Month: April 2019

I.Q. and the Fate of Humanity: Interview with Dr. Edward Dutton, Part One

“Number one, we’ve got this guy, Not Sure.  Number two, he’s got a higher I.Q. than any man alive.  And number three, he’s going to fix everything.” – Idiocracy

2zp0ac

This will be the only meme today . . . more on Wednesday!

Dr. Edward Dutton is the co-author of At Our Wits’ End, which I’ve reviewed in two previous posts here At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilizationand here At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).  Dr. Dutton was kind enough to allow me to interview him, and the first part (of two, I believe) of the interview is below.  I heartily recommend the book, and don’t pretend to be unbiased about my opinions – I sent Dr. Dutton a copy of the transcript prior to publishing and he made very few edits, mainly corrections of typographical errors as a result of the transcription.  How embarrassing is that, right?  I’ll note that any errors in the interview below are mine.

John Wilder (JW):  What led you to the study of genetics, civilization and intelligence?  

Dr. Edward Dutton(ED):  Serendipity, really.  I was interested in religion.  I did a Theology degree and Religious Studies doctorate.  And then I got to know various people that were studying intelligence such as Richard Lynn. And it was through them, reading their research that the importance of intelligence dawned on me, and the importance of genetic factors.

When I did my degree, every Humanities department in the U.K. 20 years ago, a bit less, said everything is about environmental causes. You don’t even look at genetic causes at all.  When I did my doctorate I mentioned something about this to my thesis advisor and he said something along the lines of, “Oh well no that’s good. You don’t need to think about that. That’s what scientists think about: you’re anthropology and religion.” It’s as if he was saying, “You know . . .  you just have to produce something within the bounds of the dogmas of the Church. You know it’s not up to you to think outside those.”  It was a bizarre thing to say and I didn’t really realize the full significance of what he was saying at the time, until much later. He was exactly saying:  “You don’t think outside the tent you know, dangerous thinking.”

A lot of the theories that I was espousing and that I was writing didn’t make sense and I could never quite put my finger on why they didn’t make sense. Why was it that some people were more religious than others when the environment seemed to be the same?  Was it just coincidence?  Was it just some minor alteration in the environment?

And of course, I realized that when I discovered that there was a strong genetic component to religiousness, about 40 percent of the variance:  then suddenly everything started to make sense, everything I experienced when I was an undergraduate at the Christian Union. You have Campus Crusade for Christ in America. You’ve heard of them?

JW:  Yes. 

ED:  A little bit like that, evangelical group on campus and the university I was at, Durham, which is a kind of mini-Oxford really.  There were loads and loads of them – a third of my corridor – 15 people, in my first year were fundamentalist Christians.  Fundamentalist by English standards, not by American standards.  What was so interesting was that there was this certain social demographic.  Understanding the genetics of it made it make sense and this made me question more things that I’ve been told. And suddenly I came across intelligence research and that’s how it happened.  And then I started meeting other people that were researching the same thing and getting to know other people.  And then you realize you’re actually researching something genuinely interesting.  It’s controversial and it’s a bit taboo but that’s in a sense, that’s what makes it interesting.

JW:  That’s what really shocks me about the [subject of intelligence], is the controversy.  Because as you lay out very well in your book, going back into the 18th century. [Even then] it was clearly thought that this would be the case, that within humanity, intelligence would be selected for.  In the 1950s [C.M.] Kornbluth wrote about it in the short story The Marching Morons (LINK – you can read the story here) almost exactly word for word.  The movie Idiocracy laid it out as well.  So number one it makes sense. Number two it’s been thought of before.  So what’s driving this controversy?

 

ED:  Well I guess it’s the fact that since the War [World War II – JW] anything that relates to genetics has become taboo.  Once that’s happened then people can virtue signal and thus attain status by making it even more taboo and more taboo and more taboo. And so they can find whole new areas that they can make taboo in order to virtue signal and you end up with a situation where these Humanities departments are basically just teaching dogma – teaching quasi-religious dogma rather than anything that’s scientific. And you’ve had this split between the Humanities departments and social science departments and the science departments, although even the science departments are infected by this. But it’s less easy to become infected because they are more quantitative. They have objective standards.

JW:  The War. I think that is a good point because I certainly think had an impact. But in the 1950s, for instance, going back to the C.M. Kornbluth story The Marching Morons – no one even batted an eye when that was published up in the 1950s.

ED:  I think it’s a slow process. It probably sped up in the 60s.  In the 60s, late 60s there was a linguistics expert.  He did this study of linguistics and variation between classes and he showed that working class people, he didn’t dare look at intelligence, because by then that was taboo.

But he talked about the way they talk, and he said the working class people talk to their children in a qualitatively different way from middle class people and their way of talking, the working class people, doesn’t encourage the kids to think.  Whereas middle class people they talk to them more and they ask them questions and they use higher order vocabulary and it encourages them to think. And so you end up with this growing gap in achievement between the classes.  The researcher was just pilloried for that, just for that, and that wasn’t even touching on intelligence overtly.

When my mother was at university in the 70s, Marxism was de rigueur so on that you just couldn’t discuss intelligence differences between classes.  That was out.  And so I think it started with the War. As these crazies, these leftist equality cult kind of ideologies, become more and more powerful then intelligence research has become more and more difficult to pursue in a reasonable environment and particularly then with regard to issues such as race and sex and less so perhaps, class now.  But even so there was a British psychologist, Adam Perkins, who wrote something he didn’t even look at intelligence – he daren’t look at it – he looked at personality.   He showed that there’s a different modal personality between classes and that it’s highly genetic and he was absolutely pilloried for that.  People at the academic journals refused to review his book, The Welfare Trait, I cited it in At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means For the Future.  And just for that.  As you may have read in At Our Wits’ End, we went further and we said, “look it’s intelligence that underpins this.”  It’s become awfully taboo and you get brave people occasionally like Herrnstein and Murray in 1994 who came out with The Bell Curve and you get this strong reaction because it’s cognitive dissonance.

People have taken on a religion, really a kind of quasi-religion, which they know on a certain level is not empirically accurate or at least they can’t prove it. And when you confront them that triggers them and they go a bit mad.

JW:  I think part of it is the framework that we’ve been set up with. One of the things I noticed where I was doing some early research, for me, on intelligence is when I went to Wikipedia.  I looked at intelligence of nations versus national wealth.  Wikipedia had a table of national I.Q.s and I was shocked.  I was just utterly shocked because I had had this assumption that, you know, plus or minus let’s call it 10 points, that everybody would lay out the same given that IQ isn’t a function of schooling, it’s a function of raw intellectual capacity. But yet here this table that laid out something that was very different and it led to Dr. Lynn (I.Q. and the Wealth of Nations) but now I go back to Wikipedia and that table is completely gone.

ED:  Wikipedia is increasingly corrupted by the left.  That’s the terrible thing about it, it’s increasingly the go-to source for students.  There are lazy academics, they think, “I’ve got to do an article (for a journal – JW)” and they’re told in their peer review, put something in on, let’s say, intelligence. What they’ll do is go to Wikipedia and the things that are cited in Wikipedia will then be cited by them without citing Wikipedia.  But then that means that the leftists that are controlling Wikipedia are literally influencing proper academic knowledge.

JW:  The [National I.Q.] table is gone and there’s a map there, and the map that shows various gradations of color indicating the average I.Q. in various nations.  And I thought to myself, I thought, well you know if there is a problem with Dr. Lynn’s data then why wouldn’t you go and get better data?  But no one seems to have done that.

ED:  They have.  There’s a colleague of mine, David Becker, he’s a spunky German fellow.  And his website is View on I.Q. (LINK) and he has redone all of Lynn’s calculations.  Lynn was an elderly man (he’s eighty-nine now) and he was elderly man even when he did [his original work] and there’s various mistakes.  [Becker] redid it and he put all the information online so if anyone wants to have a go at it and say it’s inaccurate they can see exactly what’s been done, exactly what the maths is.  He [Becker] found that the correlation between Lynn’s calculations and his was something like point nine eight.

It’s constantly updated so whenever our research group discovers a new I.Q. study we put it on.  I’ve just got new I.Q data today from South Sudan, for example. I’m going to write up a study probably sometime this week on this I.Q. data, and it’s looking like the IQ is like 60. [JW note:  View on I.Q. indicates the global average I.Q. is 82.  Scary.]

viewoniq

This map is from View on I.Q. (linked above).  You can see one that is quite similar on Wikipedia.

JW:  When you look at society as a whole the first example in your book was the Concord, and the irony is a couple of weeks previous to that I had written in my blog about the SR71 jet, which was 18 months between funding and flying, and I don’t think we could do it within six or seven years today.

I just I just found that stunning that we’d lost that capacity.  Then I thought about something I’ve thought about for actually more than a decade. If you look at the American Founding Fathers, you had a George Washington, a John Adams, a Ben Franklin, and a Thomas Jefferson all born about 1750.  That same year as your 1750 A.D. maximum societal I.Q. [as discussed in the book]. And these people came from a population less than that of San Antonio.  I hate to say it but if you compare them to the politicians available today, I mean . . .

ED:  No I don’t think Trump is a Thomas Jefferson.  He has many qualities about him but he’s not exactly Thomas Jefferson. No that’s true.  The I.Q. was obviously higher. And I suspect, I don’t know if this can be provable, but I would suspect that perhaps at that time the I.Q. of America was perhaps even higher than the I.Q. of England because you were under more intense selection pressure so you have these people that went to Jamestown, you had entire populations that just died out.  You were under selection pressure. I would say you were under group selection with the Native Americans and so on which we weren’t to the same extent in Europe.

JW:  There was an additional selection, not selection pressure but self-selection for people who are adventurous enough to strike out across an ocean.

ED:  Yes, that’s true and openness correlates with I.Q. at 0.3.  So you have that element as well.  Voluntary migration is correlated with I.Q.  You’ve got that probably the religiousness of the Americans in comparison to the British . . . you are more religious than us even now. Your attendance rate at church on Sundays is about 40 percent.  In England it’s about 7 percent. And I think that that’s no coincidence. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that’s a genetic legacy.  That’s one of the things that harsh selection selects for . . .  is ethnocentrism and thus religiousness because religiousness often goes in parallel with ethnocentrism.

I think the founding Americans were a select British population. You don’t want to be British. But you are. And therefore you can’t help having certain British characteristics but they’re select characteristics of the population from which you came. But I think you’re quite right. I think it’s because what you’ve got is the difference in the average I.Q. and the smart fraction. That’s quite a separate issue.

And you get some societies such as Japan where the average I.Q. is high but the standard deviation is narrow.  And so even though they have an average IQ that’s higher than us they have a smaller smart fraction than us. They don’t have many outliers.  That’s why we’re ahead of them in terms of innovating the Industrial Revolution, because they just don’t produce geniuses. We Europeans do.  So there’s two elements to it.

There’s the smart fraction and then there’s having sufficient organization of the population to be able to do something massive like the moon landing or the Concorde which is undermined by having a low average I.Q. lots of little things going wrong. So in India . . .  they’re very clever they’ are some very clever people in India. India is so genetically diverse. India has a smart fraction it has some people who are very inventive and can do brilliant things. But the problem is that the I.Q. of the country is so low that it is very difficult for them to achieve something that’s complicated where you can rely on everything going exactly right. Whereas Japan could definitely do something like that, but the problem is it probably wouldn’t have people that would innovate the inventions.

More next Monday . . .

The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water

“I need food, food to be strong for when the wolves come.” – Conan the Barbarian

communist fasting

Communist humor is like food:  not everyone gets it.

Normally I’d end a post like this with a warning, but this week I’ll put the warning straight up front.  I’m a freedom blogger with a side order of humor.  I’m not a doctor, except in my role as John Wilder – Civil War Surgeon to His Children®, Remover of Splinters and Super-Gluer® of Grievous Wounds.  The following advice has worked flawlessly for me and for thousands of others.  There may be some medical reason that it might not work for you.  As always, I suggest you go see a doctor, even though I’m pretty willful and just skipped that step entirely.  I’m not on any medications, so it’s hard to screw up medications that aren’t there.

I think, in all seriousness, this is one of the more important personal health posts I’ve written for anyone who wants to lose weight, which from the statistics is most of the United States.  As far as I can see, the biggest weight loss issues people normally face (besides your mother) are:

  • The diet isn’t working.
  • Okay, it’s working. But it’s working slooooooowly.
  • Wait, it didn’t work this week at all.
  • I’m not sure why, but this week I gained
  • Is it just me, or can everyone gain weight on a box of McDonalds® fries?
  • Wine or Beer or Chocolate Shakes or Twinkies® don’t have that many calories, right?
  • I just walked half a mile! I need to reward myself with a Double Whopper©.  Yes, with cheese.

I’m going to make a pretty bold statement:  I can fix every one of the issues above with one simple trick that doesn’t involve Marx, Lenin, or Castro.

Just stop eating.  Fast.  Not fast as in “quickly” but fast as in fasting:  not eating.

That’s it.

  • No books.
  • No seminars.
  • No cash payments to TV promoters.
  • No special food to buy.
  • No 1-800 phone numbers.
  • No special Internet offers.
  • No counting calories.
  • No communist dictators.

Thus, there’s very little profit opportunity in a business like this.  A cynical person might point out that the diet industry in the United States is worth about $70 billion every year, and the cost of being overweight rings in a tab of (my guess, based on decade-old numbers) of nearly half a trillion dollars in health care costs.  That cynical person might also note that it’s certainly not in the interests of people who are making hundreds of billions of dollars because a problem exists to actually fix that problem.

But imagine:  Just not eating . . . would save the United States $70 billion, and that’s just for starters.  It would also save a lot of money on food.  But more on that later.

fastingmeditation

When people say “listen to your body” I wonder if they’re schizophrenic or puppeteers, since those are the only people I know who talk to a body part.

Let’s talk about something more interesting:  me.  I wanted to wait to write this post until I had some pretty significant results – I wrote once before about fasting, and it was going well then.  How about now?

  • I’ve lost more than 20% of my body weight since January 1, 2019.
  • I feel great.
  • The average weight loss is about 1.5% a week.
  • The weight loss is consistent.
  • The weight loss is maintained.
  • I have to shorten my belt every week or two.
  • The ghost of Stalin is wondering how I did it.

Again, I’d say that fasting costs nothing, but that wouldn’t be true.  Fasting has saved me lots and lots of money, which will become apparent when I describe how I’m doing it below.

One other thing – I gave up drinking alcohol (beer, wine, etc.) as my weight loss progresses with the exception of two major milestones.  I figured that, besides motivation, giving up alcohol during my weight loss would be good because alcohol is the source of at least two things:  empty calories and bad decisions.  Besides, you can’t sit around on the back deck with a Budweiser® and claim you’re fasting.  Well, you can, but you’d be using Senate-level honesty.

So what exactly did I do?  I stop eating Saturday night most weeks.  Then I eat again from Friday at lunch until Saturday night.  In any given week, my window to eat is about 36 hours long.

Does it require willpower?  Yeah.  But it’s not a frightening level of willpower where I have to face the gom-jabbar or anything.  I think the biggest change for me has been breaking the conditioning of “you have to eat” that’s pretty prevalent.  I’ll listen to people saying “you have to eat” when I’m wearing size 32 jeans.  Until then?  Nope.

gomwilder

I know that the two of you who got this laughed.

Did I drink anything?  Sure.  Water.  Tea.  Coffee.  Club soda.  No diet soda – I’ve read that it stimulates and insulin response, and that’s the exact opposite of what we wanted.  Besides, I think diet soda tastes like I imagine antifreeze tastes.  Your mileage may vary.

So no eating anything?  Okay, I’ll come clean.  The first few weeks I had breath mints, but then I read the label and did the math and now I don’t have them at all unless I have a business meeting and don’t want to have bad breath that can melt a conference table.  Sugar free doesn’t mean calorie free.  I also brush my teeth twice as often.

I also cheat with dill pickles.  At 10 to 20 calories per day, it wasn’t much, and the pickles replaced salt I sweated out while exercising.  Yes, every day that I could get to the gym at lunch I would exercise.  It did two things – it burned a few extra calories, but after a workout I’m never hungry, so the afternoons are hunger free.

What is a typical week like?

Sunday is always great.  Generally no hunger at all.  Generally no food at all, either.  Not even the pickles I cheat with.

fastingdinner

And cleanup is a breeze!

Monday is normally pretty good.  I might have five calories of pickles.  Or ten.

Tuesday is the toughest day.  I believe what’s happening here is that my liver is all out of glycogen, a sugar that is stored in the liver for emergency use.  Any food in my digestive system is long gone.  That means that on Tuesday the body has to switch over to using fat.  By Tuesday night I’m feeling pretty good.  My energy levels are actually higher on Tuesday night than Tuesday morning.  Tuesday is the only day I feel really hungry.  The rest of the time, when I think I’m hungry, I’m really just . . . conditioned to be eating.  When I really sit back and examine if I’m hungry, the answer is almost always “no.”  Except on Tuesday.

You guessed it – if I get horribly hungry I have a few small dill pickles.

Wednesday and Thursday look pretty much the same as each other – my energy levels are up even though I’ve gone 72+ hours without any food.  There’s a strong focus and mental acuity that seems to emerge about this point.  It’s entirely likely that this account’s for Shakespeare’s quote from Julius Caesar, “Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.”  I have no idea if Cassius ate pickles.

Thursday about midnight (when I’m writing this blog) I often go upstairs and cook some broth and/or have some cheese.  Total calories are about 40 (about the same as eight mints) but it seems to make sense to have this as a gentle kick-start for the digestive system.  The of all food I’ve consumed during the fast would probably be less than 100 calories, and certainly less than 200 calories, and almost never any sugar.  It’s like I’m a fashion model, but without the cocaine!

fastingbikini

Mmmmm, water.

Friday is FOOD DAY!  I’ll eat at lunch – say 11:30 or so, though one particular Friday I was feeling so good that I skipped going to lunch right away and pushed it off entirely until nearly 2pm.  My longest fast is about five and a half days.  I might go longer, just for grins, but five and a half days a week is worth a weekly weight loss of more than 1.5% of my body weight every week.

The weight loss is wonderful, but the other payoff is significant:  on Friday, the food is amazing.  The taste of crisp lettuce and tomato on a burger . . . gives me shivers.  The Chick-Fil-A® nuggets become a banquet.  One Friday I had tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon.  No king ever had such wondrous flavors hit his palate.  One of the reasons I’ve grown to love fasting is that food tastes so much better.  I guarantee you that after going 100 hours without food, you will enjoy and savor food more than you ever have in your life.

waterglass

Did you notice the big lunch buffet behind the lunch?

Food (mainly) tastes better, more flavorful, richer.  That is, food that is closest to being “natural” – processed junk is not appealing on day five of a fast.  One Friday I had a concession stand pretzel with concession stand cheese for lunch.  I threw half of it away – the pretzel tasted like paste and the cheese like a chemical byproduct meant to poison some of the horrible fist-sized spiders that only live in Australia.  I never would have imagined throwing food away after not eating for five days, but then again, I never would have pictured not eating for 134 hours.

The other effect I notice at the end of a fast is that my stomach is small.  I simply cannot eat as much as I used to eat.  I’m often full before I can finish a “normal” portion size at the local restaurant.  And if I try to eat three “normal” meals?  I get uncomfortably full.

So what do I eat during the 36 hours?  Anything I want to.  No limits on portions or content, with the previously mentioned exception of the wine and beer.  Why no wine and beer?  As I mentioned, there are a lot of bad decisions in those bottles, but also because I love a good glass of wine with a steak or a beer while I’m at the barbeque grill.  These are motivation for success.  It’s that simple.

closers

It’s also breakfast, the most important meme of the day.

I know that this diet might sound extreme, but I’ll counter that our current culture is probably a LOT more extreme than this diet.  Where in history has mankind had such a surplus of food?  There is no point in history that we’ve been as heavy as we are today, and that’s more extreme than fasting.  But let’s rewind:

A mammoth hunter back in 20,000 B.C. couldn’t jump into his Fred Flintstone® car and go down to the 7-11© to pick up a Slurpee™ when he was hungry.  Instead he’d carve into the mammoth that he and Ug got the previous week.  Oops, they ate it all.  Now they couldn’t exactly go down to Mammoth-Mart© and pick up some steaks, they had to go find one.  That might mean days of hunting, and it might mean that Fred and Ug might have to focus on the hunt.

One thing that’s for sure, the body would want to provide them with energy but not eat into the muscle needed for hunting.  Thus it would pull high-quality energy from the source created just for that purpose – fat.  Fat serves a very useful purpose in animals – future energy storage for times when it’s needed.

Metabolic slowdown has been observed to be much more of an issue with reduced calorie diets – your body understands that there’s food, but just not as much as it would like.  It reacts by lowering temperature and going into a semi-hibernation.  But when the body has no food?  Energy is actually required, so it provides it as needed.  It’s often that my best and most energetic workout of the week is on Thursday after fasting for over 100 hours.

mammoth

Gym fees were waived if the mammoth stomped on you.

Do I have to workout while fasting?  No, many people don’t.  But every calorie burned in a workout while I’m in a fasted state is a calorie of fat.  So if you do a 500 calorie workout five days in a fasted state, that’s 2500 calories.  Of fat.  A pound of fat is 3600 calories, so you’ve burned about 0.7 pound (500,000 kilograms) of fat for a fairly short workout.  Add that up?  In ten weeks that’s 7 pounds (3.2 grams).  Not bad – there are entire diets that don’t provide that kind of predictable success that I’ve experienced with just one aspect of my new lifestyle.

Yes, lifestyle.  When I started, my goal was to get to a weight that I had not too long after college.  Now?  My new final goal is to get back to my college weight.  I can see that fasting some duration each week (One day?  Three days?  I’m not sure.) will be a part of maintaining that goal weight – and it won’t be a burden, I actually like fasting after having done it.  It’s obvious to me that the things I tried before didn’t work because they weren’t simple.

This is simple.

DrEvilFasting

Okay, Dr. Evil may not be a real doctor.

Fasting is also something that Dr. Fung (LINK) has said he’s used to cure (yes, cure) type II diabetic patients.  As a kidney doctor, he got to see patients that had progressed pretty far toward death.  Dr. Fung noted that he was pretty frustrated being told that the only thing that he could do was make these patients comfortable until they died.  There was no cure.

Fung didn’t accept that.  Type II diabetes is a disease that’s related to lifestyle.  It’s really part of a bigger condition known as metabolic syndrome.  He began treating his patients with fasting.  The farther gone they were, the longer the fasts – in some cases 14 days.  He noted (and many subsequent studies have confirmed this) that fasting made them better.  It increased insulin sensitivity, and that was huge.

Insulin plays many roles in the human body – I believe I recall doctors had found at least 40 regulatory influences from insulin, but I can’t find that article right now, but did find a full dozen important things it does.  But (if you have a functioning pancreas) two important features are that it allows your body to admit sugar to cells for use.  That’s important.  But in type II diabetes a resistance is formed and more and more insulin has to be released to transport the sugar into the cell.

Uh-oh.

Insulin also signals your body to build and store fat.  So you’re using sugar poorly, but also being signaled to store more fat.  Thus?  Your metabolism is screwed up and your body wants to make more fat out of the sugar in your system.  So Dr. Fung came up with the idea to just stop type II diabetics from eating.  And it worked like a charm.

People are alive today because Dr. Fung had this idea.  Let that sink in.

Am I saying that it can cure you?  Dr. Fung thinks so.  But he also cautions that certain diabetic medications can be dangerous and need close monitoring so you don’t die, or something.  Blah blah blah.

vapesulin

I hear they’re going to start vaping Cheetos® soon.

But I’m not on any medications, so this seemed like a slam dunk.  I even spent $30 for a cheap-o blood sugar monitor to see if there was anything that would show up.  Nah.  Boring, which just means that my liver and pancreas are doing the things they’re supposed to do.

But the other meters in the house, the scale and my belt have certainly been heading in the right direction.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’ve saved a lot of money.  When you only have two lunches and two dinners a week, you don’t spend as much on groceries and hardly anything on restaurants.  Also, the fam doesn’t tend to go out to dinner when I’m fasting.  I’m certainly okay with going out, but I think they feel guilty.  So there’s that money saved, too.  Oh, and the wine and beer.  Not buying any of that saves money.  And we all know that mixing Amazon® and beer lead to purchases of solar string lights and ceramic garden gnomes because “those might look good on the deck.”  The worst part is trying to explain to The Mrs. exactly what I was thinking . . .

I am not exaggerating when I say that I have saved thousands of dollars by fasting.

This will likely be the last post on fasting until I’ve reached my primary goal and learned what I have to do to stay there, forever.  And I’ll only post that if it’s interesting.

In addition to the Doctor Fung reference, the sub-Reddit on fasting is a wealth of information – mainly good information, but you should do your own research:

Here’s a link to the Reddit on fasting: /Fasting

Here’s a link to a Reddit thread showing my results aren’t unique:  Reddit /Fasting Dude

Here’s a link to about a guy who fasted for over a year:  Scottish Fasting Dude

 

Creative Destruction and a Girl in a French Maid Outfit

“Well, they’re wrong.  You are creative.  You are damn creative, each and every one of you.  You are so much more creative than all of the other dry, boring morons that you work with.” – The Office

unemployment

Hmm, you’d think the road sign outside of the office might be a hint?

A good friend of mine works out in Silicon Valley, and related a (fairly) short story about being a hiring manager after the dotcom bust – he works in the dreaded Human Resources Department.  Somehow a gentleman with a Ph.D. in multiplexing signals on fiber optics got a job interview with him.  This particular job interview was fairly short.  My friend said, “Umm, we’re looking for a mechanical engineer.  With no experience.  Why would you be looking for a job with us?”

“I’m looking for anything.  Anything.”

“I hope you saved your money,” my friend thought.  What he said was:  “We’ll be in touch.”  That’s what recruiters say when you’re in their office and they’re really tired of the stink of failure and hope that it won’t wear off on them.  They especially don’t like getting it on their shoes.

The economy is in a constant state of change, and has been since 1800 or so.  Joseph Schumpeter, the dead economist, is credited with coming up with a name for this – Creative Destruction.  That’s an academic foul for two reasons:  First, some other dead economist else came up with the idea.  Second, yet another dead economist, a different one this time, used the name before he did.  So, like Columbus, he got credited for something someone else did.  The nice thing is that you can spend your spare time wondering what you can do with a dead economist.  I like to drag mine out at Christmas and decorate him with little graphs, sort of like Martha Stewart.

martha

I like to add cinnamon to my economist.  Makes him smell more festive.

Whoever first used the name is unimportant.  Like I said, he’s dead.  But the idea of Creative Destruction originated with Karl Marx.  Karl came up with the idea (by observing economics in the 19th Century) that existing production and existing productive forces were periodically destroyed by the economy.  This was a phenomenon of the Industrial Revolution.  Innovation among clever people kept changing the world.  First the loom replaced weavers.  Then the factory replaced artisans.  And finally the PEZ® dispenser replaced scores of servants that would unwrap and gently place the PEZ© in your mouth while wearing fancy-schmancy servant clothes (including white gloves!) after executing a perfect curtsy and pulling the PEZ® off the silver tray with hand-crafted PEZ™ tongs.

Ahh, the Victorian Era.

pezgirlz

I can only afford a single PEZ®-maid.  Talk about frugality.

This change in production had the side effect of making lots of weavers, craftsman, and PEZ™-maids unemployed.  The transition was difficult, and it very much was a First World Problem.  It’s not like goat herders in Botswana become unemployed when a goat factory comes online – no.  There’s no factory for goat herding, at least not yet.  And, for the record, I have no idea if there are goats in Botswana, and I don’t care enough to Google® it, and, honestly, have only the basic knowledge that Botswana is somewhere near where people get Ebola and you can’t get decent Internet.  That’s enough knowledge about Botswana for me.

firstworld

The above is an example of a First World Problem and a good example of Creative Destruction – I kept one cell phone for six years, and had museums calling me to see if they could have it. 

Even though Creative Destruction was (and is) a First World Problem, and even though this Problem has created more wealth than any other system in the history of humanity (poor people in the United States today have better nutrition and entertainment available to them than Roman Emperors did) it still sucks when the Creative Destruction Fairy picks your job to be the one that gets axed.  Marx echoed this and predicted Silicon Valley when he wrote that capitalism grows “ . . . by the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.”  Strangely, that also describes my high school dating career.

But I digress.

Silicon Valley is built on just quote from Marx in the paragraph above.  The concept of “business disruption” is exactly what Silicon Valley does best.

Cabs?  Let’s disrupt it with Uber™.  This refinement will allow people to have cheaper cab rides.  Oh, and the money will be more concentrated, and the “cab drivers” will be paid less.  Nearly every business model out of Silicon Valley is based on this disruption – from consumer goods (Amazon®) to communication (Apple©) to “friends” (Facebook™).  If you look at the most successful companies the world has ever seen, each of them was founded on the destruction of an old economic paradigm.  The more fundamental and important the paradigm, the larger the success.

It’s like the economy is a game, and the more fundamental the rules violation, the bigger the payoff – say for example you were the only guy in the NFL® that recognized that there was no rule preventing you from using an axe however you wanted during a game.  My guess is that you’d have a pretty good pass rush if you did that – and sacking the quarterback would be permanent.

inigo

Does Creative Destruction mean what I think it means?

Marx felt that Creative Destruction, over time, would lead to people that “produce” losing all of their money to people who were merely financiers.  And, if you look at it, he’s right.  The financial sector produces less (directly) but finances all of this disruption.  If you’ve been a reader of this blog for very long, I’m certain that you won’t be surprised by my conclusion:  just because Marx was right in understanding disruption, don’t for a second think that I agree with him on his solutions.

Similar to Darwin’s theory, capitalism requires competition.  The stronger business survives.  Islands of the economy free from competition (government sponsored monopolies – like electric companies, or government sponsored businesses – like electric cars) don’t generally provide innovation.  Elon Musk must be some sort of weird innovator, because in one sense he’s disrupting the undisruptable – government monopolies on electric cars and space launch systems.

But Marx was no Musk.  Marx’s solution is simple.  Charge people what something costs to make, rather than for what value it provides – which means that every worker, for instance, makes the same wage.  Rip the production from the hands of the owners and give it to people who don’t innovate.  Free the economy from ruinous competition.  Power to the people!  Oh, and a totalitarian government to enforce it all because people don’t work the way that Marx imagines they do.

Creative Destruction is real.  But in the end, this replacement of old versus new generally increases the overall wealth in society.  I’m not speaking of the virtual importation of slave labor and environmental degradation through “free” trade agreements that are derived in secret and written on thousands and thousands of pages.  No.  But actual free trade among equals generally makes everyone wealthier. And the reality is that regardless of what controls a (fairly) free government puts in place, disruption is going to happen.

marx

From each according to his ability, to each according to your mother.

So what can you do about it?  Get a Ph.D. in fiber optics?  Well, my friend was right.  If it pays enough that for the short time it’s extraordinarily valuable, sure.  But that’s like hitting a career lottery.  If I were to give advice to a younger person, I’d say something a bit different.  I’d suggest that you look to careers that minimize the ability of Creative Destruction to ruin your Friday.

Let’s look at bad career ideas:  number one on my list of “sounds good but it’s really stupid” is software engineer.  Any career that pits me against a billion people in India and a billion people in China is a bad career.  Remember, if you’re one in a million in China, there’s a thousand other dudes just like you.  The numbers are really bad – and they don’t even have to come to the United States to compete with you.  Heck, they can pay recent grads $5,000 a year.  So they can hire at least a dozen people to do what you do.  Those are not good odds.

So, a good quality of a Creative Destruction-resistant job would be that it has to be local, or has some sort of license requirement that prevents everyone in Shanghai from applying.  Lawyers, doctors, and engineers have gotten the licensing-thing down.  It’s been so successful that some states even apply it to nail polisher-people (whatever the term is for that).

crashtest

New openings daily!  And that’s just in your skull!

Construction is has a lot of the attributes required, but it seems like Honduras has moved here to do that for us.  So that’s kinda out.  But it does point out that a job that requires actual citizenship might be a good thing.  Teaching would fall under that designation, but so much of teaching today is following a set curriculum that’s based on a set of tests that the process itself is rigged against deviation.

That may be part of the point.  Today Creative Destruction’s plan is to replace you with the lowest cost alternative, like:

  • An App
  • An Algorithm
  • A Process
  • A Batch of Cheap People Working Remotely
  • Artificial Intelligence

Avoid jobs where you can be easily replaced.  I’m not going to sit here and make a huge list and rank it and put a likelihood that you’ll be a victim of Creative Destruction in the future.  I’m not that psychic, unless I’m following my strict broccoli and chocolate diet.  No.  But I’m betting you can start to come up with your own list.

Okay, I’ll give you another one:

Blogger!  Heck, the pay may be zero, but you can always work for the fame, glory and sweet, sweet PEZ®!

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

“Never give up, never surrender.” – Galaxy Quest

reeducate

Originally I’d intended or the interview with Dr. Dutton, co-author of At Our Wits’ End which I reviewed in two parts (Review Part One At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization, Review Part Two At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)) to be here – I’m still working on the transcription.  It’s not done because the raw transcript is over 10,000 words, and family came in from out of town unexpectedly via parachute assault, and we were poorly defended.  I should have the interview complete by next Monday’s post.

One of the themes and concerns I see on a continual basis in my wandering around the web is that we are living in the endgame of a society.  Dutton and Woodley quoted Charles Murray discussing the eerie way that we get the sense “. . . that the story has run out.”  There is a sense of national exhaustion.  It’s hard to do things.  It’s like we have become a nation of teenage boys on summer vacation with no summer job.

As a nation, the United States built a continent-spanning railroad in about six years, mainly by hand, with the only explosive available being black powder.  I don’t know about you, but that just seems like so much work when I could be in my basement eating Cheetos® and playing Fallout™ instead.  California, at least, has the right idea.  They have been spending billions of dollars on a high speed railroad to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco.  This project was started in the 1990’s, so it must be nearly complete now.  Oops.  They’re pretty sure this high speed rail line will never be built, likely due to the high concentration of Cheetos© and video games in the state.

train

From a societal standpoint we seem to be at or near the point of no return, headed in the wrong direction on multiple fronts.  It’s not just the inability to tackle or construct big things.  Heck, the Empire State Building was designed in weeks and built in a little over a year.  Freedom Tower in New York City?  Over seven years of construction, and that doesn’t include the years of design that had to take place before anyone was even bribed.

wtc

It’s not just railroads and buildings that seem to be headed the wrong direction:

  • Political Violence. Wearing the wrong hat will get you fired – the Left has Hataphobia©.
  • We all know that the bad math is eventually replaced by firing squads, but like winning the lottery, we get to dream first.
  • Pink?  Purple?  Are you an anime character?
  • Bad tattoos. You’re gonna have to live with that tattoo sleeve when you’re in the rest home and have to explain to the kids changing your bedpan how cool Justin Bieber® was.
  • Constant remakes of television shows and movies that weren’t that good in the first place. Why won’t they remake some quality television, like Hogan’s Heroes®?

It’s easy to give up.  In fact, every bit of the media challenges us to give up our values.  We’re told we should celebrate children being pumped full of hormones after they make the brave and courageous decision at the age of seven that biology was a mistake and they’re really DeeAnn instead of Dean.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust a seven year old to find the remote control around my house.  Trust them with decisions about pumping chemicals into their body that will utterly change the future?  Sure.  Makes sense.

blue

The politics of the media have reversed:  it used to be that free speech was celebrated.  Now?  Free speech is celebrated, but only if the free speech in question follows the values of the elite.  For a brief moment in time, platforms like Twitter® really were able to amplify voices that cared about values.  Now?  Those voices will be silenced from those platforms.  From financial systems.  From jobs and eventually housing, if the Left can manage it.

I’ve seen this world-inversion where every value that was known to be good and true is vilified and every value that was known to be evil is celebrated.  It’s at this time I really need to pause and remind our viewing audience that the central tenant of Christianity isn’t “Do what thou wilt.”  That’s an utterly different religion with a boss who smells like sulfur with shiny horns and a pitchfork.  Except in Clown World™, “do what thou wilt” is the single highest value.

Alright John Wilder, you’ve convinced me and depressed me.  Why should we bother to continue?

It’s simple.  We should continue because it’s what we’re born to do.  Going gently onto that goodnight?  If you’re reading this blog, that’s not your style.  And despite what media is trying to convince you – what is good and right is not finished.  That’s why they’re so desperately attempting to use the media at this point – to create despair.  Despair is the main tool of evil – it causes us to curl up like we’ve been eating too much soy and give up without a fight.

reboot

Don’t give in.

How should we continue?

We continue by living our daily lives and living them unashamedly.  Living them devoted to what is good and true.  By having wonderful children.  By teaching those children the values that we know are true.  By teaching them to discriminate between good and evil, and how to choose good.  By being good role models.  By being fit.  By being prepared for the tougher times ahead.

france

We continue because that’s what we do.  I do think that times in the next decade will be tougher than the times a decade or two decades before.

That just means we’re lucky.  Calm seas don’t make good sailors.  Easy lives don’t make moral men.

But I will get that transcript done before next week, paratroopers or not.

Fat Logic: Choosing to be Fat

“I’m not fat, I’m big-boned.”- South Park

thinpriv.jpg

These girls are only 250,000 Twinkies© away from being good Marxists.

It was 6:35 A.M. around the Wilder house.  The Wilders are not morning people.  Left to our own, we would soon start going to bed at 5 A.M. and getting up at 2 P.M.  I know it’s not the way the rest of the world works, but it’s the way that we’re wired.  How do you tell a true Wilder baby?  Sleeping until noon on day two home from the hospital.

Wilders do, however, realize that the rest of the world is on this whole “getting up at 6 A.M. and going to bed at 10 P.M.” even though we aren’t.  We deal with it, but at 6 A.M. our collective family I.Q. is lower than a two week old bowl of linguini, or of congress.  We’re just not smart at 6 A.M.

“WHERE IS MY TRACK UNIFORM?”  This was from Pugsley.  He had about five minutes to get ready to leave to meet the bus that was going to take him to the track meet.   He was yelling.  Namely, he was yelling at his older brother:  “WHAT DID YOU DO WITH IT?”

Being Dad, I was amused.  This was a learning opportunity.  I stopped Pugsley.

“Pugsley, stop.  If you want to know who is responsible for your track uniform, go into the bathroom.  Face the sink. And look up, into the mirror.  It’s that guy.”  Pugsley found his uniform.  He got to his track meet.  He actually threw his shot put for a personal record that day and got a medal.  All was well.

But the bigger point was this:  somewhere around middle school there’s a switch in the brain that comes on full force.  It does this automatically.  It’s a very simple setting.  It’s a universal setting.  It’s a setting that implants an idea straight to the brain, “it’s not my fault.”

Building personal responsibility, from my observation, takes place in early adolescence, around the ages of 13 through 15.  It requires an actual family – a “strong, brave single mother” can’t do it, and in my opinion our culture of divorce weakens the role of the father.  Mothers represent love, caring.  Fathers represent justice, and rules.  To make a decent child, you need to have both.  And to have both?  You require a mother and a father.

But personal responsibility is the first lesson that’s required for civilization.  Personal responsibility is a core concept for society.  Personal responsibility drives the basic social interactions that make life easy.  Personal responsibility makes contracts enforceable.  Personal responsibility is the very lubrication of society.  When it drops away, so does society.

smellgain

I’ve recently found a subreddit (a subgroup on the website Reddit that’s focused on a particular topic) that describes this lack of responsibility very well – it’s here (LINK).  It’s called Fat Logic.  The brilliant and brutal idea of the group is that you find people who will go to any lengths to self-justify being fat.  And not a little over weight, but in many cases “have to buy two seats on an airplane” fat.

politicize

In my mind there’s a huge difference between the mindset of being so fat you have to buy two seats on an airplane, and being so fat you have to buy two seats on an airplane and COMPLETELY BLAME SOCIETY FOR THE INJUSTICE AND FATAPHOBIA.  Yes.  There are actual, living and breathing people like that.  And the things they say are skewered brilliantly on Fat Logic.

dosage

A note:  I’m on a journey to reach my goal weight.  For the record, I’m not attempting to gain weight.  I need to lose a few pounds (as of today I’m halfway to my goal).  But I recognize that my weight is my responsibility.  It’s not genes.  It’s not chemicals in the environment.  It’s not that my mother failed to buy me comics when I was a kid.  It’s the Ruffles® Cheddar and Sour Cream chips I ate for the past five years.

cookiesbox

Me, dieting with cookies in the house.

In other words:  it’s because I’ve eaten too much.  And that is the story of every fat person on Earth today.  Losing weight isn’t necessarily easy, but it is simple, and I’ll go through that in more detail next week.  Thankfully, I’ve cracked that code.

fatact

The Fat Logic Subreddit, however, is the best motivation I’ve ever seen for losing weight.  It takes the comments (like you see on this post) and points out the failed logic that people self-generate to maintain their illusion that being fat enough that asteroids orbit you is okay.  I’d be willing to bet that Reddit will ban this subreddit sooner rather than later – being truthful seems to be the fastest way to get banned from the Internet these days.

Intuitive

Fat Logic introduced me to two concepts I’ve never heard of, namely HAES (Healthy At Every Size) and Intuitive Eating.

HAES is devastating.  It removes the link between weight and health.  Certainly, being underweight is unhealthy as well, but HAES takes that fact and multiplies it into a logic bomb pointed at anyone who dares suggest that being morbidly obese isn’t totally the way that they should go through life.  HAES people hate any sort of objective measurement.  Like weight.  Or daylight.  Or money.

Intuitive Eating might be worse, but that’s like taking a pick between Stalin© and Mao™.  Intuitive Eating means exactly that – eating whatever you want in whatever quantities you want.  So, if you have a dozen doughnuts?  Eat them all if you want to.  It’s exactly the sort of diet that you’d get if you put three year olds in charge of dinner every night.  And we all know that three year olds are the perfect judges of what’s healthy.

fatliberation

Fat logic is a collection of . . . lies.  But they’re the worst kinds of lies – lies we tell ourselves to justify what we want.  Want another Twinkie®?  Sure, have one.  Have two, if that’s what your intuition tells you.  There’s no problem – you are healthy no matter what size you are.  Except for your joints, your pancreas, your liver . . . oh, I could go on, but that’s not the point.  The point is that Intuitive Eating and Healthy At Every Size are simply Marxism® for fat people.

Marxism©, at its heart, is a religion based upon envy.  Even in the highly unrealistic case that morbidly obese people don’t envy skinny people, they still can’t wrap their heads around . . . I swear I’m not making this up . . . thin privilege.  Yes.  Being thin is a sin.

fataphob

Thankfully this sin can be overcome by the penance of embracing Marx, HAES, and Intuitive Eating.  Heck, if you’ve got that down, why bother going to track?  I’ll just skip the responsibility lessons with Pugsley – then he could intuitively eat his way to 600 pounds.  He’d be healthy there, right?

Sure.  Healthy At Every Size.

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter.  Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million.  But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Roth

Update:  I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man.  Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.”  He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house.  And the television.  And the car.  And the other car.  And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending.  While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards.  The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old.  It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more.  He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house.  The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it.  He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship.  Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that.  Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe.  He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

dday2

Pop says he saw him.  But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability.  That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly.  He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things.  Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots:  the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area.  A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption.  I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

voters

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop.  Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it.  When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered.  The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail.  But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business.  He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder.  But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run.  What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback.  Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse.  Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled.  Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished.  They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving.  Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay?  No.  But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates.  And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money.  But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

distracted

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you. 

Pop Wilder spent it all.  Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe.  Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month.  Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month.  And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker.  I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study.  I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake.  There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out:  “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense:  most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you.  And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help?  Maybe.

geometry

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end?  Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain.  Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad.  This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5th Century book, City of God.   Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

fortuna snack

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna.  There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

  • there be inflation?
  • they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills?   We thought about it, but live next door to a banker?  I hear they bring down property values.
  • civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
  • I live to be 190? I hope not.
  • government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty?  In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.

At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy)

“As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point.  Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits.  Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent.  But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction.  A dumbing down.  How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence.  With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” – Idiocracy

idiocracy2

The pictures from this post are mainly from Idiocracy©, which you should watch before it’s an actual documentary.

This is the second part of the review of the book At Our Wits’ End.  The first part can be found here at At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization.  Again, I recommend the book, and the link is below.  As of this writing I don’t get any compensation if you buy it here.  Buy it anyway.  It’s an important book.

When last we left Western Civilization, we’d reached the smartest point ever in history.  Isaac Newton was an example of the genius produced at this time in history.  Dutton and Woodley have data to suggest that 1750 was the peak of intelligence for Western Civilization.

Is there any evidence for this?

Certainly.

Life in 1770 was fairly comparable to life in 1470.  Given three hundred years, things hadn’t changed much at all.  But by 1804, life was dramatically different.  The Industrial Revolution® was a product of the accumulated intellectual capital of the preceding five hundred years and it changed everything.

Prior to the Industrial Revolution©, natural selection occurred in society through the culling of the poor via disease and poverty along with the execution/prison death for about 2% of the stupider males.  This led to the population getting smarter.  But the Industrial Revolution© created an economic abundance in the West like never seen before.  Surplus food and goods were now available in society.  Medicine improved and kept the weak children of rich people alive.

famtree.jpg

Ahh, selection in progress.

Medicine also kept more of the children of poor people and poor single mothers alive.  As established previously,

  • Poor impulse control is correlated with lower I.Q.,
  • Single motherhood is correlated with lower I.Q.,
  • Less overall wealth is correlated with lower I.Q., and
  • Having more children is correlated with lower I.Q.

Again, none of these predict the behavior in individuals.  The friend I have with the greatest number of children has a very high I.Q.  There are several very smart people I know that don’t have a lot of money.  And anyone under the influence of testosterone and being 18 has really crappy impulse control.  I will also remind everyone being rich doesn’t mean you’re virtuous.  Neither does being smart. But in group behavior, the correlations above are well documented.

Dutton and Woodley note that they’re not the first ones to see the inherent problems with the removal of natural selection in a wealthy society.  Benedict Morel, named after a mushroom, observed this problem in 1857 between surrenders in France.  Francis Galton wrote in 1865 that “Civilization preserves weakly lives that would have perished in barbarous lands.”  Ouch.

But it’s true.  As of this week, every member of our family wears glasses as Pugsley was the last to leave the “good eyes” club.  And The Mrs. developed type I diabetes when she was 12.  Prior to the 1920’s this was a near immediate death sentence.  However, since insulin was isolated and entered the market in the 1930’s, she’s alive and had kids, namely Pugsley and The Boy.  Her genes would never have reproduced without the Industrial Revolution™.

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Spoiler alert:  they’re never going to be ready.

Charles Darwin wrote an entire book on the problem:  The Descent of Man.  It really wasn’t a light “summer at the beach” read as it described humanity getting progressively . . . worse.  Smarter people use contraception more (remember, the prohibition against birth control went away as religious beliefs changed).  And lower I.Q. people not only have more children, they actively desire more children.

Further factors that have developed as society absorbed the wealth of the great capitalist expansion include the development of a welfare state.  That’s a problem if you want smart people around.  Welfare states support and encourage single mothers (lower I.Q.) to have more children and ensures that those children survive.  Dutton and Woodley also note that data suggests that welfare may encourage those who are also low in “personality factors” (agreeableness and conscientiousness) to have more children.  What does that lead to?  A population that is more impulsive, paranoid, apathetic and aggressive.  By coincidence these traits are also associated with lower I.Q.

So, numbers increase on the lower end of the I.Q. scale.  What about on the upper end?  Are smart people are having lots of babies?  No.  Opening high value careers up to intelligent women causes them to have fewer babies.  Higher I.Q. people also use birth control more frequently, and actually desire to have smaller families.  So not only are lower I.Q. people having more lower I.Q. babies, smarter people are having fewer high I.Q. children.

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But at least they have what plants crave!

Having a wealthy society also increases the desire for people from less wealthy countries to immigrate to the rich countries.  As we shown in the previous post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.), less wealth generally correlates to lower societal I.Q.  Does this translate to real-world outcomes?  Yes.  Dutton and Woodley cite Danish studies that show the average Dane I.Q. to be around 100.  However, the I.Q. of non-Western immigrants is roughly 86 in Denmark.  Immigrants certainly aren’t making Denmark smarter.

futuretown

To think, you could live in a paradise like this . . . .

Since intelligence is 0.80 correlated with genetics, they and their children actually can’t make Denmark smarter.  This result would indicate that wealth, quality of life, and ability to self-govern would decrease in countries facing high immigration, while crime would increase.  As a completely unrelated note, the United States has more immigrants than any country on Earth, with 40% of the population (How the Constitution Dies) now being either first generation or born of a foreign mother.

But What About The Flynn Effect?

The Flynn Effect refers to a general rise in IQ scores between 1930 and 1980, noted by a guy named (drum roll) Flynn, James Flynn – he’ll take his data shaken, not stirred.  For whatever reason I.Q. scores seemed to be increasing.  However, Dutton and Woodley explain that the Flynn effect is most likely environmental in nature (i.e., better nutrition) and not genetic.

Apparently the I.Q. test sub-scores that show improvement tend to favor very specific areas of intelligence, namely those areas that are environmentally influenced.  There is a parallel with height, they point out:  in 1900, average height in Great Britain was 5’6”.  In 1970 it was 5’10”.  But growth has been in leg length (which is more correlated with environmental factors) versus torso length (which is more genetic).  People are taller due to nutrition.

Additionally, schools train more for abstract thought than they would have in a mostly agrarian society, which would have been the norm throughout the West in 1930.  Country schoolhouses didn’t need to teach logic puzzles, since they were focused on traditional subjects.  Now children are drilled in the kinds of questions that are used on I.Q. tests – and if you practice, you do get better even if you’re not smarter.  On some I.Q. tests administered to youth, they’re not considered to be valid if the child had the test in the past year, so practicing the kinds of questions on the test will likely improve scores.

The bad news is that evidence suggests that the Flynn effect has stopped around somewhere around the year 2000 and is now headed downward.  Reaction times (a proxy for intelligence) have dropped.  Reaction times aren’t as closely correlated with I.Q. as many of the other things we’ve talked about, but they are directly measurable.  It may be a bad ruler, but it’s a ruler that we can use to compare across time.

Also confirming the I.Q. drop is work done by Augustine Kong, a Chinese researcher at the University of Iceland studied genetic components known to increase I.Q.  They’re declining.  The average Icelander born in 1990 wasn’t as smart as one born in 1910, and the genetics aren’t there to support an increasing I.Q.  The opposite appears to be happening.

Dutton and Woodley conclude that based on the metrics they reviewed, the “average” Englishman of 1850 would be in the top 15% of intelligence today in England.  Oops.  And apparently all tests surveyed indicate declining I.Q.  That’s a problem:  if average intelligence is declining, and intelligence is a bell curve, there will be fewer geniuses and a smaller “smart fraction” that is able to put run and hold together a technologically advanced society.  Or build a SR-71 Blackbird.  Or a Saturn V rocket.

Just like a bad horror movie, it keeps getting worse.  The very temperament of genius is changing – from stereotypical genius – a very driven, self and work-preoccupied Einstein to Todd from corporate:  intelligent, socially skilled, agreeable, and conscientious.  Thankfully the genius “Todd” will provide us really detailed policy manuals and snappy PowerPoints® instead of that useless groundbreaking physics.

Creativity is correlated with I.Q. but only up to an I.Q. of 120.  As a further confirmation, creativity scores have declined, therefore . . . expect less Monty Python® on TV and more “Ow, My Balls©.”

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And people say that there’s nothing good on TV.

On the bright side, the murder rate is down.  Why would that be so?  Murder, violence and impulsive behavior is correlated with lower I.Q.  Dutton and Woodley theorize that the environment that creates violence is down – given a robust welfare system it’s less likely that financial pressures or social pressures are as high.  You kid won’t be starving to death as they stuff their face full of Cheetos® while they sit on the couch playing X-Box™, and since obesity is up, killing people is such hard work, anyway.

Why do Civilizations Rise and Fall?

Like your mother-in-law, early civilizations have a low I.Q. – they’re dangerous places to be.  But over time group selection pressures intensify, the people become highly religious and ethnocentric – the hill people want to kill and eat the valley people, and vice-versa, and everybody wants to kill the group whose god makes them wear purple.  The nice thing about strong religion and ethnocentric behavior is it allows your group to compete well.

If your religion is good enough, and if you get enough selection for I.Q., you just might end up with a baby civilization on your hands.  Once I.Q. increases, conditions get better.  An elite is formed, and, since they have nothing better to do, they begin to question all of the social traditions that made civilization smart and wealthy.

The elite begins to compete on who can be more altruistic and ethnocentrism (favoring your own people) becomes badthink.  All of the values and norms that created the civilization are despised and thrown out.  Society begins to decline.  “. . . extreme views . . . eventually become the norm.”

Resources are then taken from those that are more capable and given to those that are less capable, which is called fairness since all people are equal, right?  I.Q. drops.  Innovation drops.

Then?  The elite is purged, and the civilization collapses.  The authors anticipate the following response, that:  “. . . it doesn’t work precisely with some obscure civilization or other; or demand that we respond to an infinite regress of every unlikely possible alternative explanation . . . .”  Yeah, even academics get denial.

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Okay, maybe it won’t take that long.

Does This Explain Past History with Other Civilizations?

Sure.

  • Ancient Greece.
  • Islamic Civilization. 64% of important Islamic scientists lived before 1250.  100% of them lived before 1750.
  • China.  It came very close to its own industrial revolution.
  • The Roman Empire.  Why didn’t Rome (as awesome as it was) have an industrial revolution?  Contraception and abortion were approved of.  Higher IQ women generally had fewer children, and this collapsed Rome prior to that great leap that would have led to Maximus™ brand Ocelot Bitez® and Roman tanks.  Man, I wish we would have had Roman tanks.

What About Western Civilization?

Western Civilization has followed the same cycle, but with this important difference:  Christianity had a taboo against contraception and abortion which kept higher I.Q. women having children.  The Spring of Western Civilization was from 1000 to 1500.  During this time, it was highly religious and highly ethnocentric, just like the model.

The Summer lasted from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution©.  This period was more rational, questioning, and the Renaissance brought culture and art to the forefront.

Autumn – Industrial Revolution™ to last Tuesday.  We find ourselves with the elite questioning society.  The ideas and thoughts that the civilization is capable of are reaching their highest level as we harvest the fruit of hundreds of years of human advancement.

We may be in Winter or close to it.  The hallmark of winter is a declining I.Q. as the less intelligent spew out children like a society-destroying genetic AR-15.  Culturally, Winter is characterized by the reproduction of good ideas from the past rather than coming up with new ones.  Multiculturalism and Marxism are “anti-rational” and “their adoption should show how far g (I.Q.) has fallen.”  Dutton and Woodley quote Charles Murray with the phrase that describes the era – “The feeling that the story has run out.”

The authors are not certain we are there, but feel that it’s worth noting that things don’t look very good.

Thanks, guys.

Are There Solutions?

I’ll leave you to read the book for those alternatives.  I’ll summarize it by noting that the solutions provided are not easy choices, and unlikely to be implemented in any democracy.  I.Q. drop is caused by our society and values, and won’t be undone by a society with our values.  The authors further suggest that maybe we should spend some time saving our knowledge so it’s easier for the next group through.

Dark.

I still recommend the book.  I also recommend Dr. Dutton’s YouTube® work.  I’ve linked to a good one down below.  Next week I should have the transcription done of my interview of him, and it’ll shine a bit more light on these conclusions.

Procrastination and Learning How to Finish Thi

“He’s finishing his senior thesis.  Pigman is trying to prove the Caine-Hackman theory.  No matter what time it is, 24 hours a day, you can find a Michael Caine or Gene Hackman movie playing on TV.” – PCU

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My solution when I hit a writer’s block on my thesis was to just do something else for three years.

The Mrs. and I both have master’s degrees, but the way that we went about getting them was different for each of us.  I finished my master’s before she and I met.  The Mrs. finished hers while preggers with The Boy after we’d been married a few years.  When The Mrs. went to grad school, she wrote, finished, and defended her thesis (A Comparative Study in Restraint and Self-Control:  How I Avoid Strangling John Wilder) before she was even finished with her coursework.  I was astonished.  Before we had met, I had finished my master’s degree.  But mine went something like this:

  • Year one – do courses.
  • Year two – do courses. Finish courses.
  • Year three – get a job.
  • Year four – write, finish, defend thesis.

Yeah.  The stupid way to do it.

But getting a master’s degree was an easy decision.  Both of us had our grad school tuition and a salary paid for by being graduate assistants.  The education was free, heck, being a graduate assistant paid more than most adjunct professors make today.

What, exactly does a graduate assistant do?  One day my friends and I (when we were undergraduates) were drinking and watching a documentary of a scientist who was determining how fish swim.  Yes, your tax dollars paid for this study.  Anyway, the fish was placed in a tank with a grid, and a high speed camera was suspended over the tank.  But they put the fish in the tank and it . . . didn’t swim.

Solution?  They put an electrode up the fish’s butt and shocked it to make it swim on command.  I swear I’m not making this up.  My friends and l laughed – who, exactly had the job of inserting the electrode?  Our conclusion:  graduate assistants.  Eventually we concocted scenarios where we would apply for funding and study the way that graduate assistants exited swimming pools filled with alligators when dropped in.  The funding would include all the important aspects of science – gin, a swimming pool, and appropriate patio furniture.  Oh, and graduate assistants.

The Mrs.’ degree involved no fishes, electrodes, alligators or even liquor (she was preggers) – in fact she taught freshmen undergraduates, which might be even less fun than the whole “inserting an electrode up a fish butt thing.”  But in my case I got a job before finishing my thesis.  As a result, I ended up having to keep registering part time for two more years until my thesis (Thermodynamic and Structural Analysis of PEZ®-Based Building Components For Use in Containing a Robotic Elvis®) was complete.  My employer didn’t really care when or even if I finished my master’s, so it was all on me.

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Thanks to 173dVietVet for rare historical pictures of Robot Elvis after he broke free from the PEZ® containment structure.

So I procrastinated in finishing my thesis – I had a day job, money was coming in, and nobody cared.  Except me.  Eventually I just started writing the thesis one late night.  After finally completing it, defending it, and having my degree awarded, I ended up burning every paper, note, copy, and floppy disc associated with the thesis.  It felt good.  Really good.  I put the pages on the fire one at a time.

But why did burning the thesis feel so good?  I was done.  Complete.  Finished.  And I had done it only for me.  And it was a good way to get rid of the evidence.

mercury

I may have made some mistakes in my thesis.  Minor ones.

This is the same reason it feels good to finish my taxes every year on April 14th:  I am ending my procrastination with success even though I can’t just burn it when I’m done.  I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who procrastinates on doing their taxes, or even on tasks that are much easier.  I’m not late doing most things (like my thesis), I’m on time.  Just on time.

So why do we do it?  By “we” I mean the 20% of people who procrastinate.  As near as I can tell, there are several answers.

One person I worked with, Willie, procrastinated at work because he was bored.  He is one of the most intelligent and creative people I’ve ever known, and as such, generally lived his own life on his own terms – one time he experimented with not wearing shoes around the office.

That idea went about as well as you might expect.

While we were co-workers I’d noticed a pattern with Willie.  He’d spend time at work fairly frivolously, goofing around within the limits of what was acceptable.  Breaking his computer by deleting files and fixing it, that sort of thing – it looks like you’re working even when you’re just playing.

Then out of the blue, he’d work nearly nonstop at a furious pace on real, actual work.

John Wilder:  “Why do you do that, Willie?”

“I guess I’m bored.  I like to wait until I don’t think I’ll have enough time to get the work done before the deadline, and then I’ll do it all at once.”  Willie was seeking the thrill of the deadline, and the challenge of performing the work.  Wasn’t the work itself challenging?  No, not for Willie.

thesismotiv

My thesis advisor was encouraging. 

Willie’s strategy has merit.  I say this because I’ve done it, too.  I also noticed a pattern:  80% of the work I was assigned (Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth) wasn’t important, and would get cancelled prior to the deadline.  Willie noticed this, too.  Most things our bosses wanted us to do (in a professional role) just aren’t important and if we didn’t do them, no one cares because the work wasn’t important.  I’ve generally found that the higher up in the organization that the work originated, the less important the work is.

To compound the problem, most middle managers have no idea which things are important, or even why something is important.  Often it’s a case where the CEO wants coffee and the middle managers begin a strategy to buy South America.  Thankfully the CEO didn’t ask for Belgian waffles – they’ve been invaded enough in the last 100 years and I think the Germans already have it reserved for the next time they decide to invade France.

Procrastination in this case above produces two good things:

  • Time to Goof Around
  • Working Only on Things That Matter

My thesis clearly doesn’t fall into this case.  I know that procrastination pays off now while work on my thesis pays off later, but the net goofing around in my life is the same so that doesn’t help me – it just makes life more painful for future John.  And the thesis clearly matters if I want to get my master’s degree.

What else could cause the procrastination?  Some people avoid doing things because they fear failure.  Some avoid it because they fear success.  I’m not immune to this – as this blog got some big hits one day last year after a post was featured on The Woodpile Report (it’s here), I know that I felt a slight bit of apprehension.  “Crap.  People are actually reading this now.  That’s responsibility.”  But my thesis didn’t fall into that category, either.  I wasn’t going to be more or less successful.  Not one of my employers has cared since I got it.  Not a single employer.

It was for me.

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I did get tired of people asking me about my thesis.  Maybe I was a little touchy.

Other people just think too hard about the plan of action – there’s just too much data.  I have been in job situations where there’s so very much work to do that I’ve felt overwhelmed.  And when you feel overwhelmed, sometimes you just stare blankly at the desk while the 200 items you have to do today roam around in your mind like Germans in Belgium.  What’s always helped me in those moments was to write a list and start doing something.  Anything.  Generally in an hour or less it’s sorted out.  In rare occasions it’s 45 straight 12-hour days.  But forceful action in a state of confusion, even if it’s not the right action, is better than inaction.

Sometimes there’s too much information – there are too many factors and the logic portion of the brain is overloaded and it’s hard to make a decision.  The Boy is having that problem now.  He’s narrowed his college choices down to two.  If I were to make an analogy, it would be like having the opportunity to have a nearly free red Camry® or a nearly free blue Camry™.  Yes, they’re both the same car.  But to The Boy it’s the biggest decision he’s yet made.  Or, the biggest decision he’s going to make this year, whenever he gets around to it – which had better be in the next two weeks.

My thesis didn’t fit in those categories, either.  I knew (more or less) exactly what I needed to do.

bsthesis

Maybe in hindsight my thesis wasn’t that great.

But I’ve had zero negative health consequences from (not yet) doing my taxes.  And none of the explanations above are why I haven’t yet done my taxes, or I procrastinated in doing my thesis.  The answer is far simpler.

I’m lazy.

But I have the patience to wait for that grant money for the liquor, alligators, pool, patio furniture and graduate assistants.  That would be a thesis I could be proud of!

Death, Taxes, Ancient History, and Bad Advice

“I have to do it alone.  Don’t you get it?  Everybody dies here.  It’s just a rule.  Death, taxes, more death, and I don’t pay taxes.  So all I know is death.” – Ash vs. The Evil Dead

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Don’t delay on filing your taxes . . . any longer than me.

If I could write a book about taxes, it would be a very short book:

“Avoid paying taxes if you can and do in such a way as to not be thrown into jail.”

That would be the title.  That would also be Chapter One.  There would be no Chapter Two.

“Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but Death and Taxes,” wrote Christopher Bullock in The Cobler of Preston in 1716.  There is, however, biblical evidence that Bullock was only partially correct:  in the New Testament, Jesus was hanging with Peter and they were talking about taxes.  Jesus tells Peter to go down and catch a fish, and money would be inside the fish, and Peter could go pay taxes for both of them.  Peter did, and they even have the picture to prove it since they didn’t have receipts back then:

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Is that Jesus or John Lennon behind Peter?

So, even though Jesus could both return from the dead as well as make dead people live again, he still paid taxes.  This therefore means that the only real certainty in life is . . . taxes.  If you’re an atheist, however, it’s okay to plan for both.

The biggest tax (for me) is income tax.  But the list of common taxes is mindboggling:

  • Federal Income Tax
  • State Income Tax
  • Sales Tax
  • Social Security Tax
  • Medicare Tax
  • Property Tax
  • Liquor Tax
  • Gasoline Tax
  • Tobacco Tax

I was going to make up some joke taxes for the list above, but throughout history, I believe that government has taxed . . . everything.  New York City has a tax on food, but if the restaurant slices your bagel that means it’s prepared food, so thus you get to pay yet another tax for the privilege of living in New York.  But taxes aren’t new – taxation spans recorded history – the earliest documents relating to accounting go back to at least 5,000 B.C.  I suspect taxation goes back even deeper into the past – there are tally sticks that go back at least 40,000 years, and I imagine that they were counting out taxes on profits from sales of knickers made out of baboon fur even then.

egypt

Is it just me or does it look like the Egyptian accountants have huge Egyptian bongs?  Talk about creative accounting . . . 

As tribes wandered around in the distant past, the idea of supporting others within your tribe was probably pretty natural – these were your people, after all.  But as tribes grew bigger, and connections more tenuous, taxation started.  I think the idea of taxation came as soon as one man could count and see that another man had a little more than he did, was a little bit better of a hunter, a little bit better at fishing.

That man (or maybe his wife) then got other men and planted the idea of envy.  “Why Oog need three bearskins?  Me have only one, so Oog one percenter.  He am greedy for having thing Thag want.”  Thag went on to write the first tax regulation.  Humanity, I guess, has evil people who are filled with hatred that show up all throughout our history – we call them the IRS® now.

taxreturn

Okay, sometimes I use colored pencils and also write quotations from Moby Dick. 

For all of that time, governments have taken taxation seriously.  Murder?  Arson?  Burning an elementary school?  Overthrowing the government of a small (really small) country for fun and profit?  All petty crimes when compared to cheating on taxes.  I think the current punishment for tax evasion includes snakes and having to share a cell with a Hollywood® C- list actress-mother who bought her kid into USC®, so I certainly don’t advocate that – I mean, snakes are not so bad, but Hollywood™ mothers?

So what can you do?

First, file your taxes.  TurboTax® makes it easy, sadly.  I wish that taxes were difficult to pay.  I wish that every person got paid weekly, in cash, and had to count off actual cash payments to an IRS© agent.  Or that there was no withholding so that people HAD to write a check every year for the full amount of taxes due and didn’t live with a fictitious “I got a refund – the government paid me” mindset.

Second, max out any things you can do that lower your tax burden.  401K’s are nice for that – they allow you to invest money (often in the stock market) before taxes are taken out so you make stock gains on the pre-tax dollars.  This puts your tax burden out into the future when you will need Depends® and a walker and worthless paper dollars will be used by barbarians for heat due to the new ice age due in 2028.  But at least you avoided taxes now.

filing

Actually the records are in an envelope under my camping gear in the basement in that back room.  I think.

Third, set yourself up as a corporation and have your employer hire the corporation to do your job and pay yourself minimum wage.  The rest of your salary can then be paid out in dividends to you, which are taxed at a lower amount and you can be just like Warren Buffet.  Really, Warren does just that, and then he complains that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary, although there’s really nothing that would stop him from paying your taxes, or mine.  But he won’t because he’s busy having cheeseburgers in Margaritaville.  Oh.  Wrong Buffet.

Fourth, don’t make up your own currency to pay your taxes.  As cool as “Bi$onBuck$” sounds, unless you want three free meals a day for the next 33 to 60 months, you should probably not use ‘em to pay your taxes.

fake

Yes, I know they’re Euros, but don’t they look like Christmas wrapping paper?  Besides, all you can do with Euros is buy baguettes, bassinettes, marionettes and cigarettes in France.

Fifth, put off doing your taxes to the last minute.  It lowers your risk of audit, and, if you’re like me and have to send off a check most years, you can keep your money for just a few more weeks so you can roll on your bed in it.  Unfortunately the pennies stick to my butt, so be careful if I give you change.

Sixth, remember that John Wilder (me) is an Internet humorist and is not licensed to be a financial advisor or tax consultant or provide legal advice, because what would the fun be in that?

At Our Wits’ End Review Part The First:  Increasing Intelligence and Civilization

“Give the likes of Baldrick the vote and we’ll be back to cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner.” – Blackadder

ba2

I love accurate historical dramas.

What happens when you find a set of ideas that might explain the world as we see it, that ties together dozens of topics you’ve written extensively about over the course of years?

You smile, even if it means civilization might be ending.  Heck, if civilization ends, no more mortgage!

Let me go back to the start.

I was listening to YouTube® on my way to work.  YouTube™ has some interesting algorithms that select your next video.  From time to time the videos presented have been horrific, but on this particular occasion, a gentleman was interviewing Dr. Edward Dutton about his new book At Our Wits’ End.  I enjoyed the interview so much I ordered the book that night, and have watched many of Dr. Dutton’s YouTube© videos as well since then – he’s named himself quite appropriately the “Jolly Heretic.”

I was not disappointed when At Our Wits’ End arrived and, in my first spoiler alert for the review, I heartily recommend the book without reservation.  Dr. Dutton wrote the book along with his colleague, Dr. Michael Woodley, and together they have put together an interesting and compelling scientific narrative.  I research many of my posts, and some research takes hours and has dozens of notecards of notes.  In this case, I typed my notes about the book – the notes alone are sitting right now at 1725 words.  We’ll see how many posts that ends up being:  I’m betting it will be two, and I’m certain that not all of my notes will be used.  I may end up posting the combined review when it’s complete as a separate page on the blog, along with the interview of Dr. Dutton that he was gracious enough to agree to.  I’ll be posting that interview after the review is complete – I think it will form an excellent post script.

Last week’s Monday post (I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.) was a warm up – it dealt with how I.Q. shapes the present.  In it, the relationship between I.Q. and national wealth is fairly obvious.  This week’s post deals with (to me) the more crucial and compelling question – what will the future of Western Civilization and humanity be?  This is the core of At Our Wits’ End.

But first, from page 108 of At Our Wits’ End:

One problem with science which many people find difficult to get their heads around, is that the aim of science is to understand the nature of the world and to present the simplest explanation, based on the evidence, for what is going on.  Science is not there to be reassuring, to make people feel good, or to help bond society together . . . . Those who call for suppression are, in effect, arguing that scientific pursuit is fine until it forces them to question the worldview that they hold for emotional reasons.  Once it does this it is ‘bad science’ or ‘a higher standard of proof should be demanded’ or ‘it is immoral’.

This is perhaps the quote that impacted me the most strongly from the book.  We live in a world filled with truths – and the most uncomfortable questions are perhaps the most important to ask.  We may not like the answers, but when dealing with reality we cannot make rational decisions without that knowledge.  In my personal life, the questions that I hate to ask myself are nearly always the most important ones.  Strangely, I also seem to know immediately the answers to those questions, at least when I have the courage to ask them.

ba3

The first question posed by the book is a simple one:

What is intelligence?

As discussed previously in this blog, intelligence is the ability to solve complicated problems, generally with some speed.  For this review, I’ll use I.Q.  and intelligence as well as ‘g’ – the general intelligence factor – interchangeably.  Although these are all very different terms for a scientist studying the subject, for the purposes of this review I’ll mangle the language and call them all the same thing and use them more or less similarly.  It’s like calling a zebra a horse, but hopefully it excludes centaurs and giraffes and makes for clear reading for the lay reader.  Also, keep in mind that these are group numbers – we all know and can cite examples of individuals who don’t follow the group correlations we’ll discuss – the genius level smart dude who has bad body odor and lives in his parent’s basement.  The sort-of dim kid who developed a business and makes $350,000 a year.  They exist.  But they’re the exceptions, not the rule.

Intelligence has a most interesting property:  it’s inheritable – with a correlation of about 0.8, which is pretty high.  1.0 is perfect correlation, -1.0 is perfect negative correlation.  Educational attainment and economic status correlate with intelligence, as does salary – at about 0.3.  Other things that are correlated with intelligence include impulse control.  People with higher IQ are also more trusting.  On an individual level to predict a person’s performance you also have to have information about their personality, but on a group level I.Q. has significant predictive power.

It’s generally the dream of every first grade teacher that all of her students are equal.  But she knows that’s a lie.  Every student isn’t equal – some are much better at some tasks than others.  Some are much better at every task, and people who do well on one task generally do well on other tasks – intelligent brains just seem to have more bandwidth in general – it’s like they have an overclocked nervous system.  Again, this doesn’t mean that they’re more virtuous, simply that they have greater capabilities.

The average IQ also determines interests to some extent – the average IQ of someone who studies anthropology is lower than someone who studies physics.

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What are the properties of IQ?

  • IQ test scores fall out on a bell curve.
  • ~70% of the population has an IQ between 85 and 115.
  • 95% between of the population is between 70 and 130.
  • Intelligence is “polygenic” – lots of genes are involved in making a smart kid.

But certainly, John Wilder, intelligence means different things to different cultures?  In the very succinct commentary of Dutton and Woodley, “No it doesn’t.”  I realize that’s not an argument, it’s a refutation – I’ll let you read the book for details.  Scientifically it appears that IQ is a valid concept across cultures.  It’s valid if the culture is literate.  It’s valid if the culture is non-Western.  IQ (or intelligence, or “g”) is potentially one of the most predictive and studied properties in social sciences, which tend to be a bit squishier and less science-y than, say, physics or chemistry, so give the social science folks a break that they found this gem.

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So can a civilization get smarter?

Yes.  If a trait can be passed on via sexual selection (like my butt), then it will be selected for.  But in, say, the year 1400 a great butt wasn’t as important as regular food.  If you look at the data as generated in the study Survival of the Richest (Gregory Clark) – as quoted by Dutton and Woodley, between 1400 A.D. and the mid-19th century, the top 50% had more surviving children than the poor 50% – nearly twice as many.  Since economic status is strongly correlated with I.Q., society became smarter each generation.

Brutal?  Yes.

Concerned with sexy butts?  Not at all.

Why would smarter people have more surviving children?  Less intelligent means less money.  That means less food, less heat.  That means the poor children are all weaker when the ice weasels (extinct since 1745) came.  There’s plenty of evidence for this, as Dutton and Woodley note:  the average height on the ship Mary Rose was 5’7” around the time Henry VIII lived.  Henry VIII was 6’3”.  Henry got better food.  He got better genes.

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No, it was the genes, silly.

Henry wasn’t especially good at having children, but most of the nobles around that time were good at it – with or without their wives.  There is evidence that as many illegitimate children of nobles survived as legitimate children.  Most people have to work their whole lives to become a bastard, but like me, those lucky kids were born that way.  And some of them did okay – William the Conqueror was illegitimate and managed to invent the paperclip (I made that up) and invade England at the head of the Norman Conquest (I didn’t make that up).

According to the genealogical records I’ve seen, I’m related to William the Conqueror.  This would be an amazing story.  Except . . . I won’t polish my claim to the crown just yet and become known as John Wilder the Usurper©, Eater of PEZ® and Defender of the Remote Control™ anytime soon:  European society became one of constant trickle down – sons of nobility would have sons that were merchants who would have sons that were farmers who would have sons that worked on farms.  The poor fraction was replaced by the rich fraction over time.  The children of the wealthy replaced the poor in a silent way.

I don’t know the percentage, but I’ll bet a sizable chunk of England is, like me, related to William.

Genes for being wealthy, which is correlated with intelligence, spread throughout society.  This still doesn’t explain my sexy, sexy butt.  But there were further selection pressures in place:  2% of males were either executed or died in prison.  Presumably these were the worst 2%, so society was pruning itself.  But mobility worked both ways – people could move up the social strata as well based on their (generally I.Q. related) merits.

Also pruned were the children of unmarried women who didn’t have the position of mistress to someone higher up the social strata.  Unmarried mothers have an average I.Q. of 92 in the United States.  Childless or married women have an average I.Q. of 105.  Today children live via welfare, but back in 1741 (when one study in particular was done) moms would have abandoned them.   71% of these abandoned children in 1741 were dead by the age of 15 versus 40% in the population as a whole.  Presumably there would be even less child mortality in the upper incomes.

These selection pressures led to the gradual increase in intellect, culminating in what Dr. Dutton mentioned in one of his YouTube® videos as his estimated date for the smartest generation in recorded history – those born in and around 1750.

So, all is well, and humanity keeps going on an ever-smarter upward march of intelligence?

Spoiler alert!

No.  And Soylent Green® is people.

We’ll discuss that (the intelligence piece) in Part II of this here:  At Our Wits’ End Review Part II: I.Q. and the Fate of Civilization (Hint, It’s Idiocracy).

Meanwhile, go out and buy the book.  It’s good.