Purpose – Page 19 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?

“There are 7 deadly sins, Captain.” – Se7en

So, here are the movie versions of sin. Except Pride. Is Pride really blonde?

Some time ago I read a book that my friend wrote (there is a link below where you can get it from Amazon – I make no money from that) about sin. I enjoyed the book, as well as one can enjoy a book that makes you feel absolutely horrible about how sinful and wretched you are. And I mean that in the best way – how often do you have the benefit of self-reflection on your faults? Thankfully, the author doesn’t leave you hanging, and gives you a path forward on the whole salvation from sin thing (note: he’s a priest, so the word “Jesus” just might be a spoiler). I heartily recommend the book.

Is sin at the problem with current society? Maybe. But first let’s discuss the sins.

As I recall (it’s been a while since I read it) one construct that Father Joseph used for discussing sin was the Seven Deadly Sins. He used the mnemonic “PALE GAS” to go through them. I’ll do the same.

Pride – Pride is the big one, perhaps the source of all the other sins. An example: If you’re religious, you’d accept that your intellect was given to you by God. If you’re not religious, you’d accept that your intellect was a happy genetic accident. In either case, no matter how smart you are, you’ve done nothing to be that smart, so taking pride in your intellect is, well, bad. That’s why pride is the primo sin – it takes all the glory for who and what you are and wraps it up into your own ego. It puts you and your ego at the center of the universe, when in reality no one thinks about you as much as you think they do. Unless you’re Donald Trump. Then people (from both sides) totally obsess over you.

Anger – This is also known as Wrath, but PWLE GAS doesn’t sound so good, unless you’re from some Eastern European country that uses colored wrapping paper for money and has a vowel shortage. Anger is feeling and wishing for unjust or excessive punishment – execution for parking offenses, that sort of thing, or punishing the innocent, just because they are weaker than you. Again, Wrath separates you from both God and reality by making the righting of wrongs (real or not) not about justice, but about you. You can see how Pride echoes here . . . .

Lust – Lust isn’t love, it’s a deep and intense passionate desire that throws morality, propriety, and sometimes legality to the winds. As sins go, this one at least (in some forms) is mutual, so it’s not as strong as pure Pride. In some forms, it’s considered the least serious of all mortal sins, but, you know, it’s still a mortal sin. Outside of religion, allowing Lust to drive your life tends to lead to a lot of poor decisions – just ask anyone in Hollywood®.

Envy – Like any of the sins, Envy has various gradations. First you are jealous that your neighbor has a complete set of PEZ® dispensers of every United States Secretary of Agriculture ever. Then you find out he has all of the United States Secretary of Commerce PEZ™ dispensers. Then you go all Cain on his Abel. Yup. Envy brings you farther from God, but it also fills you with hate.

Gluttony – Generally, Gluttony is considered more of a sin when your consumption (or overconsumption) of resources will starve someone else – but it really boils down to an unbridled passion for selfishness. Eating and drinking as the purpose of life, rather than to support it. It’s fairly obvious how this is both bad for you, and drives you farther from God.

Avarice – This sin is also known as greed, but if we called it that, then the mnemonic would be PWLE GGS. And what does that even mean? Where lust is for a person, and gluttony is for food, avarice is for stuff. That just makes it worse. Pop Wilder described avarice best when he told me, “A farmer doesn’t want all the land in the world, son, he just wants that which adjoins his.” This pulls you away from God though making you focus on the things only of this world. This focus turns men into machines – focused only on owning (not creating) wealth. See reason number 53 that I don’t want to live in New York City . . . .

Yeah, it sucks to be a sloth.

Sloth – Sloth isn’t just about being lazy – Sloth is giving up. It’s abdication of responsibility for whatever reason, often as a result of the other sins, or through giving up due to depression or despondency (which used to be one of the eight deadly sins, but got voted off in the semi-finals). It’s obvious on how this sin hurts you whether you’re a believer or not.

I heartily recommend Father Joseph’s book, whether or not you are a Christian or an agnostic or an atheist. I think the truths that it speaks to are so fundamental in our society that this could be one of the better books on self-improvement available today. Seriously. I read this book, thinking I was doing okay. (Pride will do that to you.) Every page that I read I kinda cringed when it described me, something I felt, or something I was doing as tied into one of these sins. I promise you – there’s not a week that goes by that you (and I!) aren’t attracted to and tempted to commit each of these sins weekly.

Oh, and my copy is signed! (See, I just used my Pride to Envy all over you.)

And these sins are important whether or not you are religious because these sins and our universal-ish understanding of them in the Western world form the basis of Western culture. Are there analogues in Chinese Confucianism, Shinto, or the tribal religions of Africa? Or Islam?

I have no idea. And it would require like a zillion Google® searches to sort that out. But it’s irrelevant.

I do know that the culture of the West was founded on this shared concept of sin.

And we agree that these things are bad, right?

Have we managed to rebrand many of these sins as virtues?

“Check out my InstaFace® selfie!”
“He had it coming to him.”
“If it feels go, do it!”
“You deserve what the 1% have.”
“Have another piece of cake – YOLO!”
“We’re not Boy Scouts®, we’re here to make money.”
“Let somebody else do it. You’ve done enough.”

One of the virtues of the Seven Deadly Sins is that the common belief in them is the basis for a shared morality in a stable civilization. One can infer that that shared belief (beyond the salubrious Christian effects on your immortal soul, if you’re into that sort of thing) is beneficial because it evolved with Western civilization.

Can the West live without the concept of sin?

I’m not sure that it can. Let’s just take one of them: Envy.

The biggest evil of the twentieth century was communism. I’m not saying that because it’s an opinion – it’s an objective fact. More people died because of communism than any other ideological cause during that century – over 140,000,000.

Communism was built on Envy; the concept that “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” And Ivan needs Pyotr’s farm. And Ivan’s wife needs Pyotr’s wife’s new butter churn. And so on.

Nearly a billion people died from gluttony – it causes heart disease along with a host of other diseases.

Anger led to war and murder. 240,000,000.

So, deadly wasn’t a euphemism – outside of spiritual conditions, these sins actually lead to real and temporal misery and death.

So there appears to be some limited anecdotal evidence that virtue is better than sin.

Which brings me back to society. If society doesn’t agree on the same cultural precepts which have driven the creation of knowledge and wealth for several thousand years . . . nah, never mind. I’m sure it will be fine.

Increasing Returns or: Problems are our Friend

“Hey, I have a little expertise in government pensions. I could increase your annual return if you just let me invest a small portion . . . .” – Bones

My current computer techs. Yeah, I’m not kidding.

In my first job after getting my master’s degree I ended up in a department with 10 other folks, all of us technically minded. During college, I had built my own computer and had also done a fair amount of programming. I even knew DOS (no, I’m not yelling “TWO” in Spanish – DOS stands for Disk Operating System, and it was what originally put MicroSoft® into a profit making position). I knew DOS due to some patient friends, and I bought my original PC from a certain frequent commenter (GS) to this site for about $100. When I started my new job, I knew more about computers than most of the people in the group.

And when anyone in the group had problems, they’d ask Willie (the other guy who knew computers pretty well) or they’d ask me to fix it for them. This actually predates the company having an IT department or even a coherent IT policy. If employees with computers made more money for the company than employees without computers? Buy the employees computers. If the employees are too stupid to use/fix their own computers? We’ll get new employees.

So when I was asked a question, I generally (80% of the time) knew the answer quickly. About 20% of the time, I had no idea, but knew enough on what sorts of things to try that might get to a solution for my coworkers friends. (This job was generally sitcom-level fun. We were all recent college grads and we were constantly at each other’s houses for parties, dinners, and what-not.)

Soon, I’d seen most problems you could have with PC software – since I was solving my own problems plus the problems of 10 other people (Willie and I would collaborate on the toughest problems). The company finally got an IT department, but the first commandment was: Don’t Let John or Willie Know Where We Keep The Servers. I have no idea why they did that, since we didn’t know much about servers at all. Maybe they thought we’d take our trial and error methods to the entire company and erase the payroll files while we were installing new screensavers? Maybe they were wise in not letting us know where the servers were?

Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that neither Willie nor I knew all that much about computers when we started, but we knew just a little bit more than our friends. A little bit of knowledge combined with solving the problems of 10 people builds the foundation for a LOT of knowledge.

I know a little bit (tiny bit) about making computer chips. Intel®, however, knows a LOT. Intel© has been making computer processor chips for nearly fifty years. So they have fifty years’ worth of experience, right?

No. Intel™ has about 100,000 employees. Let’s pretend that 10% of the staff solves problems in production – learning how to make chips quicker, more reliable, minty smelling, etc. at any given time. That’s 10,000 people. For fifty years.

Doing the math, Intel® has invested up to 500,000 man-years into making awesome chips. To catch them? You’d have to duplicate that level of investment. Numerous examples exist where entire geographic areas become excellent at doing some sort of manufacturing – Japan led the consumer electronics boom. China makes I-Phones® faster than any other country could. Detroit. Well, it used to make cars. And as much as I kid, Detroit still has amazing technical skills when it comes to cars. Silicon Valley? Yeah. They’re the current bright spot for information innovation. Southwestern Art? Go to Santa Fe. Really good at lying? Try Washington D.C.

This isn’t a new phenomenon. If you look into the trash piles of ancient Britain, you find that during the Roman period, the dishes used by the common man were – pretty nice. (And archeologists LOVE dishes. They break, and you have to get new ones, so they tell you a lot about what’s going on with a culture.) Dishes were shipped to Britain from Southern Gaul (France) where they specialized in making plates. Once Britain was cut off from the collapsing Roman Empire? The dishes got crappy – the British hadn’t had to make their own dishes in hundreds of years.

When Rome collapsed, dishes got bad, not only in Britain, but everywhere. When the trade routes and common currency collapsed, the plate makers had to do something else to survive. The trade routes, currency, had created a center of excellence that disappeared pretty quickly once the Empire was gone.

Solving problems to get better works for Nations. It works for Regions. It works for Companies. And it works for Individuals.

If you want to be awesome, solve hard problems. Sometimes the biggest problems are the biggest blessings . . . except that DOS is about as familiar as hieroglyphics nowadays, so solving that problem is probably not important.

Did I mention that you should learn to solve important problems? Yeah. My bad. Important problems. Solve those . . . .

Russian Wrestlers, Pylometrics, and You’re Probably Not Trying All That Hard

“When the game is on the line, a winner wants the ball in his hands.” – The Replacements

A miniature version of The Boy prepares for a match . . . he now weighs 200 pounds.

The other day I was on Amazon. Yes, I know. The fact that I cannot walk into my living room because of all the little boxes shows I might spend too much time there. Anyway, I was looking for hair regrowth tonic that actually works and carbohydrate free sugar cookies options for fitness equipment for Pugsley and The Boy. One of the things that I saw was . . . a box. You can buy it here (LINK).

I don’t get any money if you buy a box. But you do get a box. One box.

The idea of the box is that you . . . jump on it. That’s it.

What led me to the box I was watching a video of Александр Александрович Карелин. Oh, sorry, you don’t speak Russian – that’s Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Karelin spelled out in the strange chickenscratch that Russians use as a secret code that Putin and Trump devised so we can’t decipher their messages. Karelin was an internationally ranked wrestler for a while. Like for five Olympics. In fact, his career record is 887 wins and two losses. His nickname is “The Experiment.” Because he could do 42 pullups. And he weighed 285 pounds. His signature move? Lifting 285 pound people off the mat and tossing them up into the air so they landed on their shoulders.

The Experiment.

Yeah.

A quote from Aleksandr: “They call me The Experiment because they cannot conceive that every day I train harder than they have ever trained in their lives.” He might be just a bit intense.

Aleksandr was being interviewed in the YouTube® video I saw, and they showed the obligatory clip of him working out. One of the exercises he was doing was repeatedly jumping on a box that was 24” or 30” high. I was impressed. 285 pound guy jumping that high? Wow.

Here’s a picture of Aleksandr. Yeah, that’s a 285 pound human he’s going to toss into the air like a ragdoll. Not sure why they need tanks if the Russians have more guys like this around. Oh, and he’s buddies with Putin and has both a doctorate and a law degree. Don’t you feel like an underachiever now?

It turns out that “jumping on boxes” is known by the $250 per hour consultant word, “pylometrics.” From the Latin root Pylo for “pile of” and the ancient Greek word “metron” which means “communist measurement system.” Pylometrics came to world attention when the Soviet track and field teams of the 1970’s were turning in absolutely amazing performances. One trainer thought, “hey, it must be all of the jumping on boxes stuff that they’re doing,” and completely disregarding the simpler theory of, “win Olympic medals or we’ll shoot your family.”

Regardless, as noted above, he renamed it pylometrics so he could charge $250 per hour to talk about it.

Well, if one of the best wrestlers ever to live thought that pylometrics should be a part of his routine, well, why not? (Previous post: Pugsley decided he wanted to be an NCAA champion in wrestling. (LINK)) If you’re going to try to be the best, you emulate everything you can about the very best people you can find. Everything. Pugsley even has a poster of Putin up on his wall now.

So, I was on Amazon, totally not looking for hair tonic when I found the boxes shown above. Did I say boxes? Yeah. I saw the picture and expected three. Turns out that a cube exists in three dimensions, so they delivered just one box with three heights – 16 inches, 20 inches, and 24 inches. It turns out if you rotate the box . . . well, you get the picture now.

The Boy put it together when it arrived, but then he had to leave, so that left Pugsley and I in the wrestling room with the cube. To be frank, I was concerned that Pugsley wouldn’t be able to jump up on the 16” side and we’d have to get something smaller. I was hoping that it wouldn’t hurt his confidence to have to jump on the “short box.”

He set it with the 16” side facing up. He jumped, and stuck the landing on top of the box like an Olympic® gymnast.

John Wilder: “That was awesome. Okay, try 20 inches!”

He tried once, twice, and was up on top on the third side.

John Wilder: “That was amazing!! Try 24 inches!

Pugsley: “No, I can’t do that.”

John Wilder: “Try.”

He jumped up. Not quite.

Again. A miss.

Third time? He stuck to the top of the box like there were magnets in his feet.

Also this month, friend was doing Crossfit®.

Things you never need to guess about a person: if they are vegan, if they drive a Prius®, or if they are in Crossfit©. Now if you find an actual human that does all three of these things, you might have found a smug singularity – beware or you might get sucked into the smug . . . . (my friend isn’t smug, just often sore after working out).

Anyhow . . . when working up to a max in the deadlift (the king of all lifts) my friend tried to stop at 100 pounds. She thought that was enough. Too hard.

Her coach encouraged her – and she maxed out at 180 pounds.

Most days we have no idea of the things that we are capable of, if only we try. The thing that generally limits your life is . . . you. If you want to be the best, you have to start by working like the best. And believing in yourself.

You might not get there, but you’ll know that you didn’t hold back. You’ve put the game in your hands.

I know where you could go to buy a box . . .

Mental Illness, Dunbar’s Number, and the Divine Right of Kings

“I thought I alone considered your boyfriend a narcissistic moron, but the whole galaxy does.” – Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy

The Tribe begins its annual war, an ancient rite known as “dodge ball.”

What if we’ve been looking at mental health . . . all wrong? This may be the most interesting thing you read all month, maybe all year. But that’s just what a narcissist would say . . .

I was thinking the other day (a dangerous thing to do, I know, thinking is something to be left to those that work at universities and in congress) and had an idea. Maybe (some) mental illness has a purpose. I’ll explain, but first I have to explain Dunbar’s Number, which, of course, is named after Kim Kardashian. I’m kidding. Dunbar’s Number is named after Caitlyn Jenner.

Robin Dunbar, British Psychologist, looked over the size of the human neocortex (not Neo-Cortez, who would take over the Neo-Aztec) and after playing with a particularly plump and pleasant neocortex, decided that brains just might have something to do with how humans relate to each other. The neocortex is actually the newest (in a biological sense) portion of the brain, and allows humans to do complex things, like talking, snorkeling, and making microwave ramen.

Dunbar looked at primate group brain sizes, and compared to the size of the neocortex to the size of the primate “group” or tribe. After running the math, he predicted that humans should have a group size of around 150 – it’s related to the size of working memory that you have about other people. The commonly accepted maximum stable group size (average) is 100-250, which explains why I need to have my children program the streaming box hooked up to my television – my working memory is full of details like the shoe preferences of the administrative assistant at work from six jobs ago.

Dunbar further theorized that larger groups could only stick together under strong survival pressures – you’d have to be pressed to work together by a fate as tough as death. Why? Because people are tough to deal with. And it takes time to deal with people, rather than strangle them.

One potential reason that the “Dunbar” number for people could be higher than predicted is language. Whereas other primates have to use non-verbal cues like body-slamming them, people, after the advent of language, can talk to each other so they can explain why they are body-slamming you. For that reason, especially when dealing with modern (the last 12,000 years or so) humans, I favor a Dunbar number in the 250 range.

There is some validity to the number. Anecdotally, I’ve been involved with a company that had two divisions in the same area. One had 120 or so employees. The other? It had far greater than 500 employees. I observed that the smaller division operated as a single unit. Every employee knew every other employee – and they knew about their families, their hobbies, and their history. Did that consume time? Sure. You couldn’t just go over to talk with one of them – the entire social greeting took at least 10 minutes. You had to catch up. And that’s the way that close relationships work – you can’t just say “hi” and walk on, you have to catch up with each other. That explains why when I come home, The Mrs. wants to talk and stuff. We’re engaging in a practice that’s at least thousands of years old.

The larger division had broken up into various factions based on job functions. These factions looked like little tribes – each had a leader, an agenda, and they fought against each other regularly, often over nothing. And each of these fights ended up hurting the company. Gore-Tex® found the same thing – they built buildings for 150 people. When the building filled up? They built a new one. They tried to keep the trust, the positive aspects of the tribes predicted by Dunbar from spilling over into intertribal warfare that happens at larger group sizes.

But ancient tribes didn’t have kid’s soccer, and FaceBorg®, and the myriad of connections that occur outside of work. So, the Gore-Tex™ number is smaller than the “actual” tribe size. Again, 250 seems about right.

So what does this have to do with mental illness?

Well, for a tribe to survive over time, while most members would be able to act as general “tribal” members most of the time (i.e., hunting, gathering) there would also be the need for specialist skills and attributes. Situations the tribe might encounter (and overall group cohesiveness) require different talents.

Let’s take schizophrenia. It’s prevalent in about 0.4% of the population. It often manifests with being able to hear things that aren’t there, see things that don’t exist, and believe in a reality that others can’t see.

Sounds like a Shaman to me. Every good tribe needs one, right? Well, 0.4% is 1 person out of 250. I got goosebumps when I did that calculation – the number seemed like a nice fit for the theory right off the bat.

Okay, what about another common mental condition? Anxiety. Anxiety is found in about 10.6% of the population. So, in our tribe of about 250 we’d have about 26 planners. 26 people worrying on a daily basis about how the whole tribe would die. These people are a pain in the butt, but this ability to dream up a constant set of disasters that the tribe could anticipate and avoid has huge survival value. In today’s world, not so much. Back 8,000 years ago? This was an amazingly important skill.

About 6 of our 250 tribe would be obsessive-compulsive. Mainly older folks. I can see the meticulousness compulsion of the older, wiser tribal member being infectious – and leading to greater spread of learning throughout the tribe. There are certain things you have to do right, you have to double check (think food poisoning) or else the tribe will die. Having these super process-driven people might have been quite a help.

About 6 would of the tribe would be paranoid. Again, like planning, it serves a purpose – but in this case the paranoia is about what other groups are doing and thinking. Very helpful to have someone looking for the hints that the tribe will be attacked from outside. Or, from inside. Are you threatening me?

Narcissism? About 1%. Only so much room for leaders. This would have about 2 of them in the tribe.

Psychopath/Sociopath? About 1.2%. So, 3 bold, direct, mean leaders of raiding parties/war parties. It takes a village to kill another village.

Pictured: Psychopath. I like the cut of his jib!

Outside of oral history, our hypothetical tribe had only one way to pass on information about required roles and how to do them – genetics. Genetics matter – many of these conditions are at least partially inherited, making it more likely that the leader was . . . the son of the leader. The shaman was . . . the son or daughter of the last shaman.

This genetic tendency to replace the leader with the leader is (likely) the source of the concept of hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility. And, genetically, those people were likely the best leaders around at that time, and they kept breeding . . . so, there was (at least for a while) some good reason to think that the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs might be pretty good choices for kings. They were bred to be kings. Now: perhaps a bit too much cousin-lovin’ (LINK)?

So, yeah, all of the roles required for a self-sufficient band are built within our genetic profiles – but some of them aren’t valued so much in our current society – we don’t need a half-dozen war-band leaders in every high school. And, as far as I know, this is an idea I developed (more or less) independently. Which is also something a narcissist would say . . . hmmm.

How much time do you have left? Not as much as you think you do . . .

“Ok, let me see if I’ve got this straight. In order to be grounded, I’ve got to be crazy. And I must be crazy to keep flying. But if I ask to be grounded, that means I’m not crazy anymore, and I have to keep flying.” – Catch 22

Now 205 pounds and doing 180 push-ups and sit-ups a day . . . .

When I was 10, summer lasted a year. I would spend the time hiking in the mountains, making models (plastic spaceships, not the Donald Trump kind), reading comic books (sometimes the same ones, again and again) and looking forward to the next day. Each day was a bit of wonder, and they lasted so very long. It seemed like the longest days were those when we were wishing that the calendar would go forward – for a vacation – for a trip – for a birthday. Our life went slowest when we were wishing it away.

When I was 30, summers began to blend together into a blur. Time for the mortgage payment . . . again? Didn’t I just pay that? I’ll change the filter in the air conditioner. Oh, that’s been a year? No, two years??? How did that happen?

When I was 5, the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas was roughly . . . forever. Now? A blink and then it’s done. And after 30? Might as well spin the wheel – days blur into weeks into months into years. A decade between visits with a close friend? Hmmm.

A clock ticks off a minute after a minute. It ticks off an hour in an hour. That linear time is 1+1=2. It’s how we think of the world, but it’s not at all how we experience it. No. Our time sense is far different.

When we are born, after living that first day – it’s all we have ever known. It’s an eternity. It’s literally all the time we’ve ever known. To look forward after that day would be to look across a gulf of time that, to us, is nearly an infinite amount of time away.

A minute isn’t a minute. When you’re ten years old, half of your life is five years. When you’re forty, five years the amount of time you’ve been thinking about changing your shower curtain. But half of your life is twenty years, and that’s something substantial to you. Kind of like the five years to the ten year old . . . .

All of us experience time a day at a time, but the day is different to each of us, has different significance, different meaning. Your time sense is changed by the amount of time you’ve spent on Earth. The most significant time is doubling . . . rather than a year, it’s all about how many times you’ve doubled your experience. Let’s take an example:

Most people don’t start building memories until they’re two and a half or so. Double it? Five. Again? 10. 20. 40. 80.

Viewed from that vantage point, we’ve only got about five doublings in our life. Rather than 80 years (which seems daunting) think about it that the time between five and 10 will roughly correspond to the perceived duration between ages 40 and 80.

And I think it’s not just time perception – it’s learning. It’s achievement. You probably learn as much between two and a half and five as you do between 10 and 20. Or 40 and 80.

Does time seem like it’s going faster? For you it is. This is the same model that radioactive decay follows – a half-life. The half-life of a radioactive atom is based upon the stability of its nucleus. Your half-life is based on how many days you have lived. And each day makes the next day shorter . . . .

Fortunately, there’s a solution. When reading Joseph Heller’s book, Catch: 22, one of the characters, Dunbar, shot skeet because he hated shooting skeet. Whenever possible he did things he hated or things that made him uncomfortable so that he could have a life that appeared to be longer. I mean, nothing seems longer than doing something you hate, so why not just fill your life with doing things you hate?

Oh, we don’t fill our lives with doing things we hate because it’s stupid. Whew. Forgot.

I’ll throw out there, that when viewed in these doublings, you have much less useful time on Earth than you think. If you have five doublings (and nobody has ever made it to six) than you’ve only got so much time to do what you want to do.

Have a book to write? If you haven’t started, will you ever?

Have an apology to make? If you wait another decade, will that make it easier?

Whatever you do, don’t wish your life away – you’ve only got so many days. Make the most of each one of them.

Tiny Fight Club, Taleb’s Skin in the Game, and Expensive Female Lawyer Reproduction

“A guy who came to Fight Club for the first time, he was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood.” – Fight Club

The Boy and Pugsley square off in a Beta version of Fight Club. Bigfoot is in the background as an observer.

I have a fight club in my basement.

Not an officially sanctioned, Tyler Durden® approved Fight Club. Just a small fight club, mainly involving me, The Boy, Pugsley, and (sometimes) The Mrs.

What is this tiny fight club? Well, it’s wrestling.

Wrestling season ended for The Boy a little sooner than he’d planned – he’s in high school and would rather have gone on from districts. We talked about it, and he was ready to commit to working harder for the coming year – and I read somewhere that “working hard” was correlated with “success.” Sounds like crazy voodoo to me.

But sometimes a hard loss will do that to you much more effectively than a win – when I wrestled, I learned something from each match I lost. Some wins? I didn’t learn a thing. And losing can either break you or motivate you. The Boy sounded motivated.

Given The Boy’s commitment, we immediately started practicing for the next year. Since Pugsley wanted to join us, we threw him in for good measure – he’s five years younger and a bit smaller than The Boy. I will note that The Mrs. has been after me for about two years to take a more rigorous and structured approach to coaching The Boy and Pugsley in wrestling. My excuse was that I didn’t want to interfere with their actual wrestling coaches and the work that they were doing with my kids – what if I taught them moves differently than the coach liked? Yeah, a lame reason, but it was my reason.

But after this year for The Boy, he was ready. He only has so many days left of wrestling, and he committed that he’d work with me to make the most of them. Fair enough, I’d commit to him to work hundreds of hours with him to help him be better. So we started practice. But before we started practice? I started reading, studying, and preparing to coach.

I prepared to start Tiny Fight Club (no, this wasn’t a restart of my failed Midget Hammer Fighting League):

What sort of things should I teach them? In what order? Wrestling is easily the oldest sport known to humanity – men were wrestling each other when we still hadn’t figured out how to knock two rocks together to make a “clunk” sound and way before they’d invented the Nintendo® Switch™.

Why did we wrestle in the murky depths of history? To impress the ladies, sure. Also, because it’s fun. Most importantly, as Jordan Peterson would say, this combat allows us to create a hierarchy, and having that hierarchy is important, as I describe in my perfectly awesome post about Peterson’s book (LINK).

But something more happened. I became engrossed in study about how to coach and what to coach. And Pugsley still had one more tournament left . . . so we had exactly three practices until he would finish out his kid’s wrestling season.

Like The Boy, Pugsley had been, well, stalled in his progress if not taking a few steps backward this year. He just wasn’t getting much better. But we had those three practices. And with them, and in drilling he felt more confident than ever.

The good thing about that last tournament? There were only two people in his bracket. One was Dirk. Pugsley had never even taken Dirk down (where you gain control over your opponent) in the last three years. The other wrestler, Ezekiel, well, Pugsley hadn’t beaten Zeke in two years. Literally he had wrestled these two other boys a dozen times or so in the previous two years and hadn’t beaten either one of them. What was three hours of practice?

In the very first match in his weight, Dirk pinned Ezekiel. Quickly. As was usual. Dirk routinely took first place.

Dirk’s second match was against Pugsley. Pugsley immediately (and with confidence) went out and gained control and got the take down! He was up 2-0. Dirk was in such difficulty (and pain!) he’d done anything he could to get off the mat. Pugsley dominated him for most of the period, then got in a pretty bad position, and then got pinned. But he came off the mat with confidence – he knew what I had coached him in worked – he had been amazing against an opponent he’d never even scored on. The next match he pinned Ezekiel in the first period. Zeke was not pleased – the creampuff he always beat had grown fangs. And Pugsley was sold on our practices.

On the way home he talked about wanting to be a national collegiate wrestling champion. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb would say, I now had “Skin in the Game” and so did my boys. And it matters.

(The following link doesn’t get me any money as of the time of this writing, but at some point I might monetize it. It’s Taleb. Buy the book, anyway.)

I am thinking about reviewing this book, but reviewing Taleb might prove to be difficult in this blog – it might require five or more posts. We’ll see. Buy it, anyway, and read it.

In the process of working through wrestling with The Boy and Pugsley – I found something interesting (outside of the bruises randomly outcropping on my biceps, forearms, and chest). I felt more energized than I’d felt in ages. The very act of working with The Boy and Pugsley to make them stronger and more skilled improved my attitude about . . . everything. My daily cardio workouts became sharper (and I studied wrestling moves during them). And my muscles started to grow as I kept up with the boys when we lifted after fight club.

But I also had another epiphany.

The combat serves many purposes: It builds confidence. It teaches to never give up. By example, it shows that hard work pays off in success. It bonds fathers to sons. It builds discipline (Pugsley’s respect for me has gone up 372% and his pre-teen surliness has utterly disappeared). These are all traits that will lead (along with intelligence and Stoic virtue (LINK)) to much greater than average social and economic success.

And I’m in much better shape, and I’m learning how to teach The Boy (no, you have to rotate more than 180˚) and Pugsley (no, you have to throw your head through while you get your hips under your shoulders) and The Mrs. (dear, could you make us all some nice sandwiches). I kid. The Mrs. oversees our deadly serious play. When The Boy complained that Pugsley smelled like sour milk, The Mrs. awarded The Boy a penalty point for “Involuntary Lactation.” That caused us all to laugh.

But the epiphany is that the combat pays off down the road in the ultimate Skin in the Game moment: this work is a precursor to reproduction . . . what?

Yes. Being a high status man increases reproduction possibilities. Being a high status woman doesn’t.

Huh?

How does that work??? Check this tweet out:

https://twitter.com/DegenRolf/status/973473559933747206/photo/1

I would say that being a high-powered female attorney actually lowers reproduction access for women. The most fertile years for women are in their 20’s – after that, it lowers drastically. By the age of 40? Forget it.

But high status guys? The guys back in the cavemen days that were winning the wrestling matches? They got a chance to reproduce. And 8,000 years ago, science says that only one guy versus 17 women reproduced (LINK). The odds are better now, one guy will get to reproduce for every out 3.3 women that to reproduce. 3.3 to one? Are you kidding me? Nope. High-status guys, only the top third, get to reproduce. I guess that choosy girls all choose the same men.

High status men.

Competition – physical competition is hardwired into the brains and souls of boys. And old men, like me. That’s why I felt so good – I was throwing myself into physical combat for the first time in years, and relishing it. Winning (and coaching well) provides many physical benefits – increased testosterone, brain chemicals and other science-y things in addition to the strength and fitness ability. If you look at the math, social hierarchy is a must for men.

In today’s society, that means a cool job with money. So, in order to have children, i.e., the ultimate Skin in the Game, the behaviors of competition and working long hours to increase income are absolutely necessary for men and are negatively correlated with reproductive success for women.

There’s no wage gap, at least not one based on any sort of discrimination. Thousands (if not more) of years of human breeding have made men drive to succeed – because success is the currency of reproduction.

The final observation for today:

Raising boys is a full contact sport. To allow them to reach their full potential they have to fight. I suspect that many (but not all) cases of ADHD and the other alphabet salads of childhood disorders that have suddenly emerged after existing . . . never, are really just boys not being able to take risks or have a fistfight or nurse a bloody nose or confront a bully – behaviors that bind them into the social hierarchy.

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

Oops, I guess I broke the first rule of Fight Club. Again.

Stoics, Fight Club, Wealth, and Virtue

“I had it all. Even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections, proof they were crafted by the honest, simple, hard-working indigenous peoples of . . . wherever.” – Fight Club

The first rule of Fight Club is . . . be older than six. And no swords.

Wealth – what is it?

Is it:

Something that we sacrifice our lives for?
Something we obsess about until it controls us?
Something that is never . . . quite enough?
Something we have to have more of than our neighbor?
Something that defines our feelings about ourselves?

I’ll be honest, but there have been times I’ve viewed wealth in more than one of the categories above and acted as such. “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants,” is what Epictetus wrote about 100 A.D. Even more succinctly, Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (gosh darn) khakis.”

What Epictetus may have looked like. If he were in a comic strip.

I may have it in for Johnny Depp, but Brad Pitt’s Tyler Durden is my spirit animal (we’ve started a tiny Fight Club in my basement, but I’m not supposed to talk about it – first rule, you know).

I keep coming back to the stoics. What did Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Tyler Durden, and Epictetus think about wealth? The website How To Be A Stoic says (LINK): “. . . they classed everything that lies outside of virtue as either preferred or dispreferred indifferent. To the first group belong things like wealth, health, education, and high social standing; to the second things like poverty, sickness, ignorance, and low social standing. These things were preferred insofar it is normal for a human being to pursue them because it makes her life more comfortable, and dispreferred insofar it makes her life less comfortable. But they are “indifferent” in the sense that they are irrelevant to our ability to exercise the virtues . . . .”

So, the Stoics were indifferent to wealth, but it was better to have it than not. You could be virtuous and poor, or you could be virtuous and rich. If you were rich, perhaps you could share your virtues even further than if you were poor – so it was preferred to have money. And Marcus Aurelius was emperor – it was hard to be richer than that, even for Jeff Bezos. Seneca? He was really wealthy, too. And since they are some of the thinkers that literally define what Stoicism is, well, wealth and power isn’t off limits, but the goal was to live a virtuous life.

So what does wealth signify?

Mostly, wealth is like stored energy – it’s a potential. A child may have a wealth of days before it, and an old miser a wealth of cash, cash that he might trade every dime of for just one more taste of youth. And a six year old would trade the ages of 18-30 for six Cadbury Cream Eggs®, which is another reason that kids can’t vote.

Steve Jobs certainly traded some of his wealth for additional days of life without having to cheat a six year old in a candy deal – he could honestly say he could be at any liver in just a few hours (having a private jet and all) and he could afford to have a staff of people looking for ways to improve Steve’s chance of getting one. Heck, Apple® has a project to clone Steve from a clump of his cells that they found in his comb – they just keep getting Ben Affleck copies instead. Thankfully, Ben Affleck is not considered by the state of California to be a “living human.”

Steve’s wealth did buy him time – a few years, perhaps. And Apple will soon sell the Affleck clones as iBens©.

Choices. Wealth buys choices. And one of the choices is always . . . not choosing right now. The wonderful thing about being rich, is you don’t take any offers you don’t want. If have to sell my car – I need the money for a new kidney for my Yosemite Sam© PEZ® dispenser, well, I have to have that money now. I can’t wait. I have to take the offer I get now.

If I have wealth and can afford to buy new, black market PEZ® kidneys for cash? Well, I don’t have to sell my car. In fact, if I have cash, I can look for people who have to sell kidney cars for PEZ© kidney cash to get a bargain.

I am willing to bet a large amount of PEZ™ that this is the first time the last sentence has been written in any language.

Anyhow. Wealth buys choices, and wealth creates the conditions for more wealth.

But what creates wealth? Well, in reality – the same virtues the stoics upheld (from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – LINK):

“The Stoics elaborated a detailed taxonomy of virtue, dividing virtue into four main types: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.

“Wisdom is subdivided into good sense, good calculation, quick-wittedness, discretion, and resourcefulness.
“Justice is subdivided into piety, honesty, equity, and fair dealing.
“Courage is subdivided into endurance, confidence, high-mindedness, cheerfulness, and industriousness.
“Moderation is subdivided into good discipline, seemliness, modesty, and self-control.”

If you will look – many (but not all!) of these virtues, if followed well and long enough, will lead to . . . wealth.

But perhaps Epictetus was right: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

And then there was Tyler Durden: “It’s a blanket. Just a blanket. Now why do guys like you and me know what a duvet or a comforter is? Is this essential to our survival, in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word? No. What are we then? We are consumers. We’re the byproducts of a lifestyle obsession.”

So, be virtuous. Get wealthy. But don’t make the wealth the focus . . . it’s not the money, after all – it’s all the stuff.

AI, The Singularity, and Your 401K

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky.” – The Matrix

This is how “The Hobbit” should have started, with dragons and swords, rather than a dwarf dinner party? Then I wouldn’t have fallen asleep during hour one of the 12 hours of movie.

In 1947, an author began to predict it. In the 1950’s a few scientists saw it coming. In the 1960’s, it became a (more and more) common subject. In the 1970’s and 80’s it was nightmare fuel for extremely profitable movies and some great books. And, in 1993, Vernor Vinge (author and mathematician) wrote the paper (LINK) that gave this phenomenon its name: The Technological Singularity, or just Singularity from here on out.

This is the second time I’ve discussed the Singularity, and the first time was over here (LINK). The topic is big enough and important enough that I thought I’d add on to it. This will likely not be the last time. Not that I’m running out of blog topics – no, I’ve got a page and a half of them. No, the Singularity keeps getting uncomfortably closer, like your father-in-law’s farting Great Dane that he normally feeds some sort of petroleum waste covered in sulfur and toxic waste. Otherwise? Anything making that smell is generally dead.

Speaking of dead, Jack Williamson (a horribly overlooked author) wrote about the Singularity first in 1947 in his story With Folded Hands. I read that when I was in sixth or seventh grade at the Middle School for Wayward Wilders. I read every science fiction story or novel in that library, and I even started The Lord of the Rings with book two (The Two Towers) since the library didn’t have book one (The Fellowship of the Rings). To this day I maintain it’s a better two book series than a three book series. The first book is really just walking and singing elves and hobbits. Meh. The second book starts with treachery and fighting. Yeah, that’s the stuff.

Anyway, Jack Williamson’s story With Folded Hands was . . . awesome. And one of the creepiest things I’d ever read. You can read it for free, here at this (LINK). Here’s the spoiler-free-ish Wikipedia description:

. . . disturbed at his encounter, Underhill rushes home to discover that his wife has taken in a new lodger, a mysterious old man named Sledge. In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ”to serve and obey and guard men from harm”. Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers, and more, and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids’ benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited.

So, you’d think that having all of those things would be good, right? Nah. Read the story. Want to ski? The Humanoids are against it – you might hurt yourself. And anything else that might be dangerous. Like driving. Or drinking. Or smoking. Or not exercising. Or not eating the right foods. Or staying up too late. And the Humanoids are smarter than you. And always watching.

It’s an example of how the Singularity can go wrong – an instruction set that’s interpreted as machines do: literally. For example, if one read the instruction “help humanity” and figured out that humanity was always suffering, and maybe the best way to help humanity to stop suffering was to end humanity . . . or if the instruction set was to create inexpensive cars . . . and it converted the entire mass of the planet into inexpensive yet attractive and stylish cars. (Elon, make sure your programs don’t include this!)

These themes spawned numerous television episodes in the 1960’s and 1970’s. How many times, exactly, did Kirk do mental ju-jitsu with a supercomputer? I can count at least seven without thinking. So, about 1/10^th of Star Trek® episodes, Kirk was fighting a Singularity. This continued through the movies Terminator® and Terminator 2© through the 1990’s. Then Vernor Vinge named it.

Let’s talk about the Singularity. What, exactly, happens?

In general, a much larger than human intellect appears. And it rapidly reconfigures everything that it sees. Concepts that are beyond the smartest humans are correlated – the data we already have in our experiments, is all brought together.

We know we are wrong, but don’t know how. Could a superhuman intelligence bring it all together in a month? A week? A day? Perhaps. We know we are wrong about the way the Universe works – and that there are some pretty significant gaps in our understanding (LINK).

It’s a fair thing to say that we are living today with a weak AI. My GPS unit tells me the fastest route to where I’m travelling. YouTube® suggests songs I’ve never heard that I kinda like. And algorithms based on my previous web browsing suggest that maybe I’ll need a knee replacement or perhaps a new kidney (now you know why I had children: they are wonderful sources of spare organs).

I may even have interacted with an AI this weekend – I was having trouble getting the “name” of one of my Amazon® devices. The “person” on the other end of the chat kept repeating the same things. I had to figure out how to get to the answer. But I told the “person” how I got there. Bet next time it’ll be quicker . . . .

This is a weak AI. It’s a general helper every day. Only a little creepy, not “fifty years old and still collecting Star Wars® figures” creepy.

But it will/is getting stronger. How long until Google® correlates web searches and times of day to a dozen or more lifestyle-related diseases? I’m willing to bet you it does that already. But this is still an algorithm designed by a human. Probably.

But recently Google™ (which now no longer promises to “not be evil”) created AlphaGo©. Go is an ancient game that rivals chess in complexity. It beat the greatest human master 89 out of 100 games in October, which most people would call a “drubbing.” Perhaps, most disturbingly, the moves that the computer made were called “disturbing” and “alien”. The computer was left with nothing more than the rules of the game and a desire to win. Not long after playing large number of games against itself, it was able to take on the greatest player in the world. And win. No human will ever beat it.

From my observation, the likely requirement for development of a true AI, a general AI is constraint. The AI was able to beat us (us=seven billion humans) because it was constrained and goal driven – it was limited to a single gaming system with observable and finite rules.

And humans aren’t constrained, right?

Well, no. Humans are constrained by a human body. As much as I would like to be able to jump to Mars and party with Elon Musk (you know he already moved there, right?) I can’t. Intellect is about observing and overcoming constraints to achieve a goal. If you don’t have constraints or a goal, intelligence has no meaning and no use. (This might be the most profound thought I ever had, with the exception of the partying with Elon Musk on Mars part.)

What are the constraints and goals of a human? Our constraints are our intellect and physical limitations. Our goals are our desire to live, help others of our kind, procreate, and keep our children safe. Obviously, these are generalized. And, they can be sublimated into secondary goals, like cats for a cat lady, or perverted into goals like more heroin for a heroin addict.

But how useful was intelligence, anyway? Surface animal life has existed for nearly half a billion years. How much evidence do we have for intelligent life on Earth? Yeah. Just us. Probably 200,000 years or so. This is 0.04% of the time that we’ve had surface life. Eyes (not human, but eyes) have been in existence for that entire time. So, 100% of the time we’ve had life on the surface, it’s had eyes. But intelligence? Not so much.

From that we can guess (maybe) that intelligence is rare. I’d guess it’s because that there’s some component of intelligence that’s simply not useful for the simple goals of procreation. It’s better to be stronger or have bigger claws or better teeth rather than a big brain. Yet we, mankind, exist. We replaced claws and teeth with brains and planning. Perhaps the dinosaurs were getting ready to make the same leap when a certain meteorite hit the Yucatan, or perhaps the cold-blooded nature of their biology prevented them from being able to sufficiently grow the brain tissue required for intelligence. To-MA-to, To-MAH-to. And, we win. You suck, dinosaurs!

Certainly, it’s fair to say that whatever biological bottleneck prevented intelligent dinosaurs from ruling the Earth today, humanity passed the test, and we are certainly, unquestionably, the dominant form of life on Earth.

The more we learn about AI, the more we will learn to give it constraints and goals like we humans have. And those constraints and goals will give the “intelligence” part of Artificial Intelligence the reason to grow. At some point, the constraints and goals will be properly set to create a general AI.

And then?

A singularity means that none of the rules from before even make sense. That’s the difficulty. Right now we worry about the prices of real estate in San Francisco or the price of the stock market or the value of our 401k. We’re concerned with how many people like our BookFace® posts or what our current salary is or how much money we have saved in a piggy bank.

After a Singularity, many of the rules that went before matter anymore. At all. Your credit score might be less important than how many freckles you have. And only the freckled will rule the Earth. Why? Because of Justin Timberlake. Duh.

Our world regularly experiences singularities – the revolution in 1776 was one. It was a fundamental change in the way the world was governed – giving more freedom than has ever come before to humanity. The entire concept of kings was overthrown with the concept of divine rights as the basis for free men living together. We also have darker experiences with political singularities, as those from the Soviet gulag or Cambodian camp can attest to. And only a Singularity can explain why Firefly® was cancelled in season one.

But the Technological Singularity will be that. On steroids.

Literally every facet of your life that you depend upon will be in question. Monetary systems? What is money to a superhuman machine intelligence? Property rights? Why do they exist? Eugenics? Perhaps the AI will work to make us better pets through forced breeding.

Nothing you can take for granted now will be certain after a Singularity. And after a technological Singularity? If a machine AI doesn’t like you, it can upload you into a core and torture you forever. In perhaps the best, but most visceral fiction representing this, Harlan Ellison has the following passage. The full story is here, but I warn you, it’s very good, but very stark (LINK). I suggest you buy the full book at Amazon . . . .

We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been trapped. AM wasn’t God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander, AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred … that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.

Yeah, like I said rough. And this .pdf was posted from a High School? They would have burned a high school teacher alive back when I was in school for mentioning that work even existed (though my English teacher did mention another Ellison work, “A Boy and His Dog” and was not immediately hit by lasers and burnt to a crisp (though I did hear that a time-ray hit him, and he later retired when he hit 65).

Again, you can get the book here (again, I get no profit from this, but recommend you buy it if you’re not squeamish):

Vinge stated in 1993, not before 2005, nor after 2030. Now? 2040 to 2050 seems to be the conclusion that most experts expect. Still, like fusion, 20 to 30 years away. Because a looming event that could consider everything you ever thought right, and immovable incorrect in a matter of months or days . . . that’s nothing to worry about. Right?

Review: The Hidden Truth. TL;DR? Buy it. Now.

“So I knew that down the road I would have to steer you away, that I would have to lie to you. And a lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths.” – X-Files

Neal Stephenson, moving through pages at nearly the speed of light, which is his superhero power (since it is obvious he will never have hair like Wolverine®. Neal was really neat (true story) when The Boy talked to him a few years ago. Future post, probably.

There are several books that I’ve made either The Boy or Pugsley read. They’ve both read Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein. But the list also includes Dune (Herbert), 1984 (Orwell), Brave New World (Huxley), Cryptonomicon (Stephenson), The Stand (King), Lucifer’s Hammer (Niven and Pournelle), well, and a few others. You get the idea.

And the idea is ideas – one of the things that books do is they introduce us to ideas and concepts – in many ways they help teach us how to thinks – at least the good books. I had a boss who was the most Zen boss I ever had. He was deeply philosophical in an entirely unphilosophical organization and industry. He liked me quite a lot – since I loved ideas as well. He had a great saying: “Books are the way that one mind can talk to another across time.”

I’m adding a book that I’m going to make The Boy and Pugsley read:

I came across this book via a quote I saw on the internet (LINK), and I was hooked.

Here’s the quote from The Hidden Truth. It’s long. But it only took me about three seconds after I read it to hit “buy” in Amazon (I’ll note again – I get no money if you buy it here, that’s fine – the author gets sweet, sweet money):

“The women’s rights movement had three goals. First, it got women into the workplace where their labor could be taxed . . . . So, with more women entering the workforce the supply of labor increases and wages are depressed . . . .

“Now couples need to have two careers to support a typical modern lifestyle. We can’t tax the labor in a home-cooked meal. We can tax the labor in takeout food, or the higher cost of a microwave dinner. The economic potential of both halves of the adult population now largely flows into the government where it can serve noble ends instead of petty private interests . . . .

“The second reason is to get children out of the potentially antisocial environment of the home and into educational settings where we can be sure they’ll get the right values and learn the right lessons to be happy and productive members of society. Working mothers need to send their children to daycare and after-school care where we can be sure they get exposed to the right lessons, or at least not to bad ideas . . . .

“They are going to assign homework to their students: enough homework to guarantee that even elementary school students are spending all their spare time doing homework. Their poor parents, eager to see that Junior stays up with the rest of the class, will be spending all their time helping their kids get incrementally more proficient on the tests we have designed. They’ll be too busy doing homework to pick up on any antisocial messages at home . . . .

“Children will be too busy to learn independence at home, too busy to do chores, to learn how to take care of themselves, to be responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, and laundry. Their parents will have to cater to their little darlings’ every need, and their little darlings will be utterly dependent on their parents. When the kids grow up, they will be used to having someone else take care of them. They will shift that spirit of dependence from their parents to their university professors, and ultimately to their government. The next generation will be psychologically prepared to accept a government that would be intrusive even by today’s relaxed standards – a government that will tell them exactly how to behave and what to think. Not a Big Brother government, but a Mommy-State . . . .

“Eventually, we may even outlaw homeschooling as antisocial, like our more progressive cousins in Germany already do. Everyone must know their place in society and work together for social good, not private profit . . . .

“The Earth can’t accommodate many more people at a reasonable standard of living. We’re running out of resources. We have to manage and control our population. That’s the real motive behind the women’s movement. Once a women’s studies program convinces a gal she’s a victim of patriarchal oppression, how likely is it she’s going to overcome her indoctrination to be able to bond long enough with a guy to have a big family? If she does get careless with a guy, she’ll probably just have an abortion . . . .

“All those Career-Oriented Gals are too busy seeking social approval and status at the office to be out starting families and raising kids. They’re encouraged to have fun, be free spirits, and experiment with any man who catches their fancy . . . . And by the time all those COGs are in their thirties and ready to try to settle down and have kids, they’re past their prime. Their fertility peaks in their twenties. It’s all downhill from there . . . .

“In another generation, we’ll have implemented our own version of China’s One-Child-Per-Couple policy without the nasty forced abortions and other hard repressive policies which people hate. What’s more, there’ll be fewer couples because so many young people will just be hedonistically screwing each other instead of settling down and making families. Makes me wish I were young again, like you, to take full advantage of it. The net effect is we’ll enter the great contraction and begin shrinking our population to more controllable levels . . . .

“It’s profoundly ironic. A strong, independent woman is now one who meekly obeys the media’s and society’s clamor to be a career girl and sleep around with whatever stud catches her fancy or with other girls for that matter. A woman with the courage to defy that social pressure and devote herself from a young age to building a home and raising a family is an aberration, a weirdo, a traitor to her sex. There aren’t many women with the balls to stand up against that kind of social pressure.

It’s not in their nature.”

Wow. Stunning. And possibly banned in California.

To be clear, I don’t think that there is a conspiracy to create the situation described above, but the outcomes of a huge social experiment are often unclear, and wrapping up the negative social outcomes summarized above into a conspiracy? Genius!

Those are some huge ideas, and that’s just in one chapter. There are plenty of ideas, and I’ll admit that I probably know the sources of many of them. In fact, I’m pretty sure we have many of the same regular watering holes on the web, and probably many of the same values.

But this isn’t like Atlas Shrugged with an 87 page speech that would have taken six days to deliver. No. The plot is tight, and the author doesn’t repeat himself. The book is thrilling – especially the last third.

Interestingly, most of the actual action takes place out of view of the first-person protagonist. Yes, he talked to that person. And now that person is dead. While not the choice of most thrillers, I found it especially effective in this book, especially since it was told in first-person. Only Bruce Willis gets in a running gunfight with German terrorists – in real life, buildings burn down when we’re not around, even though the burning building might have huge consequences, we’re (mainly) just not around when the amazing thing happens. This technique makes the book more realistic.

And the plot? Let’s just say that over a hundred years ago, for mysterious reasons, people started censoring textbooks on electromagnetics. And killing scientists – all related to a scientific conclusion that Oliver Heaviside. Heaviside is probably most famous for taking James Clerk Maxwell’s electromagnetic equations and bringing them into the final form we see today. (If you’re not familiar, Maxwell was a genius whose work was foundational for Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.) Heaviside was also famous for sporting a cool Wolverine (like in the X-Men) hairdo.

If you like this book (as I most certainly did) then you’ll immediately go out and buy the sequel after you finish the first one. It’s that good. And for $0.99, I bought the e-book so I could start reading immediately.

And you should buy this book, too, so we can convince Hans to write some more . . . .

Elon Musk Update: Elon Musk Versus NASA

“Also available in Arctic Slut, Morning-After Melon, and Elon Musk.” – The Simpsons

Artifacts from another time – when NASA actually flew rockets into space. In the 1990’s NASA lawyers made them wire the rockets to the ground so that they couldn’t fly and maybe hurt someone. Also, NASA HR has made fart jokes grounds for termination.

When I was a young Wilder, I was in awe of NASA. I was expecting that the moon landing was just a start for manned spaceflight. Successes like the Voyager probe were confirmation – NASA would be leading us into a great new era that would end up with a man on Mars. Spaceflight would be available (at least) to rich people. We’d have great cylindrical colonies up in space, and mining on asteroids would produce massive amounts of wealth. Solar power satellites would beam power via microwave down to receiving dishes and eliminate energy shortages on Earth. And probably some birds.

Ahh, the future. Now back off to the Moon mines honey! Go deal with hard radiation for a week. Then we’ll have Swiss steak! (Source – NASA Ames)

The Space Shuttle was a hopeful idea. Built on the idea of being reusable, shuttles were going to revolutionize space travel. We’d shoot one up every week or two, and the cost would be less than $700 (today’s dollars) per pound. That was the idea, anyway.

Over the course of the 135 total missions it cost about $27,000 per pound. Each mission cost about $1.5 billion. And NASA would send up a Space Shuttle to launch a communications satellite. Yes. Every time we wanted to launch something, we’d put 25% of our space launch ability along with seven astronauts on the line. The shuttle was further crippled by added weight, which limited the orbits it could reach.

In 2007, NASA estimated they could have flown Saturn V (the same rocket that went to the Moon) missions six times a year, with two trips to the Moon, each year for the same price as the shuttle. With the amount of payload that the Saturn V could have sent up, our space infrastructure and time in space would have been significantly higher than with the Space Shuttle. We’d have been on Mars. Actual people.

Yeah. NASA essentially burned our future in space on a crappy space truck. But it’s gotten worse.

The current NASA rocket program, the Space Launch System, has consumed $11.5 billion dollars over seven years. And produced no rocket.

Pictured: Actual rocket. Not pictured: NASA rocket. Because there isn’t one. (Source: SpaceX)

Elon Musk spent $500 million on the Falcon Heavy to develop it, and launch costs are $90 million to $150 million per launch, and it has a greater capacity than any rocket on Earth right now. And a greater capacity than the Space Launch System will ever have. Musk’s only competition is Jeff Bezos, who has a LOT of money and the same ideas.

In perhaps the biggest NASA troll ever, Musk sent his car into space. With a Matchbox® car of his car glued to the dash. Playing David Bowie. With a spacesuit in the car. NASA? Unable to launch bottle rockets – probably because of all of the procedures required to launch one.

How can Musk do this when NASA cannot? Several reasons:

NASA is observably stupid. It started spending money on a launch pad for a cancelled rocket. It spent $200+ million dollars. Then it decided to change the pad for the Space Launch System. As of now, NASA has spent $300 million more. It anticipates spending another $400 million. But the launch pad leans. And it might only be used . . . once. Don’t believe me? Here’s a LINK.

Yes, this is a billion dollars. Oh, the alternative? Yeah, build a complete new one for a couple hundred million. (Source: NASA)

NASA is a jobs program. There are many fine scientists at NASA. Not sure NASA needs any scientists – NASA needs engineers to build rockets and rovers. I’m sure there are plenty of universities that NASA can go to if they need scientists. But let’s pretend that NASA needs a scientist or two. Does NASA need to make braille books for blind kids about eclipses? No, but they did. (LINK) Does NASA need a writer to write about how NASA helped make the statuettes that they give out at the Oscars® shiny? (LINK) They did.
NASA has been given no fixed mission. In the 1960’s, the idea was we’ll get men to the moon by the end of the decade. And they did. The entire world watched while young (less than 40 years old, most of them) men (almost overwhelmingly) conquered the moon. What’s the mission now? To watch while Elon Musk and eventually Jeff Bezos do more than NASA ever could? How demoralized must the government workers be watching future Bond® villains take over space?
Related to the above – NASA has no consistency. Rocket programs start/stop based on the political climate of the day. Bush proposes a rocket, Obama deletes the rocket and proposes another rocket. Manned spaceflight should take second place to unmanned probes. Unmanned probes should take second place to manned spaceflight. It’s like trying to negotiate between Mom and Dad when they don’t even speak the same language.

So, the solution?

Make Elon Musk NASA Emperor For Life®. Give him the money. If we gave Musk the money, we’d be on Mars in five years. We’d have a base on it in seven years. In twenty years, there would be a million Americans living on Mars. We’d start turning the atmosphere into something we could breathe. We’d make the place homey. Maybe in a several hundred years. Maybe a thousand.

Don’t get me wrong. Living on Mars is hard. It’s tougher than living on the top of Mount Everest. It’s tougher than living at the South Pole. But it’s worth doing. Why?

Intelligent life may be very rare in the Universe – it might even be rarer than intelligent life at NASA. The one thing we owe to our posterity is that they be given a chance to live. And even though planets appear to be fairly common in the Galaxy, there’s no real sign of intelligent life around here besides us. This previous week, we saw the nearest planet to our Solar system get torched by a solar flare that we could see from Earth (with huge telescopes). This happened four years ago. If anything was living there before, it was nuked, microwaved, and fried. Colonel Sanders could only sell Kentucky Fried Alien® there, since there certainly aren’t any living ones.

And for how much time of the existence of the Earth have we had intelligent life. 20,000 years? 100,000 years? If you generously (how could intelligent life exist without beer?) assume 200,000 years, only for 0.004% of the life of the Earth have we had intelligent life. And how long has that life been observable? 0.000002%.

When we look at the threats that mankind realistically faces, putting ourselves on Mars should be the ultimate, number one goal of the human race. We face economic disruption (LINK), we face the potential for artificial intelligence being a really tough child (LINK), big asteroids (LINK), super volcanos (LINK), and diseases and other stuff (like reality television) that could wipe us out.

The alternative are space habitats. The LaGrange points (which have nothing to do with ZZ Top®) are relatively stable orbits that math provides around the Earth-Moon system. In the diagram below, you can see that LaGrange 1, 2, and 3 are stable, but tiny places. LaGrange 4 (L4) and LaGrange 5 (L5) are awesome places because they are large – you could put a lot of stuff there and not worry about bumping into each other. And you can stay in those areas for millions of years without expending any fuel.

Here are the LaGrange points, courtesy NASA and ZZ Top®.

The L5 (or L4) colonies are perhaps tougher than Mars. Or not. Manufacturing these habitats would be difficult – you’d have to set up an entire manufacturing complex on the Moon (likely) and pull some choice asteroids into L4 or L5 orbit for raw materials. It’s certain that this work would cost billions and take decades for the larger colonies that would host millions of people. On the plus side? There’s already a song built for the colonies:

Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man’s greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

Here’s a NASA depiction of a space colony at the L5 point. Only NASA would create a colony where you’d have to build a bridge. (Source, NASA Ames)

I really love humanity. I want it to live on until the Universe can no longer support life. I’d like to think that in 2 trillion years that young Wilders (whatever they look like) are out viewing the birth of a new black hole, or watching the latest episode of The Simpsons. Why? All of the Universe, all of creation is meaningless unless we have someone there to watch it in joy and wonder. And to make fart jokes.