Dependence, Freedom, and Toddler Hammer Fighting

“I’ve been kidnapped by K-mart!” – Ruthless People

I love George, going out of his way to join the English for breakfast and all.

I frustrate my children a lot. A lot. Here’s an example from 2018:

The Boy, Pugsley, and I are out shooting. Fun times. Heck, here’s even a description of that particular day (12 Strong Movie Review, Exploding Tide Bottles, Rifles, and Significance). When we finally got home, it was nearly dark. I handed The Boy a cleaning kit and the AR-15 and .22 we’d been shooting.

“Clean these.”

I didn’t explain how. I gave a short lecture on ammunition safety and “always treat it like it’s loaded” and “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” and “don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill,” and “never trust a liberal with your rifles.” I even checked the rifles to make sure they were empty.

I handed The Boy a cleaning kit, and walked away.

“How do I do this?” He was talking to the back of my head as headed down the hall.

“You figure it out.” I heard The Boy’s long-suffering sigh as I went into my bedroom.

Ten minutes later I was walking back through the dining room and was pleased to see he’d already disassembled the weapon. Ten minutes later when I walked back through he was putting the finishing touches on a cleaned and lubricated AR-15. I gave it a look, cycled the action. Smooth.

The Boy had done a good job. I told him so. He looked proud.

Dads. We just love to share the work . . .

I know that when I tossed that task to him with little information, he was irritated. That makes sense – we’re all that way. I also knew that it probably took longer than it would have if I would have done it myself. It certainly took longer than it would have if I would have spent the time going step by step, leading The Boy through cleaning the rifle. It wasn’t really efficient.

But if I wanted efficiency, I wouldn’t have taken either The Boy or Pugsley shooting. I would have done it all myself, the shooting, the cleaning, all of it. But because my goal is to teach my children that there’s no shortcut, and the only way out is through I took them. They were the point of the whole trip. Their struggle was the goal. Their prize?

Independence.

Sure, we’re dependent upon a lot of things.

Air.
Insulin. The Mrs. says that if you don’t have a functioning pancreas you need this. I say she’s just weak for not being able to kick the habit.
Sweet, sweet PEZ®. I mean, it’s PEZ™, right?
Food, at least on alternate weeks (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water).
Other people.
Occasional sips of water.

And those are all reasonable things to be dependent on. I guess. But there are some things that are much more corrosive to the soul. Most of them are self-explanatory, some less so.

Parental handouts.
Government handouts.
The opinions of other people.
Alcohol.
Anti-PEZ®
Paychecks.

I’m against being dependent upon those things, and I want to make sure I make my kids strong so that they’ll have that reserve of strength when something unexpected happens. You never know what’s going to come at you, because life is like a weightlifting toddler, short and hard. I guess you could say I went to the Charles Darwin School of Parenting:

John Wilder: “The child will eat if it has the will to eat.”

The Mrs.: “But it’s only three hours old.”

John Wilder: “Why do you coddle it so? Do you want to make it weak?”

I’m probably the only person who thinks toddler hammer fighting would be funny. But I think it’s really funny.

But the approach has paid dividends for those children that survived. I turned control of the mowing of the yard for Stately Wilder Manor over to Pugsley some time ago. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that he knows much more about the mower than I do. My role in the house has been changed from decision maker to provider. Pugsley tells me what he needs for the mower, and I get it. He fixes it. Pugsley has even re-wired one of the safety systems on the mower – when you get off the mower, it’s supposed to kill the engine as soon as your butt leaves the seat. Not anymore. Pugsley has defeated that safety device.

I’m hoping it doesn’t defeet him. I’d hate to have throw him a block of wood and a knife so he could whittle himself some wooden feet. When it comes to my kids, I’m attempting to use everyday situations to create radical independence. I’m a fan of the old Robert Heinlein maxim:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

I expect my children to be able to do all of that. If I can help them be competent, I may or may not have been a good parent, but I’ll have met my own goal. One of the proudest moments of my life to date was when my eldest child, Alia S. Wilder and I were arguing about her college major, Medieval French Basket Weaver Equity Studies. Her response to me?

“Listen, Pop, it’s my degree, it’s my choice, and I’m paying for it, every cent, so if you don’t like my major, tough.”

Game, set and match: Alia. That’s the sort of independence that makes a parent proud. I suppose I could have paid for her school. But last time she was down to visit, she thanked me. “You know, by you letting me find my way, it means more.”

I then told her, “I’m proud of you.” She cried. Then we had a Lifetime® TV moment and some International Coffee™ or whatever it is they advertise on Lifetime©.

I mean, seriously. Straight lines, people.

The other side of the coin, however, is the conscious creation of dependence. This is commonly achieved by using manipulation, guilt, low self-esteem, anxiety, and fear. I’ve seen it done to people.

Fear is the key. Some parents hobble children, in a conscious or sub-conscious attempt to keep them dependent. The downside is that this dependence creates resentment. How many times do people, when given something for nearly nothing complain that you’re not doing enough? Since 1964, the welfare system has cost taxpayers more than three times the total cost of all wars that the United States has ever fought. All wars – every single one of them. Yet poverty hasn’t gone down at all, and the people in poverty hate those they are dependent upon. They know that they are indebted, and they are both slaves to the system, as well as haters of the system.

Once you’ve got a grievance, it’s never enough. Someone always has it better, so why don’t you deserve what they have? This is the consequence of free stuff. A trip to Wal-Mart® might cost you $221.32 if you pick up the two-fer bag of charcoal, but free stuff costs you your soul.

“Give me liberty or give me medicare?”

It’s ironic that the surest form of enslavement occurs not with a whip and a lash (though I imagine those really suck, because outside of bondage clubs on the East and West Coast, not a lot of sane people like that stuff) but with voluntarily accepting kindness. Generosity. Free stuff.

You’ll notice I put paycheck into that list up above, too. For those almost every one of my readers, the paycheck isn’t a problem. You work hard. You pay your dues. You’re compensated fairly. You go home without a chip on your shoulder, without blaming the rest of the world for your job. Beware: once a person starts feeling like they’re a victim, that someone owes them that check, they’re deep into the free stuff zone.

It’s as true today as when Pop Wilder repeated it to me again and again when I was growing up, “What you work for matters to you. If you have to spend your own money, you’ll take care of it. Because it’s yours.” The most costly thing I could ever give them . . . is free.

I paid attention. I hope my kids have. And if only I could get The Mrs. to give up that weakness of hers, insulin. She should “just say no.”

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

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.]

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

â€œI need food, food to be strong for when the wolves come.â€ â€“ Conan the Barbarian

Communist humor is like food:Â not everyone gets it.

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

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

The diet isnâ€™t working.
Okay, itâ€™s working. But itâ€™s working slooooooowly.
Wait, it didnâ€™t work this week at all.
Iâ€™m not sure why, but this week I gained
Is it just me, or can everyone gain weight on a box of McDonaldsÂ® fries?
Wine or Beer or Chocolate Shakes or TwinkiesÂ® donâ€™t have that many calories, right?
I just walked half a mile! I need to reward myself with a Double WhopperÂ©.Â Yes, with cheese.

Iâ€™m going to make a pretty bold statement:Â I can fix every one of the issues above with one simple trick that doesnâ€™t involve Marx, Lenin, or Castro.

Just stop eating.Â Fast.Â Not fast as in â€œquicklyâ€ but fast as in fasting:Â not eating.

Thatâ€™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, thereâ€™s very little profit opportunity in a business like this.Â 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.Â That cynical person might also note that itâ€™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:Â Just not eating . . . would save the United States $70 billion, and thatâ€™s just for starters.Â It would also save a lot of money on food.Â But more on that later.

When people say â€œlisten to your bodyâ€ I wonder if theyâ€™re schizophrenic or puppeteers, since those are the only people I know who talk to a body part.

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

Iâ€™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, Iâ€™d say that fasting costs nothing, but that wouldnâ€™t be true.Â Fasting has saved me lots and lots of money, which will become apparent when I describe how Iâ€™m doing it below.

One other thing â€“ I gave up drinking alcohol (beer, wine, etc.) as my weight loss progresses with the exception of two major milestones.Â 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:Â empty calories and bad decisions.Â Besides, you canâ€™t sit around on the back deck with a BudweiserÂ® and claim youâ€™re fasting.Â Well, you can, but youâ€™d be using Senate-level honesty.

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

Does it require willpower?Â Yeah.Â But itâ€™s not a frightening level of willpower where I have to face the gom-jabbar or anything.Â I think the biggest change for me has been breaking the conditioning of â€œyou have to eatâ€ thatâ€™s pretty prevalent.Â Iâ€™ll listen to people saying â€œyou have to eatâ€ when Iâ€™m wearing size 32 jeans.Â Until then?Â Nope.

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

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

So no eating anything?Â Okay, Iâ€™ll come clean.Â The first few weeks I had breath mints, but then I read the label and did the math and now I donâ€™t have them at all unless I have a business meeting and donâ€™t want to have bad breath that can melt a conference table.Â Sugar free doesnâ€™t mean calorie free.Â I also brush my teeth twice as often.

I also cheat with dill pickles.Â At 10 to 20 calories per day, it wasnâ€™t much, and the pickles replaced salt I sweated out while exercising.Â Yes, every day that I could get to the gym at lunch I would exercise.Â It did two things â€“ it burned a few extra calories, but after a workout Iâ€™m never hungry, so the afternoons are hunger free.

What is a typical week like?

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

And cleanup is a breeze!

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

Tuesday is the toughest day.Â I believe whatâ€™s happening here is that my liver is all out of glycogen, a sugar that is stored in the liver for emergency use.Â Any food in my digestive system is long gone.Â That means that on Tuesday the body has to switch over to using fat.Â By Tuesday night Iâ€™m feeling pretty good.Â My energy levels are actually higher on Tuesday night than Tuesday morning.Â Tuesday is the only day I feel really hungry.Â The rest of the time, when I think Iâ€™m hungry, Iâ€™m really just . . . conditioned to be eating.Â When I really sit back and examine if Iâ€™m hungry, the answer is almost always â€œno.â€Â Except on Tuesday.

You guessed it â€“ if I get horribly hungry I have a few small dill pickles.

Wednesday and Thursday look pretty much the same as each other â€“ my energy levels are up even though Iâ€™ve gone 72+ hours without any food.Â Thereâ€™s a strong focus and mental acuity that seems to emerge about this point.Â Itâ€™s entirely likely that this accountâ€™s for Shakespeareâ€™s quote from Julius Caesar, â€œYon Cassius has a lean and hungry look.â€Â I have no idea if Cassius ate pickles.

Thursday about midnight (when Iâ€™m writing this blog) I often go upstairs and cook some broth and/or have some cheese.Â 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.Â The of all food Iâ€™ve consumed during the fast would probably be less than 100 calories, and certainly less than 200 calories, and almost never any sugar.Â Itâ€™s like Iâ€™m a fashion model, but without the cocaine!

Mmmmm, water.

Friday is FOOD DAY!Â Iâ€™ll eat at lunch â€“ 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.Â My longest fast is about five and a half days.Â 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:Â on Friday, the food is amazing.Â The taste of crisp lettuce and tomato on a burger . . . gives me shivers.Â The Chick-Fil-AÂ® nuggets become a banquet.Â One Friday I had tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon.Â No king ever had such wondrous flavors hit his palate.Â One of the reasons Iâ€™ve grown to love fasting is that food tastes so much better.Â I guarantee you that after going 100 hours without food, you will enjoy and savor food more than you ever have in your life.

Did you notice the big lunch buffet behind the lunch?

Food (mainly) tastes better, more flavorful, richer.Â That is, food that is closest to being â€œnaturalâ€ â€“ processed junk is not appealing on day five of a fast.Â One Friday I had a concession stand pretzel with concession stand cheese for lunch.Â I threw half of it away â€“ 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.Â 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.Â I simply cannot eat as much as I used to eat.Â Iâ€™m often full before I can finish a â€œnormalâ€ portion size at the local restaurant.Â And if I try to eat three â€œnormalâ€ meals?Â I get uncomfortably full.

So what do I eat during the 36 hours?Â Anything I want to.Â No limits on portions or content, with the previously mentioned exception of the wine and beer.Â Why no wine and beer?Â 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 Iâ€™m at the barbeque grill.Â These are motivation for success.Â Itâ€™s that simple.

Itâ€™s also breakfast, the most important meme of the day.

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

A mammoth hunter back in 20,000 B.C. couldnâ€™t jump into his Fred FlintstoneÂ® car and go down to the 7-11Â© to pick up a Slurpeeâ„¢ when he was hungry.Â Instead heâ€™d carve into the mammoth that he and Ug got the previous week.Â Oops, they ate it all.Â Now they couldnâ€™t exactly go down to Mammoth-MartÂ© and pick up some steaks, they had to go find one.Â That might mean days of hunting, and it might mean that Fred and Ug might have to focus on the hunt.

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

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

Gym fees were waived if the mammoth stomped on you.

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

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

This is simple.

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

Fasting is also something that Dr. Fung (LINK) has said heâ€™s used to cure (yes, cure) type II diabetic patients.Â As a kidney doctor, he got to see patients that had progressed pretty far toward death.Â 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.Â There was no cure.

Fung didnâ€™t accept that.Â Type II diabetes is a disease thatâ€™s related to lifestyle.Â Itâ€™s really part of a bigger condition known as metabolic syndrome.Â He began treating his patients with fasting.Â The farther gone they were, the longer the fasts â€“ in some cases 14 days.Â He noted (and many subsequent studies have confirmed this) that fasting made them better.Â It increased insulin sensitivity, and that was huge.

Insulin plays many roles in the human body â€“ I believe I recall doctors had found at least 40 regulatory influences from insulin, but I canâ€™t find that article right now, but did find a full dozen important things it does.Â But (if you have a functioning pancreas) two important features are that it allows your body to admit sugar to cells for use.Â Thatâ€™s important.Â 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.Â So youâ€™re using sugar poorly, but also being signaled to store more fat.Â Thus?Â Your metabolism is screwed up and your body wants to make more fat out of the sugar in your system.Â So Dr. Fung came up with the idea to just stop type II diabetics from eating.Â And it worked like a charm.

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

Am I saying that it can cure you?Â Dr. Fung thinks so.Â But he also cautions that certain diabetic medications can be dangerous and need close monitoring so you donâ€™t die, or something.Â Blah blah blah.

I hear theyâ€™re going to start vaping CheetosÂ® soon.

But Iâ€™m not on any medications, so this seemed like a slam dunk.Â I even spent $30 for a cheap-o blood sugar monitor to see if there was anything that would show up.Â Nah.Â Boring, which just means that my liver and pancreas are doing the things theyâ€™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 Iâ€™ve noticed is that Iâ€™ve saved a lot of money.Â When you only have two lunches and two dinners a week, you donâ€™t spend as much on groceries and hardly anything on restaurants.Â Also, the fam doesnâ€™t tend to go out to dinner when Iâ€™m fasting.Â Iâ€™m certainly okay with going out, but I think they feel guilty.Â So thereâ€™s that money saved, too.Â Oh, and the wine and beer.Â Not buying any of that saves money.Â And we all know that mixing AmazonÂ® and beer lead to purchases of solar string lights and ceramic garden gnomes because â€œthose might look good on the deck.â€Â 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 Iâ€™ve reached my primary goal and learned what I have to do to stay there, forever.Â And Iâ€™ll only post that if itâ€™s interesting.

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

Hereâ€™s a link to the Reddit on fasting: /Fasting

Hereâ€™s a link to a Reddit thread showing my results arenâ€™t unique:Â Reddit /Fasting Dude

Hereâ€™s a link to about a guy who fasted for over a year:Â Scottish Fasting Dude

Never Give Up, Never Surrender

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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 5^th Century book, City of God. Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6^th 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.

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

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.

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™.

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.

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.

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©.”

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.

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.

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.

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.