Let’s try this again

For reasons that I will hopefully describe in a proper essay on Monday, I’m going to try a different format for a while. I’m aiming for idea-density, conciseness, perspicacity, and plainness of style. To do this, I’ll be sacrificing examples, illustrations, explanations, and evidence (all the best things in life) in order to state as many of my tentative conclusions as possible.

Two exceptions:

1) I’ll encourage anyone still reading this bullshit to ask me for those good things (examples et al.), in which case I’ll expand the “stub” in the comments. Maybe I won’t be able to! You won’t know unless you ask. :O)

2) I intend to expand one of the ideas in a proper post each Monday.

With (1) comes a new comment policy on my part: reactions and replies are the first thing I do in the morning, and are due within 36 hours of the comment.

First I’m going to try it like this, all of them bunched into a single post. Then I’ll try many small posts.

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It would be neat if there existed a web application that used the mouse to draw on an HTML5 canvas, MS Paint style. A quick search shows I’m not the only one, but I can’t say whether it exists yet. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=html5+canvas+drawimage&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#channel=fs&q=html5+canvas+paint+mouse

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I got Euclid’s Elements for Christmas. It’s taught me that trying to work out a proposition in my head is a great way to wake up the ol’ visuospatial reasoning. I can’t remember everything well enough to do proofs, I’m just maybe trying to draw an isosceles triangle in my head with a ruler and compass.

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Here’s a format for submitting edits given only ASCII:

++Enclose additions in double plus signs++
–Enclose deletions in double minus signs.–
((Enclose comments in double parentheses. Or something.))

Here’s an alternative format:

+[Add this text]
-[Delete this text]
![A comment.]

In my fever dreams, the editor would submit a copy of the offending text file with corrections added inline++ like this++. The writer could run it through a simple parser that presents each proposed edit with the option to accept or reject, and comment on each decision if he so desires. The parser validates the rest of the file against the original text to avoid surreptitious edits, then spits out the new file and a comments file to send to the editor.

This could also be implemented in a sort of wiki where you can choose from different editors’ edit files, depending on whose judgment you trust. I’ll try to implement this on the blog soon.

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The social-hierarchical situation probably came first, but the main reason there are more people doing real work than doing “idea” work for a living is that it takes more work to implement an idea than it does to dream it up. So it’s supply and demand, and this fact seems to support a much larger population than if creative thinking were the time-consuming portion, and realizing ideas were relatively quick and easy.

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Finished reading “The Celestine Prophecy” today. The “insights” were an interesting practical blueprint for the gnostic lifestyle and seeking personal transcendence into godhood. The story was juvenile shit, maybe because the author was trying to convert juvenile little shits. This book should be replaced with a short DIY, a couple of diagrams, and a FAQ. Not recommended unless a suitable replacement cannot be found.

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Read “As I Lay Dying” the other week. I’m of two minds on the writing style, which was very important, but assumes modern English. It is therefore doomed to a short lifetime because it can’t be translated between languages or generations. Otherwise, a pretty good psychodrama that seems to address the question of how much respect it is practical to show to the dead. Kind of a Rorschach test that way. Recommended.

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Watched “Captain Phillips” on Sunday. Another psychodrama of stealthy schadenfreude as we watch Tom Hanks driven by circumstance from a confident, competent ship’s captain into a crying little bitch. The surprising take on Somalians as decadent savages with some transcendental, human qualities like hope was a little ham-handed, though interesting. It accidentally inspired me to realize two possible causes for masochism: as a relief from insensate nihilism, and as fuel for an egoistic martyr complex. Not recommended.

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Add high waist:shoulders ratio to intelligence-correlated physiognomic traits. This was a bad oversight, because it seems to be a medium-strength correlation.

Tex himself appears to be Mousterian MT with a high, vertical Amud forehead.

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Another survival strategy for thals when SHTF is to be in the missile development program, or whatever is analogous at the moment. Probably the NSA, at the moment. The winning side may overlook your Nazism to exploit your talent to build rockets.

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It is an interesting to imagine a nation of redheads only. They have a high, tight IQ distribution like the Japanese, centered somewhere around 110-115, but they produce very few geniuses of any caliber (much less a Mozart or an Euler). I seem to be at the upper end, myself, treading water somewhere in the 135 region. They are, in the main, civil, Amud, feminine, and aspergic. The males are not sexually desirable, as a rule. I seem to be as Mousterian-looking as they come, and I’m not really Mousterian-looking, which may explain where all the tall, dark, handsome geniuses went. In particular, you don’t really see gingers with brown eyes except in cold, cold Scandanavia, the old Mousterian stomping ground.

There are separate genes for red hair and red beard. Red hair probably comes from melons, and red beards probably come from neanderthals. I would consider red hair to be a medium physiognomic correlate of intelligence, also yielding an upper limit of maybe 145.

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Great comment from Tex:

I blame Neanderthals too. I blame them because they had to survive on actual food instead of sugar water like stick insects. It was the need of Neanderthals for actual protein and solid nutrients that has compromised the sugar absorption rates of modern people. I wish we could all subsist on twizzlers and Big Gulp soda buckets all day long instead of getting evil diabetes and cancer from these perfectly reasonable “food” sources.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=5133406188107963638&postID=1531991536419517606

He’s referring to the way negroids are faring relatively okay under the industrial grain-based diet. This probably excludes the effects of GM. In my mind, this puts a rather nasty spin on immense federal corn subsidies, prompting me to ask “Why?”

No potential answers yet.

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I want to find various rankings of geniuses in different fields, similar to Lev Landau’s logarithmic scale. Having done this, I’d put their pictures together and look for patterns, categories, similarities, etc. I may want to dig up that study about the effects of intelligence on achievement in different fields (I think Dr. Thompson had it), but it basically said what you’d expect. STEM is highly g-loaded, creative genius is far less so (0.15ish, if I recall).

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I tentatively suggest to myself that I revise some of my conceptions of forerunner genius. The thal distribution today probably has a much higher spread and a lower mean than melons, suggesting more thal supergeniuses and more melon 3-4 SD geniuses. Maybe the melon-backs are steadily getting smaller, Goethe excepted of course.

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Some descriptions of intuitive-style visuospatial geniuses (particularly Ramanujan). They do not show their work and are not well-disposed to proofs, preferring to state an “obvious” conclusion and move on to the next. They consider a thing true if it “feels” correct, because they are “seeing” it. “Let someone else spend their time proving all the little details.” However, they can be prompted to explain themselves at length, whereupon they are patient teachers. They are well-advised to organize their thoughts into well-organized lists and outlines for others to cross-examine for correctness.

They have only two possible attitudes toward any particular subject, 1) ferocious, obsessive zeal and 2) cautious indifference, to avoid being caught up in the former. They do not operate systematically, but rather by extreme paradigm shifts due to their visionary natures. No system can be created quickly enough to be relevant before the next paradigm shift occurs and suggests a completely different system. They may be a libertarian one month, a communist the next, and some blend of the two the next.

Though I’m not bright enough to be a genius, I seem to be a degraded version of this type. This description obviously gives rise to my “shotgun in the dark” method of posting and life hacking. I am usually making several lifestyle experiments at once, without taking data. There is a logic to this approach, because my intuitions are better than mere chance. There is a lot of noise in the “data”, but enough of the changes have positive effects to offset the negative effects and overall opportunity cost.

Enough for now.