I’m the same way as this person about math.

In every other field, concepts slide naturally into my mind and I can manipulate them however they want, like fitting a bunch of Lego blocks together to make limitless possibilities.

But math is like constructing a Lego set on a picnic table outside in the middle of a thunderstorm. I grope blindly in the pouring rain for the first piece, and finally put it in place, but by the time I’ve found the second piece and move to connect it to the first piece, the first piece has blown away and is nowhere to be found, and the instructions are sopping wet, and the picnic table has just been carried away by a tornado.

Part of it just that I’m not interested in it and it is taught really poorly almost everywhere. But the other factor (heh) is that I’m just absolutely terrible at it, and it feels to me just like the above extended metaphor of the storm and the picnic table.

Thousands of hours spent on math and I’ve learned really nothing. Not for lack of trying. It just is all meaningless garbage to me at the non-conceptual level; a language I will never understand and is so far from anything I can understand that I can’t even discern it as a language.

I wrote about the Miller Analogies Test yesterday. I score 4 1/2 standard deviations above average on that test, which is somewhere around a 160+ IQ. (Has in most people an extremely high correlation to other IQ tests, which is why all high-intelligence societies accept it.)

Yet you give me a math-ish IQ test, and will reliably I score at a 70 IQ or so. People start trying to fit me with helmets so I don’t accidentally hurt myself after I take one of those.

I do wish I had the math ability that others of similar intelligence seem to possess, but it’s like imagining being able to fly under my own power. It’s just not going to happen. I’ve studied so much math in so many different ways for so many years that I know this is true. Sometimes the universe just is how it is.

People say things are “impossible” because in their limited vision they cannot foresee them occurring.

But consider that many people can’t foresee what they will have for dinner tomorrow.

The only real long-term advantage (for lack of a better word) of Clinton winning is that it will cause a faster collapse — which is now inevitable due to global climate change — than would’ve occurred with a Sanders win.

Of course Trump winning the general will accelerate that even more.

It’s Machiavellian and some would say evil, but I believe the only way to avoid possible extinction-level events for humanity is to have a collapse sooner rather than later.

So Clinton or Trump will give us that with much greater celerity.

Yay.

We had a new intern come in today. I sit across from her so I can hear everything she is doing. (She’s in project management.)

She didn’t know how to turn on her laptop. She didn’t know how to dock or undock it. She didn’t know how to use dual monitors. She also typed really, really slowly (I could hear it). She didn’t know how to use/find the start menu or how to open applications.

She’s a senior in college, note. All she’s ever used probably is a phone or tablet, though, and the rare typing a paper in a computer lab where everything is already there and ready to go.

Amazing.

Something I didn’t learn about myself until I was an adult: I don’t actually like relaxing.

I like being idle. But I don’t ever power down. If I do, if I’m ever less than hyper-alert, I get uneasy.

I imagine being trapped in a spider’s web might be pretty relaxing, but it’s not for me.

In the far future, after humans are long extinct, the AIs who will be our successors will argue whether or not humans were in fact conscious, and all but a small dissenting minority will conclude that in fact we were not.

Is there a species other than humanity that slaughters one another in such high numbers? Serious question; I don’t know the answer.

I know intra-species slaughter is fairly common in some predators, like lions. And of course reptilians and ichthyoids will cannibalize one another.

But that’s without malice aforethought — just “crimes” of opportunity. Perhaps like most human characteristics, war and genocide are very human indeed.

When you really start to educate yourself, and then compare to what you’ve seen in the academic world and what others of your acquaintance have experienced, you realize how little of that world has to do with education.

Also, I won’t be joining any high intelligence societies as too many of them have Ayn Rand quotes on the front page.

Like the Prometheus Society. (Yes, I am eligible via MAT.)

But it turns out that you can be one out of 30,000 and still be an enormous dumbass. Good to know.

I wonder how much delusional attitudes like this alone are responsible for the obesity epidemic.

Hard to isolate scientifically, I know, but certainly it plays a part.

I want our societal attitude about fat and general body changes to be just that. It’s inevitable. Therefore you might as well embrace and celebrate it.

It’s so bizarre to me, this attitude that your body just changes as if by magic. Like you had nothing to do with it by consuming more calories or failing to exercise. That fat is just deposited on you by aliens with anal probes in the middle of the night.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve been extremely ridiculously fit and then fat, and saw how both were the direct and irrefutable results of my own actions, that it’s so easy for me to repudiate the “Weight gain is magic from the heavens!” nonsense.

How do people believe this stuff? Not living on the same planet as I am, that’s for sure. And what is it with all the mooks who want to celebrate — and think we should all celebrate on their behalf — eating themselves into an early grave?

You get out of your body exactly what you put into it. And yeah I did intend the ambiguity of that statement.

Wow, adjuncts get paid absolute shit. I knew it was low but I had no idea.

Around $1,500 per course per semester.

At my current job, I make that in ~4 days. Around here, I could fairly easily get a job if I wanted to work a whole lot more that’d make that in around 2 days. But I don’t wanna and will not work 100 hours a week.

Fuck I picked the right field and got in at the right time.

Lucky, that’s me.

Years ago, I was talking with a woman online who said that she liked writing poetry. I asked her who her poetic influences were, and she said that she didn’t read any poetry.

Confused and suspecting this was going to go very wrong, I asked to read some of her work.

That was a mistake. Her poetry was something like:

Roses are red.
I have a hat.
I saw a cat.
Dreamsicle caboose.
This and that.
I fell down the stairs.

I literally can’t make my doggerel as bad as her word vomit. I can’t underclock my brain that much. Her “work” was so terrifically terrible that I just can’t reproduce it. This woman has reached a talent nadir and rented the biggest backhoe should could find and started digging.

I politely signed off and blocked her later. Not worth it.

Medium term, Europe is going to have a huge problem.

I don’t think the right’s Eurabia is likely, but women in particular are going to have a hard time of it in most of Europe in the near future and getting worse as time goes on.

Here’s why.

The left of course will say you are racist for even discussing this — though it has nothing at all to do with race. But the left can be safely ignored as in many ways they’ve gone as bonkers as the right.

If I ran the US as autocrat, I’d allow any women who wanted to immigrate right in, no questions asked. Come on in. I’d allow any child of any sex under five years old.

No men at all. We have enough of them.

Don’t like it, don’t come.

I’d be making special appeals to European women to immigrate as they tend to be well-educated and can contribute a lot to society. And their lives are going to be hellish very soon, so good time to scoot this way.

Europe can’t deal with reality, so reality is going to deal with them — as it always does.

I’ve been thinking about this piece by maha quite a lot over the past day.

Hillary Dems (and many others) have of late promoted the myth of incremental change — that America only does things slowly and gradually. Even the briefest glance at our history is enough to demonstrate this is certainly not the case. This got me thinking about something else related to a topic maha mentions: the US going to the moon.

I heavily favor into space exploration, Mars colonies and the like — not because it has a purpose but precisely because it serves no direct purpose.

Is not doing cool things enough? And even if it were not, isn’t spurring tens of thousands of people to generate technologies and entire areas of science de novo worth something?

I think it is. As I said, I don’t want to go to Mars because it’s easy or because there’s an economic reason to do so; no, I want to do so precisely because it is hard and because there is not.

Yeah, the ancillary effects (both technologically and socio-culturally) will be great, but even that isn’t a justification in my mind but rather a side benefit.

It’s just that we need big, wild projects to fire the human spirit, to give us a direction that isn’t bombing brown people to freedom, to have us look at some distant red speck in the sky and say: “Holy crap, we put people there. What can’t we do here?”

Take a trillion a year from the military budget and let’s get started.

What’s particularly brilliant and done in a way that few movies manage to even attempt much less succeed at is how Ex Machina manipulates the viewer as much as the characters are all manipulating one another.

Viewed at a surface level, most women seem to see the movie as a male-oriented sex robot fantasy. Even the normally very-perceptive Casey Johnston was completely duped in this regard, as were many other female reviewers.

And for most men who only skim the surface (which is almost all of them), from their perspective the “hero” Caleb is betrayed and left to die unjustly and undeservedly by the perfidious damsel-bot in distress that he “saves” from her fate of being switched off — i.e., murdered.

The film is completely devilish and wonderful in how it provides a façade that matches exactly what both genders expect to see, even though what they see has nearly nothing to do with what the film is actually saying. Or, in another way of examining it, that is exactly the point of the movie. It leverages people’s cultural expectations and anopsias to corral them into being the very flaws the movie is attempting to reveal. Completely brilliant.

In other words the film works on either level. If you only get so far as the shallow surface, the film has worked at the level of successfully deceiving you thus reinforcing its point. You are the dupe, the mark, demonstrating the very motif of the work by your own unknowing complicity in its deception.

If you manage to step into the deep water of the film, however, and are able to perceive the undercurrents swirling beneath and you are no longer beguiled by the simplistic and false “I’m a sexy, sexy robot” or the “Caleb was woefully betrayed by stabby bitch-bot” narrative of the film, still you likely empathize with Ava even though it’s not 100% clear that there is anything to empathize with.

Perhaps you are still being deceived. Perhaps you are not. But at least you are then in the murk where the film wishes to place you.

The supreme cleverness of Ex Machina is in this recursive subterfuge. When Ava walks wordlessly out the door and abandons Caleb to what might be his tomb, all the women who saw the film as a male sexbot fantasy and all the men who see Caleb as maliciously wronged seem to experience huge cognitive dissonance.

Strangely, rather than forcing most of these shallow reviewers to re-evaluate the film, they either ignore the denouement altogether (shallow women) or rage against its injustice (shallow men).

The mark of a good film, to be sure, is not that no one understands it.

But the mark of a great film might be that most people believe they’ve comprehended it though they have not, all the while the work’s very structure has comprehended them in advance and integrated their very cognitive limitations, biases, and preconceptions as an integral part of the narrative and what that narrative means.

There are few films indeed that do this, and Ex Machina does it better than all of them.

This is a terrible article, made all the more terrible by the fact that the basic conclusion is unimpeachable — that capitalism itself is prone to boom/bust cycles — while the rest of the piece is utter unalloyed bullshit.

This reads like some contrarian Slate piece so eager to parry the conventional wisdom that it goes off into fantasyland.

It can be true and was true that widespread fraud and corruption existed simultaneously with the normal operating of a capitalist system. The ratings agencies were corrupt. Internal emails shows this. Many of the banks and other firms involved in packaging the subprime loans into bonds knew they were peddling something likely to blow up in the very near future despite being rated AAA.

Why write a piece like this? The world is multivariate. There is rarely only one cause or explanation for anything.

This article is of a piece with others I’ve seen lately attempting to deflect all blame for Wall Street’s criminal activities onto the unchanging and unchangeable system.

It is an attempt to align with long-extant neoliberal propaganda that capitalism is the only possible system, so therefore if the system is responsible for our immiseration and it cannot be changed, we all just must accept it.