John – Page 101 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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

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.

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.

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.

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-19^th 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.

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.

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist. But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are. Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

Some people think the Universe will last forever. Silly people. We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible. A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®. One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law: the second law of thermodynamics. The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to. At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows. As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood. After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours. The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see. The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire. Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually. Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning. That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there. The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem? The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system. It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day. To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth. With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar. Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere. Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water. Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations. Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star. Not Nicholas Cage®. Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too. Salt deposits. Sand dunes. And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day. And not only in the galaxy, but in your house. In your carpet. In your body. In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain. Without energy:

Your house will someday be a wreck.
Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards. You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard. Life is a struggle. If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things. Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end. Entropy will win. Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have. When you were six you knew this. What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes? People who went to work at a bank? No.

In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it. They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought. Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough. A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for. What are you going to do with your life?

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt. He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life. Or you can struggle. Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

Thursday Meme For Captain Marvel

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Teenagers, Testosterone, Cell Phones, Jurassic Park and Game of Retirement

“Yes Mr. Hill, testosterone can jump start puberty, but I don’t give radical hormone therapy to young boys who happen to be mediocre at dodge ball.” – King of the Hill

Okay, that meme came together really well. Or maybe Jack and Peewee were separated at birth?

Pugsley is currently experiencing what every teenage boy has experienced since there were boys – TOTP teenage onset testosterone poisoning. The symptoms are many: extreme idiocy. A sudden lowering of voice. Unexplained hairiness. Armpit smell. Showers longer than the Crimean War.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I think 11-14 is the critical age for children. This is the defining age where they begin to rebel. They’ve turned from nice, sweet children into little monsters who have determined that they have feelings but have no regard for the feelings of others – in a word, all middle school age children are psychopathic.

Although irritating, it is a passing phase, as long as the parents stick to their guns. I have seen children become middle-school aged tyrants whose parents tremble as they approach. It’s not a pleasant sight, and the wreckage of their lives is equally unpleasant when they first impact a world that doesn’t care that momma always cut the crust off of their sandwiches. I’ve had occasion to see that karma train show up a in a spoiled child’s life, and I always enjoy watching the fireworks more than a virtuous person should. Sue me. I’m human, although my ex-wife might disagree.

At some point natural selection by impact with Kia® will kick in.

Recently, I’ve been sticking to my guns with Pugsley. It’s not really hard, you just don’t give in to them when you’re right. Pugsley had his most recent attack of TOTP just the other day. I sent him to his room. After composing himself (and issuing an apology) he and I ended up outside, and he was sweeping the last leaves of autumn off the patio.

He stopped. “Dad, I’d like you to give my phone back to me.” His phone had been confiscated at least two months earlier for some infraction, and Pugsley had never managed to string enough “good” days together to get it back. If truth be told, my criteria was probably a bit arbitrary, as well – I’m not particularly a fan of preteens having phones.

John Wilder: “First, keep sweeping. You can work and talk. Second, why on Earth would I do that? I had to send you to your room today. What does that tell me about your overall behavior? What’s in it for me?”

He raised his hand, as if dealing with a velociraptor that was one hamburger short of a Happy Meal®. “Hear me out. I want you to give me the phone back. So you can take it away if I misbehave.”

“Okay, you have my attention. I’m listening.” This was interesting thinking.

Then the monologue started. “Okay, listen.”

I stopped him. “Don’t start a sentence with okay.”

“Okay. I mean,” Pugsley Paused, a bit flustered, “right. So . . .”

“You don’t need to start a sentence with ‘so’ – just say it.”

I was enjoying this.

“If I have my phone, you have an effective punishment. I know what you want. You want for me to do my chores without nagging. I get it. You want for me to do them daily. You want me to stop back talking, and to stop being a jerk.”

“Go on – what about grades?” It was obvious he’d been paying attention when I talked. It was also obvious he’d been thinking.

“All at A minus or better.”

“What about quality?”

“If it doesn’t meet your standards, take the phone.”

It was well rehearsed, and was logical. If he messed up? The phone would go away. If he did well? I would pay for the phone bill.

“Okay.”

Pugsley did a fist pump. “The Art of the Deal . . . .”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

I hear he’s selling this revised edition at school.

In short, he would give me everything I wanted for the price of a phone. I even have a signed contract. It’s like reverse Satan – I give him his soul in exchange for a cell phone.

And what, exactly, did I extract?

His mastery of his testosterone-besotted self so he could maintain self-control and unleash the Pocket-Hulk® (which is what we called him when he got mad and was a tiny Pugsley).
Discipline – I wouldn’t have to nag him about the chores. He has to start his own motor.
Long term thinking – he also agreed to link a minimum grade to the phone – and keeping an A minus means planning to do your work and doing it every time it’s due.
Standards – he agreed that work would be fully done. Well done. By my standards – not “good enough.”

It may sound like I’m lazy and want him to clean the house while I type amusing anecdotes into the computer. And I am lazy. But if Pugsley can learn self-control, discipline, long term thinking, and high standards from my slothful life?

I call that a win-win, and maybe the best deal either of us will ever make. Besides, I want him to be successful so he has lots of money so he can choose a nursing home for me that’s not based on Game of Thrones.

I hear the pudding is to die for.

When the Meme Strikes Me

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I.Q. – uh- What is it good for? Absolutely Everything. Say it again.

“I can easily understand why it should puzzle you that a person of my intelligence, I.Q. 207 super genius, should devote his valuable time chasing this ridiculous road runner . . .” – Road Runner

Besides, her last test came back negative.

When I was growing up I recall reading a short story that was, to me, particularly horrifying. In the story, a group of colonists arrives at a planet light years from Earth. All is going well – the planet is habitable but not inhabited. The colonists set the ship down and begin to prepare the planet for people. And they begin making babies to inhabit the planet, but in the usual way, not using space robot wombs or anything.

But, there is something wrong with the babies. They are ugly. And stupid. And grow quickly, hitting puberty at about age four. The scientists work frantically trying to figure out what is causing the problem. Is it some alien virus? Something to do with the journey itself? They come up with no good answers, but in their searches determine that the children really look more like a human ancestor from millions of years in the past than modern humans.

Uh-oh.

Then they get the bad news. Earth sends them a message (from six years in the past) that all human babies on Earth are now being born ugly and stupid, too. Earth thinks that the colony is the last hope for smart humans, so they have to make it succeed.

Oops.

One of the colonists gets a bit philosophical, and compares humanity to locusts, who often stay in a less aggressive form for decades, and then burst out in the big, hoppy flying plague across thousands of square miles, devouring everything in their wake. Humanity’s true form, reckons the colonist, is the fuzzy stupid pre-humans, and once humans spread among the stars, it made sense to get stupid again so that we didn’t destroy ourselves. In the end, all that’s left on the new planet are the pre-humans. And the wolves. The colonists released the wolves so that the pre-humans would have something to select off the stupid pre-humans, so they could get smart again millions of years in the future.

Depressing.

The name of the story is The Locusts by Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes, and it was published in 1979 and was nominated for a Hugo® award. This story has bounced around my mind since I first read it, though I had forgotten even the author until I was assisted by some fine folks on Twitter®. It is available in Larry Niven’s anthology N-Space, which is probably where I read it for the first time.

The story got me thinking about the concept of how civilization influences intelligence. And other questions: how important is intelligence? Is it better to be intelligent or not? Would my I.Q. be higher if I did it in metric?

But maybe the most basic of all of these questions is: what is intelligence?

Intelligence is the ability to process information quickly with sufficient working capacity to create useful connections with previous information. Intelligence really is measurable by I.Q. tests, and, oddly, is predicted by reaction times – the smarter you are (in general) the quicker your reaction times. It’s as if the brain pathways move faster for smarter people. Sadly for those that like to make fun of smart people, the reality is that they’re generally healthier and have a pretty good ability to communicate if they want to. Generally.

Subliminal advertising is illegal, but what about subcranial?

The way to think of intelligence is that it’s like your height. Your DNA at the moment of birth determines what your maximum height will be, unless your environment screws it up. You can’t study yourself taller. You can’t “think and grow tall.” No matter how much you stretch every day, your maximum height is your maximum height.

Intelligence is like that, too. Studying doesn’t help your I.Q., but it does increase your capacity within that maximum intelligence. No matter how bright the puppy and how often you work to teach it to talk, it’s never going to read quote any Shakespeare except for Romeo and Juliet. Your dog is a philistine. But just as environmental factors can stunt your height, environmental factors can make you . . . not as smart, which is why Doritos® took most of the lead out of their Nacho Cheese and Lead© flavored chips. Most of it. How can you have lead-flavored chips without any lead?

It also turns out that intelligence is very, very important if you’re considering wealth. Here is a graph showing the relationship between GDP and the I.Q. of various countries. It’s based on 1998 data from Lynn and Vanhanen, but I doubt that 2019 data would be much different, except for China, which has quite a high I.Q. but a low 1998 income. I’ll let you wander around the Internet for more information if you’d like, I’m not planning on writing about it here – I have to get to sleep tonight sometime. I will admit I was as utterly shocked as anyone could be the first time I saw this data – my preconceived notion was that the average I.Q. of the world was more or less 100, which is clearly refuted by the following graph.

What’s the difference between getting into USC™ and being a wealthy nation? To be a wealthy nation you have to have a good I.Q.

So at least one question appears to be answered – although you might end up being smart and poor, you’re never going to be dumb and rich. Poor countries are poor because they’re not smart. This answers my first question – is intelligence important? Yes. Intelligence in nations has been shown to be correlated strongly with lots of good things: economic freedom, savings, self-employment, education, literacy, interpersonal trust, and long lives. Low national I.Q. has been correlated with lots of things we don’t like: corruption, murder, and big government.

I’ll throw out that high I.Q. nations also have more suicide and lower birthrates – the only two negatives that I saw in my (brief) review of the literature I could find.

The original starred Einstein® and Hawking™, but they argued after Einstein© said a radioactive cat had 18 half-lives and had to find new actors.

Next Monday I anticipate reviewing a new book on the subject of intelligence, At Our Wits’ End by Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie. Dutton and Woodley have worked on a disturbing theory . . . that you’ll have to wait until next week to hear more about. But don’t expect any hairy pre-human babies. Because nobody expects hairy pre-human babies.

Dune, Moods, Wrestling, and a Way of Life

“Look at the symptoms: temperamental behavior, mood swings, facial hair. Uh oh, Dad, I think you have menopause.” – That 70’s Show

There ended up being roughly 732 books in the Dune series. I stopped after book four, which was one book too many.

In our basement we have a wrestling mat. It would be unusual if we had a wrestling mat and dismembered mannequin parts strewn around the room and baby doll heads covered with blood red paint, but we don’t. The Mrs. and I decided we need to leave some projects for after the kids go to college. So we use the wrestling mat for the more conventional purpose of practicing wrestling. Both Pugsley and The Boy enjoy it, and so do I. Pugsley has expressed an interest in winning a lot of wrestling matches, so he fairly enthusiastically led us to doing independent wrestling practice at home so he could improve.

One night it was time to practice. The Boy was ready. I was ready. But Pugsley said, “I’m not in the mood.”

The Boy turned pale. He knew what was coming next – the kraken was about to be unleashed. I did a quick Internet search. I then looked up from my laptop screen and quoted the following:

“Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset [JW: a musical instrument]. It’s not for fighting.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

If you’re not in the mood, make it so.

The lecture he got that followed that quote exceeded the amount of time that we would have practiced. It’s the same lecture The Boy had gotten several years earlier, and he joined in to poke his brother with verbal barbs as well. You may call it bullying, we call it raising children with values. Maybe we should have stopped before we gave him a swirly?

The context of the quote is from the novel Dune which has spawned one bad movie (the early 1980’s version) and one underfunded movie (the early 2000’s version). In the novel, young Paul Atreides is the son of a space Duke somewhere in the far future after humanity has spread through the stars. Paul has the benefit of being royal, so he has a rather rigorous curriculum of everything from math, physics, and gender studies to small arms combat. Just kidding. Study math and physics. Ha! Studying math and physics is a sucker game: study those things and you’ll have to pay taxes.

This would have been a better plot than the early 80’s film.

Like all boys, Paul was looking for a day off. His combat arms teacher, Gurney Halleck, rightly told him the truth: when trouble is brewing or there is work to be done, the Universe does not care about your mood.

Like all boys, Pugsley was looking to push and see just how far he could get away with slacking. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. He had made a commitment to his brother, to me, but most importantly to himself. But sometimes, like all boys, he needed a reminder from his father that duty comes before mood. So, he got the big speech. I quote books, I quoted Patton, I quoted my father, I quoted Mr. Rogers®, and I noted that I hadn’t taken an unplanned sick day since before he was born. Call in to the boss on a Tuesday morning with a sore throat? No.

If you’re not familiar with wrestling, the guy in purple is like France at the start of World War II.

As an adult you have to do a lot of things that you don’t enjoy. You have to go to work when you know it’s going to suck. You have to take your punishment when you know you’ve done wrong. You have to pay your bills. You have to work out. You have to meet the commitments you made, no matter how painful.

Keeping your word to other people is how the world sees that you have good character. Keeping your word to yourself is the sign of real integrity. Some days you don’t want to hit the weights. You don’t want to go to work. You don’t want to go to school. You don’t want to go to practice. You don’t want to meet that pesky General Grant at Wilmer’s place in Appomattox.

Boo hoo.

I heard you don’t have to lose the war if you’re not in the mood to lose the war. Also, is it just me or does it look like they’re playing Battleship® on paper?

When you start failing to keep the commitments that you made to yourself, you’ll stop keeping your commitment to others. What matters is turning on the alarm clock, and getting out of bed when it rings or beeps or whatever it does. Every day.

You don’t need seminars. Or pep talks. Or motivational posters. Or Tony Robbins and his weirdly white teeth (I swear that man has the grin of someone who likes to eat things that are small and squirming because they’re still living) and a $2000 seminar.

You need discipline. Discipline is better than motivation any day.

Why do you need discipline?

Kevin Bacon understands.

Because motivated is a mood.

But disciplined is a way of life.

The Pros and Cons of Working for a Corporation (As Written on a REALLY Cynical Day)

â€œCould you tell me something about theÂ CorporateÂ Wars?â€ â€“ Rollerball (1975)

My CEO says this is the wave of the future for corporations, or at least he does when we go visit him at San Quentin.

â€œDad, where should I go to work to make a fortune before I win a Nobel PrizeÂ®?â€Â The Boy actually said this to me when he was in fifth grade one day while just he and I were out driving.Â I think that his expectations might be more in line with reality right now.Â In his defense, by that time he had already made the equivalent of $2,500 by trading in Bitcoin and other crypto currency in his bedroom on the computer he had built when he was in fourth grade.Â I had no idea that heâ€™d set up a trading shop in his bedroom until WiredÂ® showed up to do a profile on him.Â Needless to say, his computer moved to the front room the next day.

Today, The Boyâ€™s expectations are a bit more in keeping with what most adults consider reality.Â Heâ€™s thinking about college and career. Â The Boy is now contemplating a life of drudgery where he spends his time at a dull, faceless gray job working long hours so he can fulfill his obligations by existing only to pay bills until he dies.Â Oh, wait.Â I guess I misspelled, â€œlooking to go out and conquer the world!â€

Seriously, who touches people at work besides strippers and Joe Biden?

The sad fact is, however, that most Americans nowadays work for mid or large-sized organizations of more than 100 employees.Â Whatâ€™s the definition of most?

70%+.

I guess that makes sense.Â We live in an age that celebrates the collective, the large, the behemoth, and thatâ€™s just our sodas and underpants.Â And working for a corporation/large organization has to be nice, right?Â Of course it is.Â Otherwise, just like vaping, all the cool kids wouldnâ€™t be doing it.

Well, there are upsides:

Steady Paycheck: Large organizations have figured out how to get money.Â Notice I didnâ€™t say make money.Â Some borrow it.Â Some get suckersÂ A friend of mine once did a calculation on a large corporation â€“ I think it was GMÂ©.Â At the point of his calculation, if you took all of the money invested in the company, and all of the profits the company had ever seen and subtracted the investments from the profit, GMâ„¢ had lost money over its 100 year plus history.Â But the check cashes every payday, so what is there to complain about?
Benefits: In theory, a large organization can negotiate discounts that save the organization money while providing valuable health care to employees, but in practice itâ€™s a choice between selling the kidney the didnâ€™t operate on to pay the bill or Fredâ€™s Medical School Discount SurgeryÂ®.
Relative Disconnect Between Pay and Performance: So, why is this listed as an upside?Â You have bad days.Â Bad weeks.Â Bad months.Â So blame it on the business cycle.Â Or on some competitor.Â Or on someone.Â Certainly it wasnâ€™t you.Â Mostly, a boss will buy this as long as you didnâ€™t take a pellet gun and shot customers/other employees in the butt as they walked by while spraying mosquito repellent in their eyes.Â Heck, even if you did do that, blame it on Phil from Marketing.Â Everybody knows Phil is crazy.
Autocratic Governance: Your boss may be horrific, but can you imagine how bad they would be if you had to elect them?Â Can you imagine the campaigns?Â Then Phil from Marketing would start a Political Action Committee . . . .
Specialization: This is a true upside.Â Itâ€™s nice that large organizations offer positions where you can study and become a true expert on a narrow slice of the business to improve results through superior knowledge.Â Thankfully, after youâ€™ve done this you can train your replacements from India who work for wages paid in cardboard, broken furniture, and used dental floss.

â€œI wonder if McDonaldâ€™sÂ® is hiring,â€ wondered wonderful Karen wonderingly.

Increasing Rewards: The farther up the organizational ladder, a strange thing happens.Â Itâ€™s mentioned above that pay gets decoupled from performance, but the higher you go, the more likely you get raises and huge bonuses if the business performs poorly.Â Youâ€™d think that this would require more work, but it really doesnâ€™t.Â Please tell me the last time you took off in the middle of the day to smoke weed while you were on a podcast?Â Yeah, looking at you, Elon.
Occasionally, Working With Great Teams For A Great Boss: By accident, you are occasionally thrown together with a likeable group of competent people with good hygiene who share common interests.Â These people are dedicated to producing good results and in helping each other for both individual success and group success.Â Please notify HR if this happens so the team can be broken up and reallocated through the business.

Appleâ€™sÂ® 2024 business strategy.

But itâ€™s not all wine and PEZÂ® coffee and bagels.Â There are downsides to large organizations, too:

Politics/Egos: This is the biggest one.Â You might be humming along, doing great work, and achieving great results.Â Then your boss gets promoted and you get his replacement:Â Politics Manâ„¢.Â Politics ManÂ© doesnâ€™t care about what you do or how you do it or the results you get.Â Politics ManÂ®, in fact, wonâ€™t pay any attention at all, since his superpower has replaced normal logic with a finely tuned sense of how he looks that day to his boss and/or the CEO, along with his other power, to turn Perception to Reality.
Perception is Reality: I had one job where my boss may have been a biker who indicated that he paid a witness in a felony trial to â€œbe out of stateâ€ on the court date.Â I have no idea if he was telling the truth, but he was weird enough that we all thought that he actually lived in his office.Â His particular brand of Business Fu (ancient New York martial art) was to convince everyone that he was blameless.Â In one particular instance he decided to blame me.Â Thankfully, I had a friend who heard about this and tipped me off.Â I walked into his office and used Wilder Fu:Â â€œYou know, Iâ€™m glad youâ€™re my boss, since if I look bad, you look bad and perception is reality.Â I know youâ€™ll take care of me.â€Â He switched from blaming me to blaming Phil from Marketing.

Thatâ€™s what we do at work, just draw random words and circle them.Â Itâ€™s motivating.

Random Compensation: One year I saved the company $800,000 dollars â€“ and not made up dollars, actual dollars.Â Result?Â A 2.13% raise.Â One year I didnâ€™t contribute a whole lot at all but looked great doing it.Â 20% bonus.
Increasing Rewards: If youâ€™re getting the increasing rewards, theyâ€™re awesome.Â If youâ€™re working and read in the paper how the CEO is off to Monaco after buying a New York penthouse, maybe not so much.
Most Decisions Donâ€™t Matter (Pareto): As Iâ€™ve discussed before (Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth) a small number of decisions you make are the most important ones.Â Itâ€™s the same for a company.Â Most decisions simply donâ€™t matter if you get them right.Â Iâ€™ve noticed that if I want to keep management busy, Iâ€™ll ask them what color they want something to be.Â Theyâ€™ll spend (nearly up to the CEO Level) hours and hours with meeting after meeting just to pick carpet color.Â One time the president of a multi-billion dollar corporation had to pick who got what office at a facility located somewhere in BFE.Â As an aside â€“ The Boy heard me say â€œBFEâ€ the other day and was greatly amused when he found out the definition.Â You can Google itÂ® (not safe for work).Â Iâ€™ll wait.
No One Knows Which Decisions Matter: Which decisions are important?Â You canâ€™t really be 100% sure â€“ the chain of events started by a typographical error on a McDonaldâ€™sÂ® menu that led to Joseph Stalinâ€™s clone destroying Europe in 1978 and the rest of humanity having to escape to another dimension where they never invented the virus that wiped the memory of everyone that with an IQ of less than 160 . . . oh, Iâ€™ve said too much.Â Never mind.

It was even sadder when they started fighting about who got to keep the trophy for â€œNearly On Time To Work This Week, Tied For Sixth Place.â€

Rules: Big organizations have rules.Â Silly ones like having to show up on time.Â Showering at least weekly.Â Not flirting with the waitress.Â Oh, wait, thatâ€™s not work, thatâ€™s home.Â But big organizations do have rules, too, and they have to. Â Why?Â Because somebody always has to push the limits.Â Every single rule in every companyâ€™s HR policy manual has a story behind it.Â And every story has Phil from Marketing behind it.Â Stupid Phil.
Weird Bosses That Got Promoted Beyond The Level of Sanity: See above.Â This has happened often enough that I think that being a psychopath is a predictor of business success.Â Oh, wait, it is? (LINK) That explains everything.

My bad.

Depersonalizing: You can be replaced.Â Thatâ€™s really part of the strength of a corporation â€“ everyone from the CEO to the accountants to Phil from Marketing can be replaced.Â In most cases, unless the CEO is visionary (and most arenâ€™t) youâ€™ll never notice the difference.Â Who else is part of this faceless collective?Â Â And the system will put you into a gray box with gray computer and gray walls and a gray chair.Â Why gray?Â Because it goes with everything.
Nobody Really Cares: Iâ€™ve worked with hundreds of people during my career.Â Outside of a few coworkers from decades past, Iâ€™ve lost touch with most of them.Â Itâ€™s not just that Iâ€™m a jerk (I am) but also that people are busy with their jobs, their lives and the only intersection they have with you revolves around that 8AM to 5PM time slot.Â Theyâ€™re like people your mom paid to have come to your birthday party when you were five.Â Or that porkchop she put around your neck so the dog would play with you.

This wasnâ€™t on my physics final.

Large Organization Jobs Only Prepare You To Work For Large Organizations: Letâ€™s say you hit mid-career and decide you want to open up your own Sushi-Pizza chain called Samurai Luigiâ€™s â€“ itâ€™s okay, I wonâ€™t tell anyone that your secret is serving the pizza raw, too.Â Chances are you havenâ€™t learned anything about business thatâ€™s useful beyond a small narrow window of â€œcapital tax law related to manufacturing investment for SporkÂ® production in Toledo, Ohio.â€Â See, corporations want you to be good at that.Â But it wonâ€™t help with your garlic-salmon-tiramisu or knowing who to bribe to get the local building permit.

So, chances are youâ€™ll be working for a large corporation, but thatâ€™s okay.Â And to all of you soon-to-be graduates out there, look forward to a life of drudgery where you spends your time at a dull, faceless gray job working long hours so you can fulfill your obligations by existing only to pay bills until you die go out and conquer the world!â€

Four Questions That Describe The Meaning of Life

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python, Meaning of Life

I heard that someone told the Dalai Lama this joke and he didn’t get it. Which is makes it even funnier.

I was busy trying to adjust my phone to listen to a podcast while driving and pouring coffee the other day, and it hit me like a ticket for inattentive driving: There are only four questions that are worth asking. I found that to be amazing, since I have hundreds of note cards with ideas for posts on them in boxes waiting for the right day for me to write them up. So how do I condense most of those ideas as answers to four questions?

I was worried that this was too simple. I bounced back and forth between three questions and four questions, but finally settled on four questions. They were simple questions, and the first one that occurred to me is the first one on this list.

What brought us here?
Who are we?
What is this place?
Where are we going?

Originally I had a fifth question, but then I found my keys. Under my hat. Again. Also, when I use the word “us” in this post, it’s certainly meant to include everyone. Everyone except Johnny Depp. He knows why.

But these are big questions. As I thought a bit about it, these are the questions that drive me to write this blog, with the exception of the odd post here and there.

What brought us here?

This was the first question, and it hit me as I was working out the ideas for a future post in my head. It hit me like an angry wet salmon wearing a bear suit. At its core, this questions the all of the conditions that led to our present state. All of them. It questions the way that we are – as individuals, as groups, as a species.

I would have sworn that Washington had a blue lightsaber.

This is only a four word question, but it’s a really big four word question. Thankfully, it’s simple to answer. All you need to understand it is the answers to any questions you can think of in these subjects:

All of human history.
All of physics.
How PEZ® was invented.
All of the history of the universe.

So, the question is very short, and the answer is very long.

We still don’t know many answers to questions that are fundamental about each of these subjects. One time I was talking to The Mrs. back around 2000. My exact quote to her was, “The Mrs., I’m willing to bet that one day they find that we have Neanderthal ancestors. I think that the reason why I came to that conclusion was based on me. I’m pale. I can sunburn under the glare from an LED computer monitor.

That sort of pale didn’t happen overnight. Along with other physical observations I’d made, it just seemed the most logical conclusion that Neanderthal wasn’t extinct. Neanderthal was us.

So when the DNA evidence came back and, eventually, showed that most European-descended people had Neanderthal DNA I wasn’t surprised. And I’m not surprised now when I hear that our most basic assumptions about the way that things like physics work are subject to change – massive change.

An example:

At CERN (where they smash atoms together like a tipsy celebutant celebrating that her parents purchased her way into USC™ smashes daddy’s Mercedes© into a mom’s parked Ferrari®) they recently celebrated, with campaign(!), that they had discovered a particle symmetry violation between anti-matter and regular matter.

If Vinnie drops a car on Frank’s car, neglecting air resistance and assuming g=9.81m/s . . .

That’s a lot of words for a very basic thing – let me break it down a bit. The Universe that we see is comprised almost entirely of normal matter, not anti-matter. But the Big Bang® should have produced equal quantities of both, so where did the anti-matter go? This is a pretty significant question, since anti-matter explodes with the force of a billion bipolar ex-wives (GigaX) when it comes into contact with normal matter. It’s really good for us that we don’t have this anti-matter going around and wanting alimony payments, but there’s no real reason that the Big Bang™ didn’t produce equal quantities of both.

This discovery from CERN might explain why my ex-wife anti-matter is thankfully rare in our environment. It appears that anti-matter doesn’t follow the same physical laws that matter does. This is the first time we’ve figured that out, but we don’t know how it’s different. But think just for a second – what if you could have a substance that wanted to fall up instead of down? That was anti-magnetic? That could coat, soothe, and protect a sore throat?

Yes. This discovery could provide technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about, but most people have never heard about it. Thankfully we’re all up to date on Kardashians, though.

Thankfully there’s tons of things left to discover, both about ourselves and about the Universe that we can safely ignore while we are Keepin’ up with the Kardashians.

Who are we?

I got this question down to three words. See what a ruthless self-editor I am? This question opens up a lot of today’s biggest mysteries:

How the human body works.
How the brain works.
What consciousness is.
If people have souls.
Why 80% of the world is silly and watches soccer.
What health is.
Immortality – anything besides a great three-letter-score in Scrabble®?
What motivates us.
Why we do the things we do.

I’ll admit, some of these questions do have overlap – the question of “What brought us here?” overlaps some with “Who are we?” Ancestors are crucial to both, for instance. Protip: since you inherit somewhere between 60% and 80% of our intelligence, the first thing you should strive to do is to convince your mom to pick a smart dad for you.

But even given thousands of researchers spending billions of dollars annually, the primary positive impacts to health in the last 150 years have been clean water, better nutrition, antiseptic surgical conditions, and antibiotics. Newspaper stories keep showing up about the immortality around the corner, but I haven’t even seen one fifty year old mouse, and we can cure any kind of mice-cancer at this point.

No, thanks, eyes are fine. And I’ll skip the colonoscopy, thank you.

Thankfully, medical science can all of the questions about why humans are like they are.

Except for the interesting ones.

What is this place?

Our surroundings are curious. There is the world and cosmos we live in, but there are also the civilizations we’ve made. How does all of it work?

What virtue is.
Where virtue comes from.
What societies work well for humanity.

This is the question I could (sort of) cram back into the other three, but I felt it was important enough because of the great deal of discord in society today, and the uncertainty about the future of what we’ve made. Understanding the ability for humans to govern themselves and live together is crucial, and we still haven’t gotten the knack yet.

Where are we going?

This is the final question, the future. The mysteries of the future are different. The past and present are set, the future is undecided, wrapped in probability. What are the big questions, the big unknowns of the future? This question is easy to answer if we just know:

The fate of ourselves.
The fate of our civilizations.
The fate of humanity.
The fate of life itself.
Physics (all of it), again.

I’ve mentioned religion twice. Though it’s not a constant part of posting, it’s a very important component in understanding these questions, especially the ones where I’ve listed it. And religion is important as a philosophical construct – it has been the largest single influence on humanity in all of recorded history, and probably before that. Beyond religion as pure philosophy, there is that possibility that deity as contemplated by religion exists, and maybe even close to what is on the label. Science certainly hasn’t ruled that possibility out.

Does a bear answer trivia questions in the woods?

But in 2000, they had ruled out the possibility that we were part Neanderthal, or at least that was the general consensus.

So you never know what we’ll learn in the future. And it looks like I’ve got plenty to write about, and with the amount of Neanderthal blood I have, probably some mammoth to catch and some caves to paint.

Weed . . . maybe not so good for you.

“Feller told me one time they got a weed down here and they call it loco weed. When the horses and cows eat it they get wilder than all get out.” – Bonanza

Like this meow meme meow?

I used to be in favor of marijuana legalization. The basis for my thoughts went something like this: it’s your own body, so go ahead and put anything you want in it – it doesn’t ruin my day. Add to that, if the criminals are running the marijuana business, we’re just funding the criminals with the profits. If alcohol prohibition funded the Mafia so it’s still giving us problems nearly 90 years after their source of profits ended, we’ve probably funded the Cartels so that they’ll still exist when NASA restarts manned spaceflight for the United States sometime in the year 3224.

Criminals liked marijuana being illegal.

Politicians liked marijuana being illegal.

Anytime criminals and politicians agreed on anything, I figured it would be better to be on the other side of that equation. And it’s just weed, right? Stoners are happy folks, and probably actually do drive a lot better than anyone after a six pack and have plumper, pinker livers.

As a non-participant in marijuana culture (except for the occasional Cheech and Chong movie) my exposure had consisted of the two or so times I’d given it a try in the VERY distant past. Like having hair after 30, marijuana was something that just never had impacted my life. Weed was just weed, right?

Wrong.

What are Chong’s three favorite things? Chicken pot pie.

I was listening to the radio around the year 2000, however, and a radio doctor (he specialized in AM and radios transitioning to FM) came on and said, “Guys, you have to realize – the marijuana today isn’t the same thing as marijuana from the 1960’s and 1970’s. The new strains have been bred so that they are much, much more potent and have much higher levels of THC (the stuff that gets you high) than weed from back in the day.” As a non-toker, it didn’t really matter to me, but I found the fact fascinating. I filed it away, mainly to use in dad-related conversations when I talk to The Boy and Pugsley about not doing weed.

In my weird family (as noted before, my brother’s name is John Wilder, as well) one member (it would be too complicated and ultimately pointless to explain the relationship, needless to say we have a lot of the same DNA) of our family was . . . baked. We’ll call her Jean Wilder, so we can have John, John, and Jean.

I was exceedingly young when Jean, who was thirtysomething at the time, came to live with us. I might have been four or so. It was obvious even to me at the tender age of four that Jean’s elevator was stuck somewhere near floor 13 – often she would sit in a chair, smoking cigarettes, staring blankly off into the corner of the room above and to the left of the 15” black and white television before laughing at something that no one else could see or hear. Sure, this is common behavior today, but since this was before cellphones, this behavior was considered unusual.

More proof that weed is safe.

I asked Great-Grandma McWilder why Jean was so goofy, and Great-Grandma McWilder looked to the left and looked to the right as if to check if invisible elves were monitoring her in the kitchen (this was before Alexa®) and then whispered to me “dope.”

Sure, you guys might think she was talking about me. And I’ll agree – most four-year-olds are pretty dopey. But in this case, dope was what Great-Grandma McWilder called any illicit recreational substance. Having been born in approximately 1732, Great-Grandma McWilder’s knowledge of illicit substances consisted of the illegal gin and untaxed cigars that I think Great-Grandpa McWilder sold at his “pool hall” during prohibition. Or maybe he just read his bible all day?

Anyway, Great-Grandma McWilder whispered “dope” because at that time families felt a thing called “shame” for the misbehavior of their members. I think “shame” has since been replaced with ribbons that say “participation” on it.

“What’s dope?” I asked innocently, because at that time in my life I actually was innocent.

She sighed. It’s difficult when you have to explain to a four-year-old what illegal drugs were. I don’t remember her exact words, but I got the idea that it was like aspirin, but very bad for you in that they hurt your mind. She didn’t have to explain much more. I had seen Jean.

As I grew older, I found out more about Jean. She had been very smart as a child, but willful. Her spacey and other-worldly behavior didn’t change as the calendar pages flipped, however. As my school gave my class more and more details about the drugs we shouldn’t be taking including lots of instructions about how we shouldn’t take them, pre-teen me guessed that Jean had probably taken LSD (not to be confused with LDS) and the experience had changed her. Forever.

By the time I got to my teens, I asked Jean about her past drug use. She said that the only drug she’d ever tried had been marijuana. Back then, I figured she was lying. Certainly grass didn’t cause the delusions and hallucinations I had observed, right? Harmless weed wouldn’t have convinced Jean that Madonna® had stolen the songs from her notebook (this was what Jean believed). Ganja wouldn’t have made Jean phone in a missing person report to the sheriff on ME because a shadowy cabal of evil doctors (I’m not making this up) had kidnapped me, even though I was off in the college dorms safe and sound at the time? Reefer wouldn’t do that, right?

Well, not so fast, Pat Sajak.

A recent study came out this week and showed that instances of psychosis were three times higher in areas where you could get strong weed. And psychosis explained every symptom that Jean had. Jean was very nice, very sweet, and a danger only to herself. She self-medicated with nicotine – she was never without a smoke – but anti-psychotics seemed to work much better.

But trends are troubling – weed THC content has doubled in the last 10 years. But Jean toked up long before then. What happened to her? Some mutant weed? A lot of weed? I have no idea. I’m not a doctor. Jean did live a long, happy, though not particularly useful life, and I’m certain wouldn’t be offended by this post.

Okay, I guess this is my final conclusion.

There appears to be some evidence that marijuana and some marijuana derivatives are useful for things like seizures, overcoming chemotherapy side effects, and playing Red Dead Redemption™ and Fallout® in Mom’s basement. Again, I’m not a doctor, but I will be warning my kids that marijuana is certainly more dangerous than is commonly accepted and should be avoided at all costs for recreation. It’s just not worth the risk of, well, being psychotic for the rest of your life. Plus I’m going to make them get tattoos that say “legal doesn’t mean moral” on their foreheads if I ever catch them lighting up a doobie.

If only there was a way to stop drug use while not funneling money to the cartels.

Oh, wait . . . virtue?

Nah, I must be thinking of something else . . . .