Sexual attraction is racism

Historically, we have proven a very myopic species. Whenever we collectively come to the realization that some facet of our culture is destructive, we never attempt to extrapolate from that realization, and instead pass it on to the next generation as "tradition" to be memorized and subsequently parroted without regard for its fundamental essence, or what essence of which it is a manifestation.

Is ritualistic human sacrifice a bad thing? Yes, very bad. Okay, we've figured that out, so we're set.

Oh, gladiatorial combat is a bad thing, too? Yeah, that makes sense. Well, it's been a few thousand years since our last decree and all, but it's still a good thing that we figured this one out. We're set now, right?

What? Don't tell me that slavery is wrong, too! Jeez, nothing fun is acceptable, is it? Well, at least we're making progress. We deserve a pat on the back, now.

You've got to be kidding me. You mean that even though other races get paid for their labor, now, they should have access to the same resources as us? Fine. That sort of makes sense. Hey, it only took us a hundred years to knock this one out. Contrast that with the few thousand that it took last time! We're obviously becoming more progressive and rational as a species.

But don't you dare propose that gay people should be allowed to get married. That is absolutely off limits.

Upon making the realization that humans shouldn't be forcefully and selfishly sacrificed to the gods, it shouldn't take much time at all to realize that homosexuals should have access to the same resources and institutions as heterosexuals. Why does each of these realizations take so long to make, in spite of their occupying the same fundamental value space?

The problem is that the realization is never that sentience is the kernel of value, or that symbolic cultural assumptions need to be rigorously and scientifically challenged; instead, it's that mass murder should not be a form of entertainment, or that blacks are people, too. In reality, these latter phenomena are just surface manifestations of the former; if eating food that tastes good is important, then we should realize this in the fundamental sense rather than make the claim that because we once ate a good-tasting apple, eating apples is important.

Of course, the above analogy gets into the nature of variability and value equations, but this blog has hit on those concepts enough by now, I think. Just keep in mind that after gay marriage, there's the right to die, and after that, there's outlawing impregnation, and after that, there's the idea that sexual attraction is racism.

When it comes to sexual attraction, we can abstract the focal qualities of an individual into two primary categories:

1. Those qualities which sexually attract us to the individual

2. Those qualities which make the individual a valid companion capable of making calculated, informed decisions and being rational overall (which increases the likelihood of the individual understanding us, reciprocating during conversations, and enjoying our company)

In the case of category 2., the individual needn't even be part of the particular gender or age bracket to which we are sexually attracted, underlying the ultimate superficiality of sex. This should come as no surprise to "antinatalists," however -- that is, if they've embraced the idea that the phenomenon of sexual reproduction is fruitless, aimless, and insipid.

It's important to understand, here, that at a racist organization, the above two categories are very much the same in the abstract, but manifest in physical substance as the following:

1. Those qualities which we have culturally -- and, to a much lesser extent, genetically -- come to embrace or find symbolic security in, due in part to the evolutionary power of xenophobia

2. Those qualities which make the individual a hard worker capable of filling the role offered at our organization

Big tits and a cute laugh are to human companionship what light skin and Caucasian facial features are to corporate employment. If you want your company to do as well as it can, then hire people based on their skills rather than their skin color; if you want your social life to be as fulfilling as it can be, then live and share your life with interesting and intelligent people rather than sexually attractive ones. We should have figured this out as soon as we stopped rolling human heads down pyramid steps, but, well, we suck.

Avoiding optimism bias

If a potential quality that you're contemplating is desirable to you, consider a potential quality of similar likelihood which is undesirable to you before deciding to chase the former quality.

For example:

1. The odds of winning the lottery are 1 in 20 million*. Yeah, those numbers are outrageous, but I'm going to play the lottery, anyway. You never know!

2. The odds of being struck by lightning are 1 in 20 million*. Phew, that's good to know. That's one less way of dying that I'll ever, ever have to worry about. It's basically a guarantee that it'll never happen to me.

Funny how we think about things differently depending on whether they benefit us -- even when the data are exactly the same in all instances! Regardless of what topics you're entertaining, always be sure to control for optimism bias during the decision-making process.

* These odds were fabricated for the purpose of the example.

Arguments against balance in the universe

1. The ratio of "empty" space to stars and planets is astronomical. If life is part of some magnificent order, then why is the universe filled with cold blackness instead of green pastures and lakes? The current compilation of evidence points toward there being very little, if any, physical advantage in existing as a complex cluster of matter -- especially the kind that moves around and consumes other clusters of matter in order to resist entropy. Almost all of the universe is hostile to large masses, and life in particular. Seriously, just exiting the Earth's atmosphere is incredibly dangerous for sentient beings. How unfortunately small our safety zone is when contrasted with its encasing!

2. Extinction events happen all the time. Was there balance on Earth during the Permian Extinction, when upward of ninety percent of marine life vanished outright?

3. There is nothing against which we can compare the universe, so any relative statement regarding how structured or balanced it is is shortsighted. The universe's processes are orderly? Relative to what?

Actually, we can compare the universe's processes to another kind of process: the human kind. I'm pretty sure that no one on Earth would think it a good idea to build a computer case the size of a stadium just to store parts no larger than those found in modern PCs.

And if someone ever did? Perhaps the people of the future would marvel in awe and wonderment at the result, but that doesn't mean that they would subsequently desire to imitate it. Fascination does not entail admiration.

Re: Entropy

So I got the following anonymous email today as a complement to a comment somewhere regarding the inevitability of the heat death of the universe:

Even if truth hurts, it is better to accept it and face the
consequences. I. e. that life is ultimately pointless and heads
nowhere. We lost. I laughed. Then cried. Soon I'm dead. Thanks. Not.

First, I want to point out that the reason for why I am writing my reply here rather than via email is because this message was sent by an Austrian remailer. I've had stranger things happen, but regardless, I'm not a fan of one-sided conversations where one of the parties isn't allowed to participate or defend his stance. The reply, unaltered, to... someone:

1. Why are you using a remailer? What are the consequences of revealing your email address to me? Is it so frightening to you to have me know who your ISP is -- or even just your mail provider? What could I possibly do with this information? Google you? Yikes!

Guess not everyone is into the idea of transparent communications.

2. When the ostensibly true "hurts," I embrace the pain for the greater good. What hurts more than the truth, though, is the human species' insistence on promoting absolute certainty with regard to epistemological claims. I find it fascinating that you are able to predict, with such alleged precision, events trillions upon trillions of years into the future. The time scales involved in your claims are absurd to imagine; as a result, your conclusions are even more so.

3. Current predictions regarding the heat death of the universe do not utilize the life variable, because doing so would make any subsequent claims baseless and erratic in conclusion. Life -- and, consequently, intelligent information agents, both artificial and organic -- resist entropic decay by actively seeking to keep themselves indefinitely open as systems. Given that I have no idea what the universe will look like in a trillion trillion years, I have no idea what the implications are for both the success and the failure of these processes. I also have no idea whether one outcome or the other will result; the future of information is more uncertain now than it has ever been in human history.

4. We are presently unable to detect approximately 95% of the universe, and only speculate that it exists because we can measure its effects on the 5% that we can observe. In what ways intelligent information agents will be able to utilize dark energy a billion years from now is unknown.

Something to keep in mind, here, is that, if protons decay into nothing at some point, the universe will not be empty afterward; on the contrary, it will be filled with energy -- so much energy that the energy content at this instant will be laughable by comparison. If current models of the universe are accurate, then dark energy will continue to expand the fabric of spacetime for, potentially, eternity. Does this mean anything for intelligence one way or another? No, because we don't know what dark energy is.

5. During Einstein's time, we only had evidence for the existence of a single galaxy; today, we are aware of hundreds of billions. Furthermore, recent evidence in the field of astronomy has pointed toward the possibility that the universe is at least 250 times larger than we've been thinking it is, and that, as a result of inflation, the light cone spanning the diameter of the visible universe is minuscule in contrast to the vast distance separating our central point of observation from all of material reality outside of the cone.

The moral of the story is thus: Never forget that your time period containing all of the answers to the universe's mysteries is an immense coincidence for you, and that everyone to have ever thought this has been wrong to date. Sometimes it is better to accept that we do not know much about our bizarre situation than to feign authority out of some psychological need to feel secure in our certainty that, yes, the universe is a fatalistic place, and there's nothing that we can do about it.

It may feel good to believe that everything is okay, but feeling secure in our certainty has the same effect regardless of whether we're sure that it's all okay or that it's all terrible. I can tell from your reply that you are consoled by your indisputable grasp on truth; it is, after all, easier to accept that everything sucks -- or that everything is wonderful -- than it is to accept that our context is a gigantic unknown. It's human nurture to tend toward confidence and security, after all. Not having an answer causes discomfort. We can't have that!

Having said all of the above, I have no hope for the future, and think that the most likely outcome for life on Earth is that it will all get eradicated when the sun becomes a red giant. If this does happen, it will be a horrific event, but it is possible that afterward, there will never be any horrific events anywhere ever again. 

James Randi Educational Foundation: Take 2

More convenient strawmen and haughty disdain, this time on page 2:


Posted by Sophronius:

I disagree that empathy is a bias. I have always considered empathy to be a source of information: By allowing us to sympathize with others, we gain a better understanding of them. It would be much harder to predict someone's behaviour without empathy, I think.

From dictionary.com:

em·pa·thy

[em-puh-thee] Show IPA
–noun
1.
the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
2.
the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.


Empathy means to live vicariously through someone else, to truly feel or imagine what it must be like to be them, temporarily. If we were to attempt this for all beings to have ever felt anything, we'd fail miserably; nevertheless, the welfare of billions of beings is important -- something that we can ascertain via logic.

Empathy and sympathy completely block any attempts to fix problems, and in fact are part of "the problem," for they cause selfishness. When we identify with those like ourselves, it feels good, but it has no rational basis, and so is entirely founded on emotion.

Examples:

I'm a cripple, so when someone picks on cripples, I empathize; I get upset. However, when someone picks on an obese person, perhaps I laugh, because I'm not obese myself, and, for one reason or another, lack the ability to put myself into the shoes of the obese person.

Because I'm black, I sympathize with victims of slavery. Because I'm female, I sympathize with female rape victims. Because I'm obese, I sympathize with those who attempt to spread awareness of heart disease.

We shouldn't be limited by what we've been conditioned to be capable of empathizing with. I can't cry when I hear that a bunch of people died last night in a tornado, so if I rely on empathy alone, I'll not rationally concern myself with the event, or the fact that such events happen outside of my personal life. If I feel something for someone who's experienced a tragedy, I'm going to neglect those for whom I feel nothing who've also experienced tragedies -- especially if I'm presented with a choice between these two options, and need to make a decision per the law of opportunity cost. Is this fair? Is this unbiased?

Well, he seems to make an error in the first paragraph when he claims that we consider life intrinsically valuable due to having gotten "emotionally attached" to our ego.

Strawman. I stated that we fabricate excuses for why life needs to exist in the first place -- not for why life is valuable. Furthermore, I'm in favor of the idea that SENTIENT life is valuable; plants and bacteria can be tortured for hours for all I care.

How difficult is it to understand that something can be precious, even in spite of its lack of functionality or purpose (and thus, need to be continued on the production line)? When you perform a mercy killing on your pet, does the fact that you don't believe that it should continue to exist negate the fact that you find its life valuable?

The explanation for us valuing life seems the logical result of natural selection, and as such is intrinsic to our nature. But eh, minor point.

Completely disagree. The general goal of valuing things as a phenomenon sprung from natural selection seems to be to perpetuate genes at the individual level -- not to value life itself. Members of early human tribes were no different from members of chimpanzee troupes or lion packs in their valuing of those genotypes most closely resembling their own -- and, thus, the individual genes whose goals were to perpetuate themselves feverishly and for no good reason.

Very few humans value "life" as a concept nowadays, anyway; they value their own lives, their own personal satisfaction, their nations, and the lives of those closest to them. If you mean to say that humans value their own lives, well, the fact that people are addicted to their various desires does not make those desires functional, imbued with purpose, or somehow objectively worth perpetuating.

Valuing life requires intellectual effort -- at the expense of one's genetically motivated inclinations to scorn all life but that which is reminiscent of oneself. This is evident all throughout the animal kingdom; dogs do not value life, but their own self-satisfaction.

It's a bit odd that he suggests that life is the cause of everything negative in existence, or that "the world might be better off without you". Negative is a human concept and wouldn't exist without sapient creatures to experience it.

This is silly. When baby birds starve to death in the absence of super important humans capable of deeming such a thing negative, is it somehow less unpleasant for the baby birds? Negative is not only a concept, but a sensation. Does the fact that we've contrived the concept of sex change the fact that animals have sex?

It also doesn't make much sense that he distinguishes between creating a positive and ending a negative, since the net effect is the same.

There is no such thing as a positive derived out of thin air; all "positives" are contrived from states of deprivation. I distinguish between the two merely because the former isn't physically possible.

He then claims that having emotions is dangerous. He backs this up by citing things like genocide, which would not occur if humans had no emotions. Even if true, this completely ignores the fact that we consider genocide bad because of our emotions.

That's precisely the point, isn't it? If emotions can lead to nasty consequences, then adding more emotions to the pile is going to make things nastier than they already are.

What you're saying is akin to stating that cancer wouldn't be so bad if we were biologically like plants instead of animals. Isn't that an obvious inference?

We'd also have no genocide if there were no humans, but that is kind of missing the point.

And what point would that be? Can you justify genocide? Short of Jesus and heaven, you're going to have a tough time finding something to put on the other end of the scale that balances everything out. Are you sure that you're not as religious as the fish in a barrel that you like to shoot so often?

He actually does seem to argue that human existence is bad at some points... while simultaneously praising productivity as if it's our highest goal.

1. Suffering is bad.

2. Human existence leads to suffering, so there's certainly something bad about human existence. Whether human existence will ultimately lead to less suffering or a discovery of some metric of value far greater than what we're currently using is hard to say.

3. Even if, hypothetically, all of human existence were a bad idea, wouldn't it be productive to do something about that bad idea? You're framing "productivity" as some kind of linear initiative where positive quantities continuously increase, which is an extremely limited approach to productivity -- a word which always needs context in the first place.

He is right, however, that people will have children even when this is a bad idea (natural selection at work again), but that's nothing new.

Newness is a terrible thing to value by itself. The Nazis were new for a time.


Posted by I Am The Scum

You really need to stop reading this blog. It's absolutely terrible.

I think I'm going to start using this kind of rhetoric in my research papers. I wonder if my grade will go up or down if I start the first paragraph of a paper on nuclear fusion by referring to it as "really horrible and stuff." Hmmm.

In his computer example, he mentions that a computer would have an understanding of how others feel, and lack empathy. That's what empathy is.

2+2=4 does not require empathy; it requires logic. Understanding evolution does not require empathy; it requires empirical observation, from which logic is eventually derived by logic agents. Computers can understand these things.

Empathy is an emotional response to an imagined scenario; see above for its official definition. Empathy requires sentience -- a central nervous system designed for sight, touch, smell, hearing, taste, or some combination of these. A computer does not require a central nervous system in order to understand that 2+2=4, or that circles are round, or that things that don't feel good don't feel good (or that some organisms don't want certain sensations).

We should stop trying to make things better...

What?

We should stop trying to solve problems...

Huh? Have you read any of this blog?

Four thoughts to ponder

There might be a bigger post in the works. I'm not sure. In the meantime, consider these:

1. Suicide is currently the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. Why not Somalia or Afghanistan? Because the people there are too busy dealing with how horrible their lives are to even contemplate suicide. They haven't even had the opportunity; that's how bad things are for them.

2. People who claim to be happy in public are often lying, because being depressed is a social taboo that can lead to being ostracized -- especially if one has a spouse and/or children.

3. Many people who legitimately think that they love their lives are only ever asked after things have settled down. Humans are fickle; it's very easy to say that something horrible is "worth it" when it's no longer happening. Ask someone if they're happy right after they've gone through a coincidental string of three funerals in a row and then gotten fired from their job and see what they say.

4. Some people love to eat unhealthy foods, but the subjective satisfaction of eating those foods does not make the foods healthy. Likewise, someone may legitimately enjoy living, but that in no way implies that their life is healthy -- for themselves or for the rest of the biosphere.

Update: Alright, I'm seeing conflicting reports on the suicide thing. Some say that it's the eleventh leading cause of death, which, while still high up on the list, doesn't quite make it seem like a crisis or confirmation of there being a substantial number of profoundly unhappy people in the world. It's definitely still a problem that needs to be addressed by society (not in the "take some medication and pretend everything's okay" way, of course), but the huge variation in data just goes to show how sloppy a lot of modern research is. For this reason, and because of my general skepticism regarding statistics, I'll refrain from citing any sources and just state that suicide happens, which is a perfect reason to not have children.

The "hard" problem of consciousness is pretty mushy

The hard problem of consciousness is silly. Here it is, as summed up here:

The problem is how an entity which is apparently immaterial like the human consciousness – it exists, but you can’t locate it, much less measure it – can have arisen from something purely physical, like the arrangement of cells that make up the human body.

You can say the same for abstract concepts like efficiency, health, power, racism, immensity, height, etc. Can you physically locate efficiency? If not, does that mean that efficiency has a soul, or that it's some overly complicated conundrum? Not really.

And yes, you can measure consciousness. Energy is a great analogy for consciousness, because it's not a physical substance in itself; rather, it's a measurement of the ability of physical objects to perform work. You can't feel, taste, touch, hear, or smell energy, but you can know that it exists, because it, by definition, is nothing more complicated than a capacity. Consciousness is just a measurement of the work done by neurons -- a process; in other words, even if it is not the sum of the neurons themselves, it can be demonstrated to be a property or by-product of the neurons for the same reasons that a tornado or river (or their energy content) can be demonstrated to be properties of physical matter, but are not themselves limited by it.

Just because a process is not limited to an unchanging set of physical matter doesn't mean that it requires magic in order to be explained, or that it is somehow beautifully complex; conceding that this is true for just about any abstraction, process, or measurement while simultaneously allowing consciousness to be an exception is preferential thinking at its worst.

The crux of the article, though, has to do with why people mistakenly believe that they have a soul, which is fine, but the issue is made out to be needlessly complicated:

No one has produced any plausible explanation of how the experience of the redness of red could arise from the actions of the brain. It appears fruitless to approach this problem head-on.

I can't make sense of this at all. Anything that confers an evolutionary advantage, no matter how intuitively incomprehensible it may be to us, will be selected for, because the universe will use any impetus or motivator that it can to keep life going. Analogously, the two options with which we're currently presented as explanations for the universe's existence -- that there was a point in time before which no causes existed, and that causality is infinite -- make no sense to humans intuitively, but that doesn't imply that there absolutely must be a third option.

Your brain's inability to imagine things which it did not evolve to imagine does not in any way demonstrate that those things are not business as usual for reality.

As for the subjective feeling of "being" a soul, or an ego that "pilots" a body, I fail to find this phenomenon any more exceptional than any other evolutionary motivator, including non-sensitive reflexes, or even genetic instructions to consume chemicals. When you say things like, "It's truly a marvel how the brain has devised a mechanism for encouraging the reproductive success of organisms by way of thoughts, feelings, awe, wonder, and a sense of beauty," it just sounds like, "I'm in awe of the fact that living things have the capacity to be in awe," or even, "It's amazing how living things are controlled by genetic instructions for no reason whatsoever" to me.

For future reference, here are some immaterial entities which probably exist, but which also probably do not have souls:

Love
Shyness
Hunger
Bravery
Adolescence
Adultery
Success
Enlightenment
Disgust
Exercise

You know what? This list could contain thousands of items, so I'll stop here. Consciousness is not special.

Update: Maybe the following idea will be of help to those who think that consciousness is special simply because it is slightly more complex than its surroundings:

Consciousness, like rivers or exercise, doesn't merely "exist" -- it happens. Think of anything that happens, and you'll soon realize just how unspecial consciousness really is. Can you quantify a baseball game? Can you hold it in your hands? Can you pinpoint exactly where the game is and label it as a material object? No, but baseball games happen, which is something else that the universe allows for. Consciousness happens; our brains are the stadiums.

The importance of free education and reforming general education

The free nature of Wikipedia and YouTube demonstrates a potential direction for education -- if we're smart enough to allow it to happen. Unfortunately, Wikipedia's relevance criteria for articles is based on the argument from popularity (the American Idol/democracy argument), while YouTube is a for-profit website owned by scummy capitalists in league with advertisers devoid of real values; both are interested in pleasing people en masse, either as a symbol of some arbitrary image, or to make massive amounts of money at the expense of everyone else. Never mind the issues with inheriting wealth, allowing profit-generating entities to have owners (or to NOT be owned by everyone), the lack of alternative service providers, or using symbols in the place of hard, empirical observation; that all sucks, but what this post will be about is how such incentives and lack of regulation will keep us retarded for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Let's put it this way: You don't have to pay for an ISP in order to gain Internet access (try a library, school, or other academic location), so if you can read free articles and watch free vlogs that are of higher value than the average, hugely expensive college lecture, then someone better realize the potential that's currently being wasted and pull a Napster for education. Knowing who Napoleon replaced when he came to power or how to factor trinomials makes no sense in the context of the modern person's highly technicized existence, so why are we continuing to teach people such functionally useless nonsense? Do we really get off on artificially conjuring up value in order to give our society the false appearance of being interesting and productive? What about all the stuff that's out there in the real world that actually matters?

Furthermore, now that, thankfully, the music and film industries are dying* (and the porn industry†, believe it or not), I think it's time that the same started happening to the education industry. Let's not pretend that it isn't an industry, either, because that's exactly what it is. Remember when I said that it makes no sense for the average person to learn about Napoleon and complex math? Well, it does make sense -- for the banks and academic institutions administering all the tests, texts, and other materials. Firstly, yes, there are some colleges that are for-profit (I go to one), and secondly, regardless of motive, it's nevertheless still the case that millions of dollars get wasted every year on producing and using crap that not only could be learned by browsing Wikipedia in far less time, but is also totally irrelevant to anyone's ability to:

1. Treat people properly or behave in a competent manner within a social environment

2. Produce things that actually improve society's overall quality by removing or reducing negative impediments

The monetary incentive aside, colleges are still usually interested in upholding an image, which is a symbolic gesture that, in this case, has positive social consequences for the colleges, but hurts both the minds and wallets of those used to this end. Offering needlessly complex math and history courses in order to show off your "standards of quality" and "reputation" is no different from a woman showing off how "graceful" and "respectable" she is by wearing dresses. So all you feminists out there who advocate the slutification of your culture as a means to "realizing gender equality" or some such silliness, drop your personal predilection for the one symbolic standard that hurts your cause and start promoting free education -- for the betterment of all!

Alright, facetious rundown over. Three points:

1. In the future, if we're all going to be streaming movies from hulu.com and downloading mp3s, we might as well take our "online" classes for free as well; it's more efficient than the alternatives, and the technology is already available (even if everyone is too interested in music videos and online shopping to care).

2. If we're doing all education online and for free, then we might as well choose "courses" -- or even individual lectures -- ourselves, and leave out the authoritative administrators altogether. If you want to fix toilets for a living, find a free online service provider who specializes in providing information and examinations for that stuff, then read up on it, participate in the discussions, do your real-life practice lessons, and take a few (hopefully not too memorization-based) tests. This will allow you to earn a certification for your desired skill set without all of the wasted resources and bureaucracy.

3. Even though general education in the modern sense sucks, there should still be a foundational set of ideas that gets taught to everyone at a young age, regardless of what they go on to pursue later in life.

If we as a society ever become interested in this direction, in order to make sure that 3. is established as a societal baseline, we'll first need to scrap the following:

1. Psychology - especially Freudian psychology (if your textbook admits that a concept that it's bringing forth is no longer accepted even by modern psychiatrists, you know you're holding a waste of trees in your hands), but all psychology, really, as it focuses on the individual rather than the environment, doesn't involve empirical observation and testing, and contrives arbitrary "disorders" where almost all people have at least some of the qualifications, even if they don't have enough to qualify for "treatment"

2. Math - Keep arithmetic and times tables, but get rid of trigonometry, geometry, calculus, etc.

3. History - I don't need to know about King Hammurabi or the Boxer Rebellion in order to fix your computer

4. Creative writing - Most fiction writers never go to college for writing, and the few who do often don't get anything out of it. Being graded for such a subjective activity is really silly, anyway.

5. Arbitrary guidelines for research papers - It doesn't matter whether your student indented twice or only once for his block quotation, so stop throwing a fit about it and do something meaningful with your credentials for once

6. Political Science - This is just "Spend hundreds of dollars to listen to the news in person 101"

7. Sex Ed

8. Phys Ed

9. "Philosophy" - This is just "Spend hundreds of dollars to have someone give you a list of their favorite philosophers while refusing to in any way indicate that one might have better ideas than the others, or that other not-so-famous people probably have the same ideas... 101"

10. Music

11. Art

12. Any other liberal arts courses

13. Creation "science" and Intelligent Design

14. The pledge of allegiance

15. Prayer

16. Grades - Either you're good enough to do it in real life or you're not -- no arbitrary, base-10 nonsense necessary.

After we've scrapped all the junk, we'll need to teach the following to all young people before they go on to pursue an occupational field, regardless of what they become interested in learning about later on:

1. Arithmetic

2. English

3. Logic

4. Philosophy (the real kind -- not the "all ideas are equal and memorizing the names of famous people is more important than thinking coherently" kind)

5. Meta-cognition

6. Science (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy)

7. Computer Science (or at least basic computer competency and troubleshooting skills)

8. Statistics

9. Economics

Obviously, anyone who wants to specialize in something will be able to go more in-depth in some of the above areas than what the general requirement entails; additionally, they'll be able to take entirely separate courses for the purpose of acquiring the above mentioned certifications. However, when it comes to what is a requirement, there are certain skills and concepts that should be stressed.

Specific things that everyone should be taught at a young age:

1. How to formulate logical premises and conclusions; logical fallacies and why they're fallacies; how to construct a logic flowchart; what things like non sequiturs are

2. The ever-present possibility of being in error, or of being deceived by one's senses

3. A methodology for living, including methods for how to manage processes, formulate values, and accomplish goals; an understanding of why something is more valuable than something else, or at least appears to be based on sensory information; an understanding of how to determine what to do in various situations and how to make decisions based on opportunity cost, value equations, etc.; how to isolate variables for problem-solving; how to perceive the world as an integrated system dictated by cause-and-effect, relations, input, processing, and output that can be infinitely broken down into subsystems

4. Waste management, which expands upon 3., but is a bit more specific

5. How to conduct an experiment (of the thought variety of otherwise); how the scientific method works; why peer review is important; the differences between dependent variables, independent variables, and controls

6. How to spot any kind of prejudice, bias, superstition, fear/attachment, emotionally-made decisions, or religious thinking (regardless of whether it applies to what people refer to as "religion")

7. The nature of pleasure as a termination of deprivation

8. The arbitrary nature of most criteria in all areas of life, including deadlines, work hours, and weekends. For example, there is no scientific evidence in favor of the idea that working eight hours a day is more effective than working seven or nine, or somehow optimal. In any case, the ubiquity of the arbitrary criteria phenomenon needs to be stressed at a young age.

9. The arbitrary nature of the self; why a peer of yours who is very similar to you ideologically is more "you" than your seven-year-old self; why memory is the only neurological component that prevents individual sentient organisms from realizing that they're the same, in substance, as all other sentient organisms; why your pain and someone else's pain are substantively equivalent in the same way that one chunk of iron and another chunk of iron are substantively equivalent; how chemicals enter and leave the body, and what they do during metabolic activities; why living organisms are sort-of-open systems, complete with processors, memory, storage devices, buses, input devices, output devices, system software, etc.

10. Statistics; how to collect a sample; how to deduce probability outcomes; the significance of sample size; how to calculate odds; how to interpret odds (to avoid wishful thinking, etc.). Note: If 3. and 8. are properly taught, then the idea of percentages will not be taken seriously, even if percentages will still be used on occasion (or maybe not, depending).

11. Attachment avoidance - for death, life, work, loved ones, ideas, beliefs, isms, and material possessions. I'm not sure if I'd take it as far as meditation and related practices, but there should definitely be an emphasis on preparing for the inevitable decay of the "fun" things around you, as well as how to maintain a productive psychology in the absence of fulfilled desires.

12. How to use a personal computer; how to use a mouse and keyboard; how to navigate the Windows operating system; how to keep your PC free from malware, security threats, and performance problems; how to upgrade your PC. Note that this doesn't need to be incredibly comprehensive or technical; it just needs to allow the general population to be computer literate. This deserves far more attention in school than dinosaurs or Pilgrims. Sorry.

13. The different spheres of influence on the individual, and how to recognize them in everyday life. For example, the media wants you to stop smoking not because it's the only thing (or the most painful thing, or the first thing) that can kill you, but because there's plenty of money to be made in ineffective products advertised as being capable of helping you to quit. It's unlikely that lung cancer will be less pleasant for you than the average cancer; likewise, it's likely that you'll live almost as long as you would have had you never started smoking. Besides, quality is more important than quantity, which is always absurdly tiny when weighed against eternity. Oh, and all that marijuana that you think "isn't a drug, man"? Yeah, no one has gotten lung cancer from it yet because your grandparents didn't consume it in massive quantities every day for years. In a nutshell: Do you hold a fairly popular belief or presumption? If yes, then odds are good that someone is making money off of your gullibility.

14. The flaws inherent in the English language and why, despite our needing conventions in order to effectively communicate, most of the rules of English are totally arbitrary and meaningless. For example, synonyms are often superfluous, and capitalization was only necessary in times of hard-to-read Gothic script devoid of paragraphs.

15. What the Bible actually says; comparisons between modern values and ancient Semitic values to demonstrate the huge contrast between the two; emphasis on the barbarism of the Old Testament and why it makes sense in the context of a pastoral people with few resources; emphasis on the previously henotheistic nature of proto-Judaism; how religions, like languages and species, share common ancestors and are related to one another, in spite of the commonly held view that they are spontaneously generated

16. The differences between harmful radiation and harmless radiation (wavelengths, frequencies, photons and electrons, etc.). Honestly, people being afraid of ghosts and Satan is bad enough in 2011. Do they really need to be afraid of cell phones and microwaves, too?

17. Maybe a LITTLE bit of drawing technique or music theory as part of a larger course on something else, just to demonstrate why no one should make millions of dollars by painting portraits of women without eyebrows or by singing songs about love

18. How slaughtering livestock actually works; why meat is just a preference and not a basic human need; how much money and resources could be saved by feeding grain to all of the starving people on the planet as opposed to the pigs and cows on your burgers, which don't need to exist in the first place

Updated 6/2/11: 19. First aid; a mild amount of medical knowledge


Doing all of the above will only be possible in an environment where everyone with innovative ideas is allowed to start his own organization or website and subsequently generate publicity for his efforts; it won't be possible in an environment run by corporations, and it certainly won't be possible in the current academic environment. We must, to the best of our abilities, separate not only education but all forms of human conditioning from money-making; if we don't, we'll never promote proper skill acquisition or social understanding and competency, and courses will continue to waste resources and brain space in the meantime.

Why doesn't anyone talk about this stuff? Well, the majority of people are not in school, so they don't care, because it doesn't affect them -- at least not directly. If more people would stop treating education as either some compartmentalized facet of existence that "just happens" or a pathway to corporate enslavement, then maybe it would be easier for them to see just why our inability to raise children properly leads to war, world hunger, and any other huge, generic problem in the world.

Feel free to add onto one or more of the above lists in the comments section if you have any additional ideas. I'm always looking for more.

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* This is the place where I'm supposed to link you to articles proving that I'm right, but I don't feel like Googling for the obvious.

† Apparently, because so much porn is available for free all over the Internet, producers are struggling to stay in business. I find this kind of amusing for some reason.

Individualism and the absence of goal-setting on the Internet

Let's get one thing straight: The Internet is dominated by a handful of corporate* websites that are for-profit. Government websites and personal hosting space are almost nonexistent; can you name a site that you regularly frequent that isn't corporate-run? When was the last time that one of your friends decided to invest in a few servers and implement something like IIS or FTP for hosting sites or files? Was it practical? Did it prove useful?

On the Internet these days, ads and unskippable commercials abound; incentive and encouragement are given to those who help the corporations in question make money -- so long as such people aren't associated with ideas antithetical to the corporations' pursuits, that is. If you don't give a particular site a bad image or speak out against it, you're acceptable; if you have an interest in genuine goals and completion of finite, quantifiable tasks, however, you're in trouble.

This problem is compounded by the fact that, not only is the Internet run by corporations, it's more or less run by a number of them no larger than the amount of fingers on your two hands. So long as the incentive for providing a web service is profit, no resultant product site is going to be geared toward encouraging people to better themselves, or work. Work, in this society, is not something that consumers do; it's something that producers do, and while most people take on both roles at various points in their lives, they almost never take them on simultaneously.

People aren't interested in making society better unless the betterment of society is incidentally profitable on a personal level, so if they're not getting paid -- especially if they're expecting to be provided a service for purposes other than "work" by someone who is getting paid -- they're not going to be interested in doing anything that isn't for themselves. And, as the saying goes, the customer is always right.

Or is he?

When you really think about it, it does seem as though the primary cause of the monopolization of the Internet is the apathy and selfishness of the average e-consumer. "Here's a new technology that allows you to make videos of yourself and broadcast them to thousands of people; do whatever you want with it except take your clothes off or badmouth us. Oh, and since you can do whatever you want with this functionality, there's no need to go to any other sites with similar functionality ever, ever again!"

This line of thinking keeps the website's superficial, outward integrity in tact while simultaneously enabling the customer to fulfill his every most base desire, regardless of how much of a waste of time the desire is when put into the context of a finite existence continuously guided by decision variables affecting all of sentient life. In other words, the owners of the website get richer by encouraging its users to use the service for pretty much any reason they want, which usually turns out to be one that doesn't involve helping someone else; in simplest terms, the website has no goals.

Sure, there is a distinction to be made between continuous goals and finite goals, and profit is a continuous goal, but what about the latter type? To me, a goal in the truest sense of the word is any completable construct representing the need for an object that can be quantified. For example, "make money," as previously noted, isn't really a goal per se, but "make X amount of money" is, as it contains a quantity variable, and, once the quantity is obtained, the goal ceases to exist.

The problem with our current framework for the Internet is that, not only does it disregard attainable goals, it actively seeks to prevent them from emerging, as it treats the Internet as an end in itself (for the consumer) or a means to the end of profit (for the producer) -- rather than as a means to any other imaginable end, including real, quantitative goals.

Without intervention from an external body -- whether a government or something similarly authoritative -- the Internet, like much of our economic system, will continue to foster goalless profit-seeking, which, while superficially beneficial to the consumer for mere minutes at a time, is ultimately only materially beneficial to a fraction of the human population smaller than the population of the average city. Perhaps someone unaffiliated with a particular website has brilliant ideas, or is working on a project that would be of interest to you, but because the project isn't in the best interest of the two or three major websites capable of hosting it, you never learn that it exists. What a travesty this is if true.

Imagine a world where websites actually promote goal creation and completion. By this, I don't mean vapid social networking "gaming dynamics" (i.e. allowing users to set commenting goals, story writing goals, etc.), which only encourage further self-absorption in the same manner that the video games after which they're modeled do; I mean things like providing propositions for a community, convincing others that your ideas are reasonable, and finding new avenues for promotion and discussion.

A real-world example might be something like a YouTube, Blogger, or even Wikipedia specifically geared toward philosophy, science, and social welfare vlogs/blogs/articles as opposed to just about any non-"offensive" videos or articles that one could imagine. A mission statement or declaration of methodology and goals would be evident everywhere on the site, and all users would be subject to bans based not on how their content affected others emotionally, but on whether the content was logical and conducive to the goals proposed by the site. There would be no owners, and everyone would have access to all editable components and modules.

In this scenario, suddenly, the aforementioned sites are no longer doing everything [legal] that they can in order to get ahead of everyone else; instead, they're working toward seeing demonstrable, practical results of proposed solutions to the world's problems. Users are encouraged not to simply behave themselves, but to actually do work. The dichotomy of user and designer has collapsed; everyone fulfills both roles simultaneously, creating a positive feedback loop of suggestion input and implementation. Everyone involved consumes resources or uses services in order to make other resources and services better, with the latter resources and services doing the same, etc., all to the end of improving society.

So long as problems exist, it should be every major organizational entity's goal to solve them. This goal can be broken into a plethora of sub-goals, of course, but it should nevertheless lie at the foundation of every organization's agenda, no matter the circumstance. Until we stop treating everyone as a source of our own personal satisfaction, though, this will not happen.

So just imagine it for a second. Imagine being able to edit someone else's blog, because you've both agreed beforehand on the direction and goals of the blog. Imagine participating on (and owning) a YouTube channel owned by fifty other people, each capable of uploading and favoriting videos. Imagine being able to, as something like a site moderator or administrator, suggest whether someone should be removed from the group or have their videos deleted, but not being able to actually do those things on your own without the input of the entire group. Imagine being able to alert everyone involved to potential areas of expansion. Imagine a website that exists not to provide people a service, but to get something done. People "get things done" and set goals all the time in their own personal lives, so why shouldn't a website advertise itself for this same purpose? A simple "Calling all interested parties: We need someone to start writing material on X subject. So and so is already working on Y subject, but if you think you have a better way, let so and so know" would suffice.

It would certainly beat what we currently have.

The interesting thing is that most of the above is possible right now on a small scale, but the services provided by the sites that can be used in this manner don't exactly help in any significant way. While it's certainly possible for you to write a blog or book on a topic that is actually important, without promotion from a major organization tailored specifically toward promoting and regulating content like yours, it probably isn't going to matter much.

Oh well. Until progress in this area is made, the alternative should be group YouTube channels, group blogs, wikis, etc.

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* Wikipedia is an interesting exception. I'm in support of its method, but not its goals. Modern people tend to conflate method with goals quite often, which is unfortunate, because the technology is fantastic, in this case, and could be used in a more stringent and socially beneficial manner. Instead, Wikipedia contributors are content to delete articles for interesting ideas unfamiliar to the general public, for example, but if something which promotes horrible values is incredibly popular, it's "relevant" to humanity in some skewed way, and thus worthy of an article according to the site.

I'm not against providing or caching information on every conceivable topic, because free information, no matter how trivial, could prove useful to someone in the future. However, even if one concedes this, Wikipedia's only "goal" is to let people learn more about things they've already heard of. Popularity is only one form of relevance; relying on it to demonstrate the benefit of your website to society at large is, like democracy, a form of argumentum ad populum.

Going beyond technical solutions -- into the territory of meta-cognition and abstraction

I'd like to address a commonly held misconception regarding the functioning of human societies -- specifically pertaining to the nature of social conflict. It seems that organizations such as the Venus Project and the Zeitgeist Movement subscribe to the notion that conflict is the result of material scarcity. This concerns me, as I see some potential in the general direction proposed by those organizations -- and am, as always, interested in the revaluation of our society and culture -- but see no merit in passively espousing the "scarcity" point of view.

The problem with this proposed line of thinking is that it brazenly ignores the intensity and fervor with which the average person defends his preconceptions -- about life, politics, economics, religion, practical matters, art. Even in a society free from social stratification, material inequities, barter, ownership, etc., there would still be a need for stringent monitoring of thought systems, for having open access to material resources would in no way mitigate the stresses of philosophical division. For example, sure, there would be less incentive to steal in a society where no one could profit from reselling a stolen item, or where no one would cache items in order to conceal them from neighbors, but would this so-called technical solution have any impact whatsoever on whether someone thought that the purpose of life is to reproduce and have fun? I think not.

Hunter-gatherer societies were almost universally egalitarian, and rarely generated murder or went to war with one another, but they were also notoriously superstitious in constitution. Technical solutions should be greatly favored over the band-aids and services which are in current practice, but they're only part of the solution as long as minds are involved.

Ideas should do battle... fairly

The process of memetic selection, while possible in the face of apathy, or even a lack of awareness that it is ongoing, appears best conducted with a certain degree of seriousness and passion for making progress. This entails not only that those involved should hear all new information introduced by a peer, but also that such information should be presented as though it bears considerable gravity upon the circumstance of being human.

The real issue, though, is that it's hard to make a fight of ideas fair; everyone seems to possess some kind of preconditioned conception of what the best course of action is, and either is unwilling to hear the opposition, or sees the fight itself as some kind of bizarre, frivolous game where the goal is to win (especially where an "in-group" is watching, or where there is some set of figurative "belongings" to guard and protect). Cognitive biases, when combined with a genuine lack of respect for the pursuit of understanding, breed cheating in the forms of: slander, trolling, character assassination, poisoning the well, group bullying, scare tactics, threats, red herrings, being louder than your opponent, sticking your fingers in your ears, propaganda, falsely associating an idea with something obviously stupid or horrible, hyperbole, making unfair comparisons....

You get the idea.

If you have your "thing" that you like to do, and define yourself by that "thing," you're going to do everything that you can to make sure that you are "the one who does his thing" -- even if it means throwing sand in someone's face, distracting the fighters, or otherwise throwing a wrench into the works. Not only is this unfair, it's unproductive, and usually an implicit admission of a lack of regard for the process of selecting the best ideas; this lack is corrosive to mutually beneficial "discussion" relationships, and often leads to unnecessary conflict, passive aggression, and other negative "forces" which have absolutely no business in any selection process -- whether of ideas or something else.

I couldn't fathom a scientific, peer reviewed journal being criticized by a particular institution with terse comments like, "Are you kidding me? Do you really think that Neanderthal DNA is present in the human genome?" or "Oh God, not more of that 'dark energy' crap again. Save it, Einstein," or "What you have to say about the structure of the DNA molecule is nice and all, but don't you hate Jews? Get out of here, Jew-hater!"

If you don't have respect for the rules of the game, don't play.

A note before you comment: There was a misunderstanding or two recently in some of the comments sections of my posts. It is unlikely that this post is referring to you personally in any way, regardless of who you are; clarification was provided in at least one instance. My mind works by relation, meaning that I get ideas based on tangential experiences; the ideas are very rarely direct reactions. This post applies universally, as far as I can tell, and is something that all of mankind should heed.