Tag Archives: maturity

October 30, 2009

Wisdom I Learned Working In IT: Nothing is Magical

By wise sloth

I worked in the IT field for nine years, most of it as a help desk technician. It would be an understatement to say my job hasn’t been easy. Anyone who works on computers is part detective, part engineer, part psychologist, part interior designer, part whipping boy, and a shit load of other things that require you to push your mind to its limit in multiple directions every day. When you’re surrounded by intimidatingly mysterious problems every day, you think with your nose to the ground.

Computers aren’t mysterious, magical or spiritual. When you have a computer problem, you don’t pray. You call the helpdesk because deep down, you understand how reality works. Nothing happens because of magic, divine intervention or fate. Absolutely nothing ever happens for no reason at all. Every event in this universe is the product of a cause and effect chain of events. I’m not saying God isn’t real, just that if God is real, it doesn’t break the rules the natural laws the universe operates on.

 

 

When your car or computer breaks down, you don’t wonder if someone put a curse on it. Common sense tells you it happened for a cut and dry, logical, scientific reason. You can always confirm this by looking at the evidence and follow the chain of events backward logically to find the secular source of the problem. Yet, people pick and choose times to suspend sanity and slip back into magical thinking.

I once got a call from a user who said something was wrong with her computer. At the time I had a program that let me connect to other computers remotely and take control of the mouse and keyboard. I took control of her computer and started controlling her mouse remotely to check various settings on her computer. I made the mistake of not warning her that I was going to take control of her computer. When she saw her mouse start opening folders, she screamed into the phone, “MY COMPUTER IS POSSESSED!” That really happened. When I got off the phone with her I thought, “If this lady thinks ghosts haunt computers, how much else does she not understand about the universe? Her reality must be a scary place to live.”

A lot of people don’t like to accept that we live in a scientific universe because it’s easier to absolve yourself of ignorance by saying the universe is unknowable and to excuse yourself from responsibility because everything is part of God’s plan, and He’s going to clean up all our messes. It has been my experience, both a computer technician and a human being, that this is a destructive way of looking at life. It never solves anything, and it paralyzes us from taking realistic cause and effect measures to fix our problems. If you don’t believe me, then pray to God to fix your computer the next time your hard drive burns out and see what happens.

Or, when anything goes wrong in your life, don’t panic. Remind yourself, there’s a logical reason why it’s not working. If it seems mysterious, it’s just because you haven’t followed the cause and effect trail to the source of the problem using salt-of-the-earth deductive and/or inductive reasoning.

 

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Meaning of Life
How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
Biker Philosophy
My Tweets About Philosophy 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in How to Think Like a Genius

October 30, 2009

Every grain of knowledge is valuable. Every grain of ignorance is destructive.

By wise sloth

On the surface, it would seem there’s nothing wrong with being a little stupid or a little ditsy, but this belief is unequivocally false. It’s not okay to be a little stupid. At the same time, actively being stupid is just as bad as passively neglecting to dedicate your life to mental and personal growth.

Every action has its consequences. The consequences of the little stupid thoughts you allow yourself to think, and the consequences of the little smart things you fail to, are like tiny grains of sand. In and of themselves, they may not seem like much, but over the course of your life they add up into a giant dune. Imagine how heavy that dune would be if it were all resting on one end of a scale. Now imagine the other end of the scale where the smart grains go. If you haven’t dedicated your life to vigilantly combating your own ignorance and striving to improve your mind, then how many intelligent grains of sand do you think you’ll have to weigh against the ignorant ones?

Unfortunately, this is more than just a cute hypothetical question. Imagine taking all the little, seemingly innocuous stupid things you’ve done and smart things you’ve failed to do through the course of your entire life, and ask yourself honestly, “What are the cumulative, real-world consequences?

Ultimately, the consequence is you failed to fulfill your potential. You took your one shot at life, the most precious and sacred thing in the universe, and wasted it. And on what? You had the chance to live a life more brilliant and divine than the night sky and you squandered it watching reality TV and cat videos, listening to rap music that glorifies hurting other people, and gossiping about celebrities whose importance you know is a lie. Drug addicts live life more spectacularly than that. At least they know you’re supposed to feel something. But you, your life was completely in vain because you thought that floating just around the status quo was good enough and you didn’t have any responsibility to put any real effort into fulfilling your potential.

Now let’s take this a step further. Imagine if everybody in your society took their person ignorance/intelligence scales and dumped their sands onto one huge scale. Would your society’s scale be heavier on the ignorant side or heavier on the intelligent side? I know for sure my society’s scale would lean to the ignorant side. And what do you think the consequences of that much stupidity would be? Mind you, the consequences of one person snuffing out their own spark of divinity is as bad as an entire universe disappearing. How much worse would it be for the majority of an entire society to do that? And what would happen to that society?

Extinction. That’s what would happen to that society. Or at least, the consequences of their ignorance would set in motion the cause and effect chain of events leading in the direction of extinction. And at some point, the momentum of those consequences would pass the tipping point, the point of no return.

Look at who you are. Look at what you think and what you do. Look at the society you live in and ask yourself honestly, where is all this going?

If you ask me, I don’t think anyone could shovel enough sand off society’s scale to tip it back to the side of intelligence. I think the world is beyond saving. I think it’s just time to buy a bunker, a rainwater collector, some back issues of Playboy and a ton of MREs.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

The Meaning of Life
How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
Biker Philosophy
My Tweets About Philosophy 

 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Education, Knowledge and Learning

October 30, 2009

10 Steps To Becoming A Genius

By wise sloth

1: Accept you need to fulfill your mind’s potential.

Look at the graph below. Where on the graph would you mark yourself if the far left represented the ignorance of a newborn baby and the far right represented the genius of Leonardo Da Vince?

(Ignorance) 1—2—3—4— (Normal) —6—7—8—9—10 (Genius)

Okay, that was a trick. Without changing your position on the graph, replace the word “Ignorance” with “Insanity,” and replace the word “Genius” with “Sane.”

The definition of the word “sane” is: “having or showing reason, sound judgment, or good sense.”

Think about a baby. Does a baby think or act with sound reason, judgment, and sense? No. If an adult acted like a one-year-old, he’d be locked away in a mental institute. We’re all born insane, and our progress towards sanity doesn’t happen on its own. As we grow up, our brains develop and automatically make us more capable of sanity, but in to grow to your full potential you have to proactively use reason, sound judgment, and common sense.

Genius isn’t a condition you’re born with. It’s the process of pushing your mind to its unique potential. Once you’ve pushed your mind to what it’s capable of, you’ll be the person you’re capable of becoming.

 

 

 2: Accept you’re capable of becoming a genius.

If you’re smart enough to graduate high school, then you’re smart enough to become a genius. How many song lyrics, movie characters, book titles, sports statistics, telephone numbers and street names will you memorize in your life?  How many books/magazines/news articles/websites/blogs have you/will you read? When you add it all up, the number is astronomical even if you score low on a traditional I.Q. test.

You’ll never reach the limits of your mind. Therefore, the limits of your mental potential are defined more by what you believe they are than what they actually are. You have the potential to become an expert at just about anything if you would only allow yourself permission to become what you’re capable of becoming and push yourself as far as you can go.

 

 

3: Accept you’re ignorant.

Everyone is born insane, and we become saner by learning. But no matter how much you learn, you’ll always be an ant on a speck of dirt in an endless universe. Nobody knows shit about shit, and we’re all so lost we don’t even know how lost we are. So conceit is a delusion, and humility is sanity. The smarter you think you are, the less room and motivation you give yourself to grow. The more humbly you accept your ignorance, the more room and motivation you give yourself to grow.

 

https://youtu.be/54uhSPxrOtA

 

4: Accept everyone is ignorant in different ways to different degrees.

Humanity doesn’t have life figured out. Our entire history has been a slow process of clueless adults raising clueless children. The younger generation always takes it for granted their parents’ generation has it all figured out. So children devote their lives to mimicking their elders only to waste their lives re-enacting primitive, obsolete customs invented by pompous monkeys.

Take everything you learn with a grain of salt. Even if someone teaches you something true, it’s probably still incomplete. Questioning people and their belief systems can only help you arrive at a clearer perception of the truth. Blind faith can only result in blindness.

 

https://youtu.be/hBQTLjuRTh4

 

5: Decide what you want to learn.

Nobody can know everything. The end goal of genius isn’t to master every field of learning but to master the one/s that are most important to you. The only way you’ll have the motivation to master anything, is to love doing it. Find something you love, and excel at that. If you try to master something you aren’t terminally passionate about, you’re either going to quit or be miserable, which would defeat the purpose.

 

6: Develop a systematic plan to understand life.

Imagine it’s Sunday afternoon, and you don’t have to go to work, but you’ve got a ton of errands and chores you need to get done. If you just wander around the house and do a chore here and there when you just happen to find yourself in a room that needs something done it’s going to take forever to get all your chores done. Imagine driving around town aimlessly and hoping you run across the store or business you need to get something done at. You’ll never accomplish all your goals.

Becoming a genius (aka growing up, aka becoming sane) is the same way. You’re not going to be able to wander through life aimlessly, casually doing the things you feel inspired or hungry to do and hope to make the most out of your mind. You need to plan out what you want to learn and how you’re going to teach it to yourself.

 

https://youtu.be/__JE8E8rX4I

 

7: Learn as much as you can.

If you want to be smarter, then learn more. If you want to be exceptionally smart, then learn an exceptional amount of information. You’re going to run out of time before you run out of storage space in your brain.

 

 

8: Learn and practice rational, logical thinking.

To understand the information you learn and make the best use of it, you have to be able to process the information effectively. You can memorize the encyclopedia, but if you don’t know how to think, all your good for is reciting information. The better you are at thinking, the more valuable conclusions you can draw from your knowledge.

 

 

9: Ask the right questions.

You might be able to cram enough knowledge into your brain to win every quiz game in the world, but that doesn’t make you a genius. What separates the savants from the geniuses is meaning. Is the knowledge you possess and are the questions you ask meaningful? Do your intellectual pursuits make a difference in the world? Do they help people? Do they advance humanity? If not, then it doesn’t matter how many credentials you have or how many people pat you on the back. Your efforts are meaningless.

You don’t have to be smart enough to figure out why E=MC2 to be a genius. The world doesn’t need 7 billion astrophysicists anyway. We need geniuses from every walk of life. We need people who can solve meaningful problems in the fields that they’re suited for. Solve a meaningful question and that will be an exercise in genius, but that doesn’t mean you can rest on your laurels for the rest of your life. Just because you did something genius yesterday doesn’t mean you’re a genius today. And just because you performed one stroke of genius doesn’t mean that you’re a genius in every other facet of your life. In fact, nobody is a full spectrum genius. Every genius is a complete idiot in other ways.

 

 

10: Question your answers.

Let’s suppose you questioned your personal beliefs and the foundations of your culture and found them lacking. So you went back and rewrote the rules and applauded yourself for fixing them. Then you lived the rest of your life by those new rules and taught them to other people. The only problem is you’re Anton Lavey, Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Timothy Leary or Charles Manson. If you don’t question everything, especially your own answers, you’ll end up acting on irrational conclusions that will cause harm to you or others.

Question your answers.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

How to Think Like a Genius
Knowledge and Learning
The Meaning of Life

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