Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
“Seriously, I don’t get it. What, do you shoot luck lasers out your eyes? It’s just hard to picture. And certainly not very cinematic.” – Deadpool 2
Yup. I sure feel that way when I accidentally tell the ticket taker “I love you, too” after she says, “Enjoy the movie.”
One novel I recall reading back when I was in a kid in junior high was Ringworld by Larry Niven. Niven’s fiction has always been great because when he thinks about a subject, he thinks about that subject deeply, and spins off great ideas faster than a nudist nursemaid on nitrates.
In the case of Ringworld, the main idea was about taking all the matter in a solar system and putting a big ring around it. This would have about three million times the surface area of Earth, so if you were kinda bored and needed a weekend project to add a little bit of space to your place, building a ringworld might give you enough room so you didn’t need to rent one of those 8×10 storage units. That might save you $30 a month!
I’ll warn you, if your gym teacher makes you do a lap, it might take several hundred thousand years.
Another view of the Ringworld in motion.
Outside of that huge idea of building solar-system-scale structures, Niven had a dozen others in just that one book (and he did it in other books, too) that made it especially mind bending for a young teenager to read. One of the ideas was about luck.
In the future that Larry Niven had constructed, parents were limited to the number of children they could have, but you could have an extra child if you won a lottery. Teela Brown’s parents won that lottery, and so on – for five generations. In this case, Niven speculated that there might be a gene that made you lucky, and her character was brought into the novel with that genetically-based luck as her superpower, which helped move the plot along in an interesting way.
I hear religious cannibals only eat Catholics on Friday.
The idea (like a lot of Niven’s other ideas) stuck with me for a while. I know that there are people who think that the concept of “luck” is magical thinking. Me? I think that to discard luck as a concept in a Universe as vast as ours describes an unwarranted degree of certainty about how things really work. In fact, when talking with people, I often say, “I’m the luckiest person you know.” I really think that I am a pretty lucky fellow. Some would even call me a jolly. And good.
“He is lucky who realizes that luck is the point where preparation meets opportunity,” was an unattributed saying in a 1912 edition of The Youth’s Companion. That’s a great definition, and it is one that firmly puts you in control of your destiny – most “overnight sensations” work, very hard, for years before success hits. It’s a concept I sell to my kids frequently because the last thing I want is to allow them, for a single second, to feel like they’re victims of life. That gives them an excuse not to perform – and they’ll need to pay for my nursing home, and I want them to be able to afford one with pole dancers.
But we need to face an unpleasant truth: like Teela Brown, some people are just luckier than others.
Can you back that up, John Wilder? Yes, yes I can.
People are born with different abilities – attractiveness, speed, strength, intelligence, cunning. It’s only on rare occasions that a rogue like me is born with all four. Er, five.
Many crucial events in history have swung on luck – Lee’s invasion of Maryland was stopped at Antietam in 1862 because a corporal of the 27th Indiana Volunteers found Lee’s invasion plans in an envelope wrapped around three cigars.
Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin because his bacterial slide was accidently infected with a fungus – a penicillin producing fungus.
Talent is normally distributed – it follows a bell curve – most people have average talent, while some have amazing talent. Most people (in the looks department) aren’t 10’s – they’re 5’s, which is, after all, average. But variable amounts of talent don’t account for the huge differences in success some people see. Bill Gates wasn’t the smartest man born in 1955. Bill Gates wasn’t the hardest working man born in 1955. Bill Gates wasn’t the man born in 1955 with the richest dad.
Luck plays a role in your life. If you’re born well, that’s a good start. If you pick the right major at the right time? That’s another step on the way. Get associated with the right things at work? A business that is just the right one at just the right time? Soon enough you’re the CEO.
Lucky Charms® are also part of a complete breakfast, but then again so is a spoon, which is also inedible.
I’m not saying that the CEO is unworthy, but I do think that those who rise to the top should understand that there’s a role for luck as well. Scientific American (LINK) even has an article where a mathematical simulation of talent plus luck equals the creation of the unequal distribution of outcomes we see in the world today where vast amounts of wealth are owned by a small number of people.
Is an unequal distribution an unfair outcome? No, mainly because people make the individual choices that lead them to their fates – very few people are forced to their position in life. If I had made several different choices in my life, could I have been the CEO of a major company? With luck, sure. But I’m sure that whoever got the job is doing fine, as am I, plus I don’t have to live in a big city and wear a tie more than once a year.
And what about lucky breaks that go way beyond probability?
Yup, I think those happen, too. But that’s a future post. If you’re lucky.
I was actually shocked they still had keys – I was expecting that they’d be subjected to retinal checks to get back in their rooms. Until I heard that the floor had a shared bathroom. A co-ed shared bathroom. Imagine being in the midst of a growler when the girl of your dreams drops on by to leave the kids off at the pool? I’ve been married forever, and I like to pretend that’s not something The Mrs. does – at all.
I was surprised. I was unaware that the diet of Deadpool® was entirely comprised of burning tires.
The Mrs. and I were there, really, for The Mrs. and not The Boy at all.
When The Mrs. had talked about The Boy moving away, it had started off with a matter-of-fact statement about “. . . when we drop him off at college.”
I had responded with, “Why would we need to go up there to drop him off? He seems to be perfectly capable of carrying a few boxes to an elevator. It’s not like we’re dropping off Stephen Hawking.” This was, apparently, not the thing to say to a mother getting mentally ready to cope with her eldest son going off to college. It doesn’t help that The Mrs. is also staring down the added mathematical certainty that her youngest child, Pugsley, will likewise be moving out within a handful of years.
She responded with: “Of course we’re going.”
If you can put “icy” into a tone, this one was nearly at absolute zero. I saw the molecules in her exhaled breath stop vibrating as they fell to the carpet and form a nice Ice-9 frost (look it up). I could see that we’d be driving the hours required to get to Midwestia State (Home of the Whimsical Crotch Goblins®) the day the dorms opened.
When I met Stephen Hawking, he told me that there are an infinite number of universes out there, and maybe even one where I was funny. I responded, “Here’s a great joke: Stephen Hawking walked into a bar.” That one really made him mad. Now I have to live in this Universe, where Kardashians aren’t fast food workers.
I can understand how The Mrs. felt. It’s almost always a melancholy time when a child moves out, unless that child is Johnny Depp, in which case his parents were happy to be able to announce to their friends that their house was now aerobics-free as Johnny was now doing Pilates of the Caribbean. I’m sorry. I’ll admit that there were uneasy questions floating through my mind. I thought the questions were about him, but in reality after reflecting, I realized the questions were really about me:
I thought the questions were: “Is he ready? Does he have the tools to go out into the world? Will he make the right judgements?”
It sounds like those questions were about him, but they’re not. Those questions are really about me. A more truthful way to write them is: “Did I prepare him? Did I teach him enough so that he’ll be competent and safe? Is he a good man?”
The only thing I’m sad about is that he thinks steak tastes like chicken.
I think college is a good idea for The Boy, and I’ll get back to his specifics a bit later after Morpheus is done with him.
But I don’t think college is for everyone, and I think it’s really a horrible idea for some people. I learned this from my association with a youth group. I was discussing the future with one young, bright kid – he was a junior at the time, I think. I asked him what his plans were.
I stopped. I was getting ready to give him my “you need to go to college” speech, but hesitated. This young man had thought about it. He loved being outside. He hated paperwork. He was very smart. The average hourly wage for an electrical lineman is $30 an hour for a journeyman. With overtime, he could be making $100,000+ a year in just a few years and live in an area near Modern Mayberry where most of the nicest houses are available for $200,000 or less.
It was a shockingly (intended) good choice.
Being an electrical lineman also offered some other benefits: it’s not a career that you can do online. You have to physically be there. This is nice, so you don’t have to compete with a two billion or so people in China and India like you might if you were being a computer programmer.
This job has another advantage – it requires just enough certification that it shuts down people who would randomly try it, mainly because no matter how crispy the body is electrical companies hate to pay to have them removed. But the young man in question wouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens, either.
Being a lineman has a third advantage: it is a basic service that you can’t outsource. You can ship a factory nearly completely overseas – I’ve heard of just this happening – but the electrical infrastructure required to run the United States has to be in, well, the United States.
One final advantage: you can start your own company, buy your own truck, and work the hours you want as a contractor to bigger electrical companies. It’s a business where if you want to be a contractor or an entrepreneur, you can be without too much difficulty investment.
The nice thing about working with kids is they often teach you things, too. The standard advice you give a bright kid with good values is go to college. This is clearly the wrong advice for many kids.
A kid growing up today will face more challenges in employment than any generation in history. Competition will take place in ways that I never had to consider during my career. And this is after automation removed thousands of jobs from factories as machines replaced skilled workers. In this new revolution, expertise from “knowledge workers” will be replaced by algorithms and databases that allow, for instance, computers to diagnose skin cancer at a 95% correct rate, versus an 87% success rate by actual human dermatologists. I know it sounds bad for the human dermatologists, but I got a 0% correct rate since all I would do is look at the picture and say, “ewww, gross.” Let’s see a machine beat that.
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a doctor.
I’m not sure that there is, in the future, a truly safe job or career to go into, unless we experience Lord Bison’s Deep Fried Econopocalypse® (and if you’re not reading The Bison Prepper, you really should be (LINK)) and then the guy who makes costumes out of leather and football shoulder pads has probably got a good career ahead of him. Owning a scrapbooking store? Maybe not so much.
What are the attributes of a safe job? I mean, assuming Mel Gibson doesn’t show up at your house tomorrow?
Local – If you can’t do it over the Internet, that cuts out billions of people from getting that job.
Certifications Required – A job, like the lineman example, isn’t something that should be done by just anyone – it requires a minimum intellect as well as training and experience. Many medical jobs are similar. I hate the way that we have, in my opinion, over-certified our world. But you can use that to your advantage.
Other Bars to Entry – It used to be that you could give applicants for jobs an IQ test, weed out those that weren’t smart enough, and be fairly sure that you were getting someone who was at least smart enough (or not too smart) for the job. Now? You have to use something that works like an IQ test, like a college degree.
Hard to For A Machine to Do – Blogging. That’s hard for machines, right fellow humans? I have been told that 93.2% of you like to hear that.
But there are ways that even “safe” jobs might be at risk:
Carpenter: Carpentry, in many cases, requires no certification – any illegal aliens have taken many of these jobs in certain areas.
Teacher: Why do we need all of these teachers? We can get a YouTube® lecture up, and have a teaching assistant give the standardized test.
Store Associate: Check out the product features on the Internet – seriously stop. You’re not my supervisor. Leave me alone!
Checkout Clerk: Self-service checkouts are pretty common now. I refuse to use them, period, but I can see that I’m rapidly becoming a minority.
Johnny Depp’s Sinus Cavity Cleaner: Okay, this one is really a safe job.
Okay, I’ll admit, she’d be perfectly acceptable working picking strawberries or in some sort of insect control responsibility.
But there are other problems. I maintain that too many people go to college. In 1959, only about 45% of high school graduates went to college, and only 70% of students graduated from high school. That’s a little less than a third of the US population.
In 2016, 84% graduated from high school, and 70% of those went to college. That’s nearly 60%. If you break down the math, almost twice as many people are going to college as a percentage of people in the United States. There are only two possible conclusions: either people have gotten smarter, or college has gotten easier.
See, if you build a new building on campus – not a bribe – call it Skank Hoe Hall. But having your skank daughters get in because you’ve bribed a coach? Yeah, that’s a bribe. Allegedly.
One thing I did note in the hour I spent sifting through the data is that many degrees are more helpful, and, potentially more stable. Health and medical sciences accounted for 10% of graduates, and those jobs are hard to replace with a machine. You have to have people helping people. Robots can diagnose, but at least for now, a doctor has to do the cutting, and a nurse the nursing, until Arnold Schwarzendoctor 2000™ arrives.
That’s a realllllllly long thumb.
I would speculate that we have twice as many people going to college as necessary, and we could replace the expense and time wasted at college for many people simply by allowing employers to give IQ tests. Yes, doctors and nurses need school. But we have approximately 1,000,000% more anthropology degrees than required to maintain our civilization, and an infinite amount of Women’s Gender Studies degree recipients than required.
I advised The Boy on how he could take what he enjoys doing, and turn it into something useful. Don’t compete with billions of people – find ways that you can provide higher value services to people in ways that have to be local and are hard to reproduce. I think he has a pretty good plan.
Given the accelerating pace of change we’ve seen in the last two decades, I imagine that anyone starting a career in 2020 may have to make multiple changes during their life. From what I’ve seen so far, I think The Boy is well prepared for school and the changes that he’ll see in life. I think he’ll do fine. It’s time to let that eagle fly.
“What kind of cruel charity charges orphans $500 to eat dinner?” – News Radio
The Mrs. seems rather narrow-minded about certain donations.
Before Pop Wilder passed away, I would go to visit him on a regular basis. After graduating from college, almost all of my trips and time off from work (when we didn’t stay home) was spent visiting Pop at our ancestral homeland in the mountains around Zorro Falls. I called the trips to go visit Pop “Obili-cations” because I felt obligated to go to see him on my vacations. Sure, I had a choice on how to spend those 10 days of vacation a year, but I also knew that the number of hours I’d ever get to spend with him were like the collective I.Q. of Congress: finite and rapidly shrinking.
To me, these trips were important. I figured* that I had spent over 99% of the hours I’d ever spend with Pop already. I had 1% or less of those hours left. These hours were precious and few. Given that perspective, I didn’t really mind spending every vacation day going to see him up at Zorro Falls. Now that I’m a father, I’m very glad I made those trips since it now gives me the excuse to guilt my own children into doing the same thing.
While we visited, I’d often go to church with Pop on Sunday mornings. Pop had lived within thirty miles of Zorro Falls his entire life. This church we’d go to was the same small church where we went when I was a child. It was the same church where, as a five year old, I had colored Jesus’ face bright purple during Sunday School one Sunday morning.
Sunday School Teacher, leaning to look at my coloring page: “Johnny, you know that Jesus wasn’t really purple, right?”
Young Johnny Wilder: “He’s God. He can be any color he wants to be.” I never even bothered to look up at her. I was busy coloring the Apostle Matthew’s skin in silver, having finished with Jesus. It was only years later that I realized that Matthew had been a Terminator™ sent back from the future to stop Jesus from giving birth to John Conner®. Now, at last, the Bible made sense!
Sunday School Teacher had no response to my stunningly brilliant “purple Jesus” logic, but did tell Ma Wilder. Ma Wilder got years of mileage out of that story, though I wish she wouldn’t have told it to the guys on my wrestling team.
But back to the story: I was on an obli-cation, and I met Pop at his place and went to the church with him. We sat down in the pew right up front since Pop claimed that the artillery during his European vacation in the 1940’s hadn’t been particularly good for his hearing. Sissy.
The Pastor began his sermon. Now, I always really liked that Pastor – he had been friends with the family for years. He had officiated at Ma Wilder’s funeral. The topic of his sermon that day was charity.
I look back on my life and feel really good about the times I was able to help someone. I recall stopping at a convenience store while travelling for business. I was looking for a book store, because I’d just finished the novel I was reading. The clerk told me that, “This is Chicago, nearest book store is . . . twenty miles that way, at the mall.” He then did something unusual. He looked me in the eye, and pointed at a tiny redhead, maybe 19, standing by a car in the rain, very out of place in the mean streets of south Chicago. “She needs your help, man.”
Unlike a vegan, I can change a flat tire.
Her tire was flat. She was trying to go to meet her fiancé at the airport. He was coming home from Iraq that night.
“Can you help me?”
I changed her tire in the rain. She didn’t have an umbrella, but she did have a poster board that she held over me while I changed the tire. As I tightened up the last lug nut, I stood up. “Okay, you’re good to go.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“No, ma’am. That’s not why I did it. Go see your fiancé.”
I still feel good when I tell that story. And I’m not telling it to brag – any person reading this blog could have and would have done the same – I’m no more virtuous than any of you. But I am happy that I was there that night, to help that young girl get to the gate and throw her arms around her man as he came back from combat. The act of charity probably helped me more than it helped her – I know I remember it, but I’d bet she doesn’t. The fairy tale ended with her at the gate. The supporting characters (me, for instance) were lost in the arms of her man, details that won’t make the final version of the story she has told her children.
Which is how it should be.
Anyway, I agreed with the pastor when talked about charity. Helping people is good. But then the pastor continued, “And let us pray that Congress will act to give money to these poor people.”
He lost me right there.
Is it just me or does Jesus look a lot like Bruce Springsteen? I guess he is The Boss, after all.
I know that it’s probably a sin to be really, really pissed off in church, but there I was, in the second row, angry. And it’s probably a double-secret sin to be really, really pissed off at the Pastor. Thankfully, the church had just had a new roof installed so I was shielded from immediate lightning strikes from on high. And, if I’m being honest with you Internet, if a “stray” lightning bolt was going to hit me, it would have hit me far sooner than that day – being irritated with a Pastor is probably pretty low on my list of sinful behavior. Thankfully, Christianity has forgiveness embedded into it, because I certainly need it.
But why did I get so angry at the nice Pastor? Charity, when done by an individual is enriching. It helps both parties. It helps me. It helps tiny redheads with flat tires. It is an act that transcends – a willing gift to someone who will never be able to repay the gift to the giver.
Charity, when done by the government breeds resentment on those taxed. If they don’t want to participate in this charity, men with guns will come and take them to prison. Government forced charity breeds resentment of that very charity.
Billions, trillions? Doesn’t matter. It’s just other people’s money.
Government charity also breeds resentment by the recipient. Why didn’t they get more free stuff? It leads to bad incentives – why work when you’d lose the government benefits? The final straw is it destroys the dignity and independence of those that receive it. And if the program is set up poorly, it actually provides a disincentive for people to get or remain married. Government charity is certainly worse on the recipient than on the (unwilling) giver even though both of them come to hate the systems.
True charity makes two winners, government charity just manages to create anger and division. Government charity is the epitome of a program designed by Democrats – it takes a great goal (we all like the concept of charity) and turns it into a bureaucratic mess enforceable only through coercion and penalty.
If it stopped there with just that mess, it might be survivable.
Government has now opened these incentives to any person who can cross our border. Get across, and get free healthcare. Free food. Free housing. Need a cell phone? A ticket to Des Moines? We can help. Approximately four billion people would like to live in the United States because their countries suck. They can’t get nearly as much free stuff, and they’ve heard of the economic miracle of the United States.
Charity is like working – it’s great when other people do it!
This version of “charity” has created a group of millions of angry, unwilling donors, while at the same time creating millions of resentful, angry recipients. Thankfully, there is no reason we can’t have a billion resentful, angry recipients living in the United States tomorrow.
Sounds like another successful government program. Yay!
*By my spreadsheet, I had spent half the time I was ever going to spend with Pop Wilder by the age of eight. By the time I went off to college, I had spent about 94% of the hours I would ever spend with Pop. If I had moved back to the same town, or gone into the family business of firewood polishing together, obviously that would have been a different story. I’m only trying to note that these hours with family are precious, and are gone much faster than you might imagine. Feel free to use this to make your children feel guilty.
For your coloring enjoyment. Or colouring in Canada, eh.
“Owning a nuclear weapon means never having to say you’re sorry.†– John Wilders Book of Quotes: Cannibal Soup for the Soul™ For reals, I’m thinking about publishing a book of collected essays from this blog, and that’s the title I want to use, and thus the ™. It’s MINE!
One of my professors at college had very, very precise printed block letters. One day we were talking and he brought it up, especially since my own writing was, shall we say, a challenge to read. I think I was his Teaching Assistant at that point in graduate school
My professor: “One day, I was in my forties, I just decided that every single letter that I wrote was going to be perfect. Absolutely perfect. So, from that moment, no matter how slowly I had to write, I was going to be the best. I took a month and just focused on printing my letters perfectly every day. After a month, it was habit.â€
Being 20, I missed the significance of this, and only on reflecting now do I realize what my professor was really saying:
“Wilder, you may have written something great. You may have written something awful. I just can’t read it.â€
How bad was my hand writing?  When I was in sixth grade, my teacher required every essay or book report to be in cursive so we could practice our handwriting at the same time we produced a book report. My teacher pulled me aside. “John, please print your essays.â€Â She had come to the (correct) conclusion that my handwriting was less decipherable than cuneiform texts, and that her only hope of ever grading one of them was for me to print it or for her to go back to graduate school and learn the ancient secrets of my people: Those Who Have Crappy Handwriting.
She let me just print my essays and book reports.
It was a big deal to me and I felt free after that. I hated cursive. I even remember the book that I was doing the report on: Farmer in the Sky, by Robert A. Heinlein. My teacher had no idea what the book was about, and actually had me read the report to her twice so that she was certain that I wasn’t making it all up on the spot. The skill of reading my own handwriting helped me: if I could read my own handwriting, I could read anything.
Printing? That totally worked for me. I actually do it to this day, but I prefer typing.  It’s quicker, but printing simple block letters works.
This is, supposedly, a receipt from a slave sale back in ancient Babylon. Imagine having to write a receipt out in clay, make a copy, and then put it in an oven. The drive through at their McDonalds® must have been slooooooow.
In thinking back to my professor’s writing self-improvement plan, I realize it wasn’t random, it was a process. The first step was, by far, the most important:
Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number One:Â Raise Your Standards
If you’re trying to write a perfect upper case E, a sloppy E or a tilty E just won’t do. And maybe your first E won’t be perfect, but I assure you it will be better than the E you wrote when you weren’t concentrating on it. It isn’t easy. It’s slow. It’s frustrating. But once you’ve changed your standards internally, a crappy E is something you won’t tolerate. You’ll notice it and it will drive you nuts. Every E becomes a challenge in perfection.
When you change your standards, your standards change you. I’m sure someone else has said that before, since there have been roughly 105 billion people that have lived since 50,000 B.C., so if I’m one human in a million, there are 105,000 others just like me who have lived. Thankfully, we don’t all live in the same city
Wilder Rule Of Excellence Number Two:Â There Are No Shortcuts
Okay, I know that’s not original. I recall a joke about a person who wanted enlightenment and inner peace. And they wanted it right now!
Some Random Dude told the Dalai Lama the following joke: “How does a Buddhist like his pizza?â€
The Dalai Lama: “I don’t know.â€
Random Dude: “One with everything.â€
The Dalai Lama: “I don’t get it.â€
The above is supposedly true. In my imagination the Dalai Lama responded with: “Okay, I know a better one. Two lesbian surveyors and a horse walk into a bar . . . .â€
Getting better at anything is hard work. It turns out that those who are the very best at, for instance, playing violin, practice more than people who aren’t as good. Practice is absolutely necessary to creating excellence. But the practice that works best is the practice that happens when you are right at the edge of your abilities. It’s when you’re practicing at that edge that this weird blend of focus and trance takes over. I’m sure that there’s a word for it, but in my mind it’s this state where the sense of self disappears. Perhaps the best word would be transcendent – when I’m there I lose track of time. I don’t think about the practice of writing a perfect E. I am the practice of writing a perfect E. I am excellence. With an E.
The management guru Tom Peters! (he likes to put exclamation! points! behind! everything!) wrote a column that I read in 1999. Tom Peters! was travelling, and decided that Tom Peters! was going to start running. His column stuck with me. Tom Peters! noted, more or less, that he was a very slow runner, but there was absolutely nothing preventing him from practicing like a world-class runner. He could push himself to his limits. Tom Peters! didn’t have to wait to train like a world-class runner. Tom Peters! could do it right this minute.
Like my professor, last month I decided I’d improve my writing. Sure, I can read it and the NSA® can’t, but I decided I’d give it a shot. I focused every day when putting my daily to-do list together to make each letter perfect, each E a combination of right angles, as straight as I could make it. Amazingly I got better. I also noticed this – even when writing a simple to-do list, I could be transcendent.  I could lose myself in a quest to be excellent.
I think, in part, our world today seeks to trivialize the search for excellence. The Greeks nailed this in what they called Arete. Catherynne M. Valente described it like this:
The word I love is Arete.  It has a simple meaning, and a complicated meaning. The simple one is: excellence. But if that were all, we’d just use Excellence and I wouldn’t bring it up until we got to E. Arete means your own excellence. Your very own. A personal excellence that belongs to no one else, one that comes out of all the things that make you special and different . . . . It could be anything in the world . . . . It’s even harder to get that good at it, because nothing, not even being yourself, comes without practice.
Arete also has the additional meaning of living up to your potential, fulfilling your purpose. I think many things about the way society is organized today serve to sever us from Arete. Television and movies make you a character in someone else’s Arete. You replace the feeling of excellence from actual achievement with psychologically experiencing someone else’s Arete. Some video games are like that as well, though certainly many require a great degree of skill.
And, yes, the highest and best use of some people is to play video games.
But much of modern work today is built around processes and defined procedures. The idea isn’t that you do work with Arete, the idea is that you do mediocre work consistently. And you can do that work with people who have an I.Q. of 85 or 90.
Replacing Arete with processes and procedures lowers liability and provides consistency. It’s why people go to McDonaldsâ„¢ – not many people think of it as their favorite food, but it’s inexpensive, consistent in quality, and fast.
Honestly, Arete is why I write this blog. When a good theme hits and I’m writing, I cease being. I am the blog. I am living a transcendent moment. I am Arete.  Modern life takes us from that with process-driven jobs.
Are we willing to trade in our Arete for the perfect furniture? Are we willing to trade in our Arete for a video game?
Can’t you just smell the Arete coming from the cube farm? No, that’s the smell of coffee. And despair.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not. And if you looked at my to-do list? It’s much better this month than last month. Excellence is something we can do every day. We can become transcendent in our tasks, no matter how lowly – if your task in this minute is to clean the floormats of a funky French fraternity’s ferret using your fingers, lose yourself in it. Do the best job you can possibly do.
This Wilder, Wealthy and Wise post is brought to you by the word Arete, the letter E, and the number e. (The number e thing is a math joke.)
The biggest famine in human history was caused by communism, based on a bad idea and a stubborn decision to hold with ideology over reality. It was known as, ironically, The Great Leap Forward. Mao decided in 1957 that within 15 years, China could surpass the United Kingdom (The Guys Who Supply Evil Accents to Movies) in economic production. Mao was egged on to make this pronouncement based on Nikita Khrushchev’s 1957 pronouncement that in fifteen years that the U.S.S.R. would surpass the United States in economic production.
Spoiler alert – none of these things happened, and Bruce Willis was the ghost the whole time.
That’s the entire world death rate. Who says communism isn’t powerful!
The Great Leap Forward killed about 45 million people in China. Mao decided that he wanted to collectivize farming to consolidate power (more on this later). In addition to this, Mao also decided that to increase economic output, he’d have the peasants make steel. In their backyards. This worked about as well with an I.Q. above room temperature could have predicted, especially once the farmers started melting down the tools they farmed with to meet production targets, thus decreasing food amounts even more than replacing experienced farmers with office workers did.
Oops.
Another victory for environmentalism under communism!
Farmers had to melt down steel farming tools to meet Mao’s steel production targets. Even though Mao was informed relatively early on that the policy wasn’t working, he stuck with it because he didn’t want to look weak because his wife told him he never would get that raise unless he stood up to his boss at work. In the end? 45 million people starved to death so Mao could keep his day job.
But this was just stupid, not vengeful. This is known in China today (as related by the Internet) as the “Three Years of Natural Disasters.” Even in death Mao cannot be challenged publically, so you can bet he finally got that raise. The rumor is that even his ghost can kill. But Mao’s ghost kills via bad breath, but George Washington’s ghost kills with laser eyes, so we’ve got that going for us.
Stalingrad? No, Stalinsad™. I may have to really trademark that for a series of teddy bears I sell to leftists so they can hug them after rallies.
Although Josef Stalin only gets the Silver Medal in the “Killed My Own People” sweepstakes, it’s not due to lack of trying – he managed to kill, by many estimates, 20 million of his own people in activities completely unrelated by war. How did we get there?
Soon after Lenin died, Stalin and the Soviet Union benefitted from a strong and robust economy. The local farmers, called Kulaks, were producing record grain yields. And if there’s one thing that people like, it’s grain, especially James at The Bison Prepper (LINK).
That’s a good thing, right? The grain production gave the U.S.S.R. a source of currency, and the Kulaks imported farm machinery to increase farm production even more. The Kulaks were the engine of the economy. As a leader, Stalin must have loved these guys, right?
No. Stalin hated them. They were a threat to his power, and he didn’t like any power structure existing outside of him. So, he went after the Kulaks.
But what was a Kulak? Well, a Kulak was a peasant. But this was a peasant that was slightly less poor than the other peasants. That meant, for reals, that this peasant had a slightly nicer hovel, and had some regular gruel. It wasn’t even as good a job as the assistant manager at McDonalds, but it was still really good in the Soviet Union where a bowl of warm mud was considered a major prize. As such, these Kulaks were often looked up to locally because they were successful. Their position in society was earned through merit.
One of the interesting (to me, at least) measures of communism is how the system selects, on purpose, those of no real merit to be placed in positions of authority. The factory worker given a gun and told to enforce Stalin’s will was being given the best job they had ever had, and power beyond anything a typical factory worker ever had. This policy of promoting the unworthy and stupid into positions of power made the unworthy and stupid really zealous communists. Where else could they go to get that kind of power? They owed everything they were to the state. Where else could a former prostitute or pimp decide on the summary execution of a former doctor or engineer?
So, faced with the army of 25,000 idiots, the Kulaks decided to do what a reasonable person does: they decided to get together to go to Moscow to work out a solution. Stalin was glad to meet them, and worked with them on a solution to all of their problems: those Kulaks that weren’t summarily executed were shipped off to “leisure” camps in Siberia. You might have heard of the camps – they called them Gulags.
Ahh, just like Disneyland®!
But that wasn’t enough. Stalin sent his 25,000 strong army to confiscate every bit of grain from problem areas. Every bit. He encouraged the poorer peasants to raid the houses of the Kulaks and take . . . everything. Envy is powerful, and here was a license to steal.
So they stole. But that wasn’t enough.
Stalin essentially shut the border down of the Ukraine after pulling all food out of the area. In a stunningly familiar Communist plan, armed troops kept the people in. Mao was an inadvertent murderer, but Stalin starved millions of people to death, on purpose.
Why? James Mace explains:
I remain convinced that, for Stalin to have complete centralized power in his hands, he found it necessary to physically destroy the second-largest Soviet republic, meaning the annihilation of the Ukrainian peasantry, Ukrainian intelligentsia, Ukrainian language, and history as understood by the people; to do away with Ukraine and things Ukrainian as such. The calculation was very simple, very primitive: no people, therefore, no separate country, and thus no problem.
Even today, the Western Press has a love affair with Stalin. I won’t go into reasons why, and I’m not sure I care, but it’s obvious that the New York Times has never met a communist it didn’t love. Walter Duranty privately noted on a telegram to London that over 10 million had died of starvation in 1934 during the Holodomor, but wrote publicly rosy pictures about the Soviet Union. But what did Duranty say in public?
Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.
Showing that they are perfectly unbiased, the Pulitzer™ committee has refused to rescind the Pulitzer Prize® given to Duranty for his participation in the cover up of Stalin’s mass murder of millions. I wonder if complicity is in any dictionary they own?
Rumor is that he was murdered by the Soviet NKVD. Because truth is the biggest enemy a dictator has.
It might occur to a discerning reader that, while Democracy Dies in Darkness™, tens of millions can be killed by communism and lying about it, even when proven, gets prestigious awards! And who says the press is biased.
But just like in the Olympics®, communists can be proud. The got the gold and the silver!
“Bob, it won’t kill you. But it will make you very sore.” – Real Men
I promise, I try to have a point on alternate weeks.
The difference between what reality actually is and the way that you think reality should be can make you crazy. It’s not unusual – I think it’s the way we’re wired as humans. We have a big brain, and we can imagine things. I, for instance, can imagine a world in peace where people just leave me alone, taxes don’t exist, and Joseph Stalin and communism are as hated as Britney Spears and the IRS.
Yeah. I can imagine it. But I won’t hold my breath. Some of the stuff the world throws at me makes me pretty mad, if I allow myself to sit and think about it. You’ll notice I used the word “allow” – because that’s what it is – allowing myself to dwell on something that makes me mad. Honestly, I’ll admit it: sometimes I go online just to find a story that makes me angry, probably because it’s a substitute for a pacemaker that doesn’t require electricity. So, yes, anger keeps my heart beating on alternate Wednesdays when I run low on coffee.
The sad part is that most anger is a wasted emotion. Most of life just is. Nothing you can do can change it. On many things trying to change it is even worse than the original problem. We started out with a Depression in 1930, but ended up with a World War. See? Not a real good trade. Oh, wait, we got the space program out of it.
However, I’ll also tell you that you just can’t ignore everything in life and just say mañana, as attractive as that may sound at 5AM on a Monday morning. So, you can’t care about everything, but you also can’t ignore everything. It sounds like a paradox, like how the Kardashians became famous for being famous, but give me a second to explain. I’m a trained professional.
For me, it comes down to having a list of criteria.
Does it matter? In reality, most things really don’t matter one way or another. If they’re out of strawberry topping for your hamburger, it doesn’t matter. You might remember tomorrow, but you certainly won’t remember next week. You won’t remember when you’re 80. Rule of thumb? If you won’t remember it next year, it isn’t important.
Is it a matter of principle? Not everything is. Giordano Bruno (Jordan Brown in English) is a dead Italian who got burned at the stake due to heresy on February 17, 1600, at the age of 52-ish, so you know he pissed somebody with a cool hat off. The funny thing is that if you go to the Wikipedia page on Bruno, it makes him look like Carl Sagan crossed with Barack Obama. He questioned all Christian dogma (which makes him the darling of the Left) while arguing for an infinite Universe and used the Copernican model of our Solar System to predict that there would be planets around other stars. Genius!
But Wikipedia skips gently around the fact that he didn’t like Christ – he liked Hermes, and was a fan of reintroducing Egyptian gods. Today, he’s revered as a Gnostic saint. And, really, if anyone starts the name of their sect with a silent “G”, do we really want give them any gcredence? I thought gnot.
Even though Bruno picked a really stupid thing to die about, at least he had some pretty fierce words to say to people who thought they could tell him what to do:
It is immoral to hold an opinion in order to curry another’s favor; mercenary, servile, and against the dignity of human liberty to yield and submit; supremely stupid to believe as a matter of habit; irrational to decide according to the majority opinion, as if the number of sages exceeded the number of fools.
Jordan Brown, er, Giordano Bruno seems to think pretty highly of his own opinion. But the sentiment is a good one. One I’ll buy, unless it’s about running out of strawberry topping for my hamburger. That’s probably not a hill I’m willing to die on. Unless they were out of ketchup, too.
I bought Giordano’s book, Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, and started to read it. After I realized that it would take me two years of study of ancient Egyptian mythology, ancient Greek mythology, astrology, and 16th Century European politics to decipher it, I decided to read a book where aliens wanted to drop a meteorite on Earth instead. At least I understood that the aliens wanted to come to earth because they liked our women as much as we do.
No, not hot alien girls. But, in a pinch that’ll do.
But Giordano has a point – there is a place where principle wins above all. It may not be this hill we’re willing to die on, but we have to be willing to die on some hill, even if we can’t win. If you’re not willing to die on that stupid hill where it’s a beautiful, pointless, stupid gesture? You’re not fully human, and would probably sell me out for a pack of Juicy Fruit® gum. For your sake, I hope you know where your hill is, or can find it. Even (shudder) if it involves astrology. Jesus, Bruno was an idiot.
The alternate view is that the future belongs to those that show up, so, pick that hill carefully. Giordano picked his. And he really did die on it. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have kids, but he did show up for the future, in the most potent way possible: with his ideas. If I could go back in time I wouldn’t kill Stalin or Lenin. Nope. I’d kill Marx – he was a fat guy who never had a job and was probably smelly because he couldn’t properly clean out his bodily crevices in Victorian England, but his ideas . . . his ideas have killed millions. But more about those tools on Monday.
By the way, finding a stupid name like Jordan Brown (sorry, dude) could sound so much like someone who commanded a tank division, I looked up John Wilder in Italian, and it would be Giovanni Feroce. Which is really badass. But it’s not Latin, which would probably sound something like Giovannius Maximus Feroci. Yeah. Like commander of a tank, designed by Ferrari® to fight grizzly bears. I can deal with that. Except Italians can’t seem to keep the oil on the inside of the engine.
The Boy put this together. He does indicate that he works for Ramen®. His favorite is beef, but he will do chicken. Shrimp? You’re not making any friends there. Stick with land animals.
Here are the zones:
Zone 1: This is the most important zone: you can change it. It matters. It’s a matter of principle. This, with no humor added, is the definition of the hill you can die on.
Yes, it’s a Microsoft® Office™ meme. No, I’m not proud about it.
Zone 2: You can change it. The best definition of this is “It’s the principle of the thing.” It’s not important. This is the Zone inhabited by Karens.
And my real readers would never complain.
Zone 3: It matters. It’s a matter of principle. But you can’t change it. I think this is what Twitter® accounts are for? Also? Maybe sometimes this is a good hill to die on, too.
Zone 5: It matters, you can change it, but it’s not a matter of principle. So, you know, get up and mow your lawn. Or at least stay off mine.
Zone 6: It matters, you can’t change it. Ignore it. Triggered people live here, and I know you don’t want to live like Trigglypuff.
I remember when the word “triggered” had nothing to do with people unable to contain emotions just because someone said something naughty. But I also remember when dudes didn’t win girl’s high school track meets.
Zone 7: You can change it. It’s not principle. It doesn’t matter. This sounds a lot like FaceBook®. If you use it, keep in mind you’re keeping Zuckerberg in sippy cups while he sits on his high chair.
Thankfully Congress got him a sippy cup.
Inadvertently, I seem to have come up with actual advice that might help you if you’re sane enough to follow it. Who knew? Nah, who am I kidding? Go nuts. Literally. It seems to work for AntiFa®.
“Joe and Rita had three children, the three smartest kids in the world. Vice President Frito took 8 wives and had a total of 32 kids. 32 of the dumbest kids ever to walk the Earth. So maybe Joe didn’t save mankind, but he got the ball rolling, and that’s pretty good for an average guy.” – Idiocracy
It’s better than the “Girls Gone Wilder” picture featuring Kardashians. They don’t shave nearly often enough.
Again, a single meme today . . . more on Wednesday!
I heartily recommend the book, and get no compensation if you buy it.
As before, any errors in the interview below are solely mine.
JW: Is there an optimum I.Q. level?
ED: Well that’s an interesting question. We touch on that in the book. The problem is that high I.Q. isn’t inherently good. What’s good from an evolutionary perspective is to survive. If you are putting energy into having a large brain and having a large I.Q. that’s energy you’re not putting into being aggressive and having big muscles. In certain ecologies that’s better for you to do that, to have the big muscles and the aggressiveness. You’re actually less likely to survive – intelligence doesn’t help you. You’ll die. Intelligence is not selected for. Intelligent genes will pop up by random mutation and they just won’t get selected for. What’s happening now clearly is that there’s a negative correlation of about 0.1 among women between I.Q. and how many children you have and so what that inherently means is that there must be an optimum I.Q., because above the optimum you’re not having children. There’s something to do with the environment-gene interaction. That means you don’t breed.
JW: So essentially you’re less fit for the environment . . .
ED: They’re less fit for this zoo that we live in. Even if we were living in a zoo there’s some evidence that very high I.Q. is a bad thing. It correlates with things that are inherently bad in some ways like autism, being easily overstimulated, allergies, and not being very instinctive and therefore not really wanting to breed. And if you’re an outlier in I.Q. you have difficulty talking to most people and dealing with them because you find them so stupid and facile.
JW: One of the things I’ve noted from the data is that “higher I.Q.” [that’s in quotes] professions you end up seeing occupations like judge and engineer. There seems to be a cap of around 130 I.Q. or a little bit above 130 I.Q. You didn’t see so many of that greater than 130 fraction showing up as judges, attorneys, or engineers. In fact they ended up working in much less “high I.Q.” jobs . . .
ED: As the I.Q. gets higher, the positive manifold between the different components of the I.Q. battery becomes weaker and as a consequence of that at the very high level they have very, very high g, very high intelligence, you can be absolutely crap at things which only weakly correlate with intelligence like social skill. And this then will of course preclude you from climbing up the social hierarchy. This is, I suspect, why the correlation between income and I.Q. is only about 0.3, 0.4. With education it’s about 0.5.
JW: Looking at the fate of civilization is as we head into winter, what are your thoughts on timescale? Is there a minimum societal I.Q. beyond which the center cannot hold?
ED: That’s hard to say because it’s never happened before in a way that we can measure it. If you look in the book, we’ve got those graphs where we compare the collapse of our society, and the difference with us is that we’ve got so much further because of industrialization and we’ve got past the contraception. What we know is that in terms of our linguistic I.Q., we’re back at the level that we were in about 1600. That’s where we come back to from a peak [vocabulary] in 1850. Now we’re back to 1600. The factors that make that an overly simplistic comparison is that first, the standard of living was much worse in 1600. That’s going to make people more violent and more impulsive. Secondly, we’ve gotten high in extraversion – we’ve been selecting for extroversion for a long time, which makes people adventurous and risk taking. So, we’re not like 1600 in that way, but that was when we were last at this level of vocabulary. There has to be some clever person you could get to do mathematical modeling of how this works, we could calculate what the boost is to our behavior patterns by the level of, say, low child mortality. We can probably calculate that. Then perhaps we could make an estimate, ideally better than guesswork, but I’m sure you could find somebody, maybe my colleague Emil Kierkegaard. I imagine he might be able do something like that. Once I.Q. starts to decline at the genetic level, which is definitely happening, then this sets off an environmental decline as well. It’s a cascade effect, a snowball effect, because once I.Q. is declining then you can’t teach kids as well, the teachers are of low quality, the conditions are of low quality. Then you have this environmental effect so you will push things down quite quickly.
JW: When you talk about the Flynn Effect being having the potential to have arisen from environmental factors that means it could go away within a generation.
ED: Well yes, if you think about what the Flynn Effect is underpinned by, this capital that we’ve built up is almost like a catapult. I was in an interview once, and the interviewer used this metaphor: it’s like a catapult that’s given us momentum and once we run out of that that momentum means that we can just do these little micro interventions but there’ll come a point where that momentum will run out. And when that runs out then it will undo everything quite quickly because we simply won’t be able to do things that we used to be able to do in the past. We can’t do Concord anymore or go to the Moon, but there’ll be other things we won’t be able to do, and so it’ll collapse quite fast. That’s why I suspect it’ll collapse into war quite fast.
JW: Nothing can stop it because even if you have some sort of smart fraction left the vast majority of people have dropped so much.
ED: Exactly. So it reminds me that this concept they talk about in global warming research of a global dimming. They say that it’s pushing the temperature down. It’s causing this effect which is which is actually keeping it less warm than it would be and that once that goes then the temperature will spike up very, very, quickly. That’s the theory anyway. There’s this idea that there’s this effect: all these micro innovations are creating this better environment where we can control more things which is masking the evidence that should be there of us getting stupider and stupider. When that goes then the sudden stupidity will hit. If we were suddenly put in Darwinian conditions overnight, our inability to cope would be quite extraordinary in comparison to that of previous generations, even my grandparents’ generation, because we’re so totally protected from having to think.
JW: When you look at altruism as a whole do you think that it might be the big enemy of intelligence?
ED: It depends. That’s quite a complex question because if we think about group selection then it was as a consequence of us having relatively high altruism and cooperativeness that we were able to develop farming. And farming selected for intelligence, because it pushed out those that were too stupid to be able to farm, that had such short time horizons they couldn’t farm. In a direct sense altruism was the friend of intelligence. But then on another level you would argue well it’s altruism that’s stopping people from introducing eugenic policies, stopping people from getting rid of the welfare state which definitely promotes low I.Q. as my colleague Adam Perkins showed that there’s no question about that – it does cause people who are lower I.Q. to have more children, and stopping people from stopping low I.Q. immigration. You could argue, perhaps, under Darwinian conditions maybe altruism is the friend of intelligence to some extent, because under Darwinian conditions we’re under group selection and the group that is internally altruistic although externally hostile will survive. But once you get to non-Darwinian conditions then what tends to happen is that the levels of stress are so low that religiousness, which people become more religious when they’re stressed, the religiousness collapses and religiousness tends to promote ethnocentric attitudes that tends to promote focused altruism. Your altruism is only focused on your own group and not to outsiders because they are the devil. Once that collapses, then you have a generalized altruism and that would seem to be perhaps in an indirect sense the enemy of intelligence. Actually, altruism does correlate with intelligence weakly. People who are intelligent and who are altruistic because they are better able to reason through, not where you instinctively know how someone will feel that – that’s empathy, but they can reason through how someone else might think and they can solve social situations better. Thus there’s a weak relationship between the between altruistic behavior and intelligence.
JW: So for intelligence, perhaps an optimal level of altruism might resemble the Spartans then? [chuckles] Entirely an in-group focus extraordinarily trusting of in-group, but even your own offspring are outgroup if they don’t meet your specifications.
ED: Yes possibly. But the problem was with the Spartans was that it was taken to such an extreme and that they were almost like Nazi Germany. I mean they were they were so unfree that perhaps there wasn’t sufficient space for people to sit down and be creative. Because part of being a genius and coming up with an original idea is that you have a moderately antisocial personality combined with very high I.Q. in an environment where it’s awfully conformist like that and those people perhaps didn’t cope well. So that there’s an optimum there as well. I’ve got a book that’s just come out called Churchill’s Headmaster: The Sadist Who Nearly Saved the British Empire and it does what it says on the tin. It’s about Churchill’s prep school headmaster. Anyone that knows anything about Churchill knows that his prep school headmaster was this evil sadist and I show that he’s not. He’s actually a jolly nice chap and it’s Churchill that’s the evil sadist. If Churchill had had more time with this headmaster then maybe he would have been molded into more of a gentleman. Now that system of public schools like Eton was deliberately and consciously modelled on Sparta. Everybody knew that Sparta was the way forward. Plato said that the upper class should never know their parents. It wasn’t as bad as that. But for nine months of the year that you wouldn’t see your parents. There was a degree to which the Victorians got the balance right because look at the growth of the British Empire. It got the balance right. It made basically militarized the upper class but it was sufficiently open to nonconformists that geniuses could develop. I wonder if Sparta was just too far, too conformist.
JW: Versus some of the ideas that came out of Athens.
ED: Perhaps those ideas were ideas that came along once Greece was in decline. That’s what happens. The best idea, the original idea, all that critical thinking . . . that comes along in the autumn [of a civilization-JW]. Same with Victorian England. Science and whatever. It’s in the autumn of civilization that these things tend to flourish.
JW: You mentioned that as well with Islam and Rome, that the best ideas came in their autumn.
ED: That’s when you’re engaged in critical thinking, but by the end of autumn you’re critiquing everything and you take it too far and you destroy everything, including the things that hold society together like militarism and religion and . . . just everything. Nothing is sacred. When that happens then there will be people for whom things still are sacred. We see this now with the Muslims who are more ethnocentric, more motivated. So the desert tribesmen creates the city and it becomes decadent and the new desert tribesmen invades. This is the problem we have. I look at this in my new books Race Differences in Ethnocentrism and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How the Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers.
The only problem is I’m afraid I can’t think of a solution, neither myself nor my colleague Michael Woodley of Menie can think of an adequate solution to the problem of declining intelligence and so we are kind of resigned to this idea that it’s that there is an inevitable cycle. It’s in the nature of things. I was thinking that it could be something to do with human survival itself. If we get too intelligent then we get too low in kind of basic instincts and violence and these kinds of things.
Therefore we can’t survive. It’s like humanity somehow regulates itself, with the invention of contraception for example, such that intelligence never gets too high that humanity dies out. You probably get this with other animals as well. All of them are probably going to go in cycles. There are probably periods of time where frogs were more intelligent than frogs are now. There was probably a period of time when frogs were less intelligent. Not within a large range, for frogs. I think it’s probably the same with humans. Humans will go through these periods of high and low and ultimately the species survives. That’s evolutionary perspective. That’s the important thing.
“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.
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.
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:
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
