Greta Thunberg is the only person I am aware of thinking reasonably and collectedly about her own future. No one in the mainstream seems to realize how destructive climate change will be. She does. She is the only climate realist most people are aware of, therefore.

Of course, part of her reason is selfish. Whose isn’t, though? Not wanting to die from climate change and its resultant wars is damn good motivation to do something about it.

What’s sad is how many adults act like she’s crazy or misguided or some sort of puppet, when in reality they are completely wrong — as events already are proving them to be. This will only get worse, but luckily for them by the time it gets really bad they’ll all be dead. The judgment of future societies will not be kind to them, though, nor should it be. They are the useful idiots of history.

People like me get told all the time that we know nothing because we have no credentials — that we can’t possibly have any idea what we’re talking about. But I’d just like to point out that I wrote this four whole months before the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 737 Max crash.

This automated pitch control system that relies on only one sensor (this is a big no-no in this arena) sounds truly moronic and it will likely result in more crashes as currently designed IMO.

Something I’m not exactly proud of being right about, but credentials are only worth as much as the intelligence and systems understanding behind them. And, usually, there’s not all that much there there.

I’d rather be right than anything else. It’s a lot harder work but it feels a lot better, too. If credentials gave me anything I cared about having, I’d get some. School and anything memorizable is absurdly easy for me. But credentials don’t give me anything I care about so I’ll just keep being right while others waste time making themselves dumber and more conformist.

Meet your heroes.

You will quickly reach something you think is utterly trivial, required knowledge, they know absolutely nothing about.
Your mental model of what’s essential, that you developed in isolation from others, is actually impossibly broken.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) August 30, 2019

Absolutely true.

People often ascribe high intelligence to me because I know twice or three times as much as they do. But I know two percent or even three percent of the available knowledge. They know one percent. So yes, I know twice or even three times as much but it’s an illusion in an important sense.

Because I still don’t know anything! And as you get older and wiser, you see more and more the vast gulfs in your knowledge and understanding that will never be filled, and can never be filled. The chasms ever widen and your brain still moves at the same old speed as before.

So someone is like, “You are so smart!” And then I’m thinking, “Damn, I’m an idiot, so if this person thinks I am smart….”

If you don't believe in borders why do you lock your front door at night?

Your House has a selectively permeable border – you front door. The idea of selectively permeable borders works at ALL scales. https://t.co/HlUQXSLAWF

— GuruAnaerobic (@GuruAnaerobic) August 29, 2019

This isn’t a perfect analogy, but agreed. Countries aren’t the same as homes, but in many important senses they are. I’m wary of analogies that conceal more than they reveal but in this case it works. Open borders is an idea that can only function non-destructively with roughly similar cultures, level of development and social welfare systems. Otherwise, a lot of that will get destroyed.

Stop Mocking Vegans.

No. Veganism is not a diet that can support human survival. It’s a religion, and a stupid one at that. If you want to be weak and malnourished and in constant cognitive decline, be vegan.