Tag Archives: value of wisdom

October 10, 2017

What Is Wisdom?

By wise sloth

Knowledge is having the right answer to a question. Wisdom is figuring out the right answer to the right question.

The more you know, the wiser you can become, but until you use a piece of knowledge in a question, it’s just inert information in a data set waiting to be queried. You have to ask yourself questions and use the knowledge in your brain as the variables in the equations in order for your knowledge to serve a purpose.

The more important the question, the more valuable it, and the knowledge required to answer it, becomes, but tallying the sum total of your knowledge is futile. The only thing that really matters is you came up with the best answer to the best question to have the most positive effect on your life. If you’re doing that, then you’re moving forward in life and shouldn’t have time to rest on your laurels anyway.

You can appear wise if you happen to know the right answer to a lot of random questions, but if the question is unimportant, then the only people who would praise you for mastering futility are fools. That’s not the definition of genius. That’s the definition of insanity.

 

 

Ask the right questions.

Nobody will ever ask you all the most important questions in life. You’re the only one who can do that for you. If you don’t make a habit out of asking yourself, “What is the most important question I can ask?” then you’re a ship lost at sea, not because you can’t sail, but because you don’t.

Wise people appear to be two steps ahead of everyone else because they’ve already asked themselves the most important questions before they came up, and they’re focused and driven because it doesn’t take external motivation to do what’s most important to you. Far from needing a push, you’ll make excuses to justify doing what’s really most important to you. It takes motivation to act against your beliefs. That’s why there are so many backsliding religious people. Religion is hard to do because it requires a lot of cognitive dissonance to believe in something that fails the test of truth.

Since thinkers have already taken it upon themselves to thoroughly question what’s logically most important in life, they’re more likely to be working towards a logical end goal. People who don’t make a habit of asking themselves, “What’s most important in life?” are unlikely to be toiling towards or defending a logical goal. That’s ultimately how you measure the difference between wisdom and foolishness: by the value of the end goal. You can accomplish everything you set out to by being clever as a fox, but if your goals are unimportant, then you’re just the world’s sharpest fool.

So ask yourself, “What’s the most important question I can ask?” Think about that for the rest of your life. While you’re doing it, bear in mind, the only way to answer a question is to ask more questions, and the more skilled you are at asking questions, the better answers you can deduce. So initially, the most important question you can ask yourself is, “How do you ask a question?” Like most questions, there are a lot of answers, and some are more useful than others. If you need a place to start, I wrote a guide which offers one perspective, and there are thousands more on Amazon.

 

 

Question your answers.

Our brains trip us up with schemas, biases, logical fallacies, and all sorts of other reasons to be irrational. To make enlightenment more difficult, many of life’s questions have multiple right answers. Some questions have answers that can’t be proven but have to be asked anyway. And the most important question you can ask right now may not be the same as anyone else. Plus, no matter how much we learn about life, our understanding will always be at least 99.9% incomplete.

We’re all lost on our own seemingly futile journey customized to our lives, but we’re also all in the same boat. We’re studying the same data set and sharing the stakes. So a lot of our goals/questions will line up. Sometimes corroborating your answers with someone else is proof you’re on the right track. Other times it’s a sign we’re all making the same mistake.

One thing most of us can agree on is, if a lion is charging at you, then the most important question you can ask yourself is, “How do I not get eaten by this lion?” because if you die, then you’re out of the game. So to the extent that life is valuable, it’s important for you to ask yourself, “Am I about to die?” If the answer is “yes,” then the next most important question you can ask is, “How can I prevent that?” If the answer to the first question was “no,” then the next question you need to ask is, “Are other people about to die, and if so, how can I prevent that without getting myself killed in the process?”

You may be a murderous psychopath who views other humans as soulless piles of atoms, or you may be a sociopath who measures the value of others by how you can use them to get what you want. You may be a religious zealot who measures the value of other people by how many of your favorite prophet’s rules they break, or you may be an abused, broken child in an adult’s body, who hates the world for everything it’s done to you. No matter what you think of anyone else, the bigger picture is that we’re all in this together. It takes a collaborative effort to advance humanity. The more people die, the fewer allies we have to accomplish mankind’s long-term goals. We can’t survive, let alone colonize new planets with utopian village theme parks if we don’t work together, but first, we have to save each other.

 

 

We all need to survive, and right now the sky is looming with apocalyptic threats so obvious you can’t take your eyes off them. The answer to the question, “Is something coming to kill us?” is “Yes.”

I’ll save you some time decoding the matrix of problems strangling the world. The lynchpin of the world’s problems is poverty. Understand that and everything else will fall into perspective. Fix it, and all its satellite problems will fall away.

But what happens after we fix all the world’s problems and establish utopian settlements on Mars? What’s the next most important question we should ask ourselves then? We’ll see when we get there, but one question we should be prepared to ask is, “What’s the greatest threat to the perfect world?”

It would be logical to prepare ahead of time for an asteroid or futuristic Hitler, but the root of all evil is ignorance. If you build a perfect city and fill it with fools, the first thing they’d do is tear it all down with sincerely good intentions. We’ll never live in anything resembling utopia until everyone is wise. That doesn’t mean we all agree on the same answers, just that we’re all talented, self-driven question-askers who are asking ourselves the most important questions.

Before we become wise enough to live in utopia though, we have become wise enough to create it. Plus, if we all became as genius as possible, we wouldn’t even need to solve half the world’s problems, because we’d be smart enough to not do those stupid things in the first place. This means the most important thing we can do to create and protect utopia is to learn new things and ask new questions today. The better learning resources we have, the faster and further we can improve ourselves.

This means it’s of paramount importance everyone does something to improve education. There are some free online schools, that could use donations, but every nation in the world should be putting money in a single fund to create one online school with the budget of a small country. If your politician isn’t talking about something like that, you should tell them to start or replace them with someone who does.

With or without the perfect education tool, it’s still up to the individual to decide to teach themselves by any means necessary. It’s a moral imperative everyone asks themselves every day, “What’s the most important thing I can teach myself today?” because you won’t grow until you do, and when you don’t grow, the world doesn’t either. The less you grow, the more the world is full of idiots.

 

Scumbag Steve Meme with the caption, "Expects us to live in a Utopian society. Doesn't read."

 

What do you do after solving the big problems?

It’s worth speculating what would you do if you became an uberman and all the world’s problems were solved. What’s the most important question you can ask when there’s no threat to distract you… or when death is unavoidable? You’re here, and you’re going to die eventually. There’s more to life than just surviving and preparing. If you only live for tomorrow, you put off living indefinitely. There’s value in the moment, and there’s value to who you are independent of what you can do for society.

Whoever you become is who you have to live with. Who you are is how you experience reality right now, and for the rest of the fleeting moments in your life regardless of anything going on anywhere outside your skin. There’s no point training to be the perfect problem solver, student, worker, artist, citizen or parent if you’re not becoming the perfect you. I could be wrong, but sooner or later, the most important question you can ask yourself may be, “How do I become more me?”

 

"If everything I am is who I am, then I should understand and improve who I am."

 

Well, if you can be your favorite you in the present moment, then afterward, you’ll have the perfect past to look back on. Everything I’ve said up to this point may feel more like a guilt trip than an inspirational speech. Nobody can just jump up, become an ubermensch and build an intergalactic empire, but I’m not begging or demanding you to carry a burden. I’m pointing out what an opportunity life is. Every question you ask is a step forward, and the more steps you take, the farther you get. Climbing that mountain yields at least three rewards: the experience of the journey, getting to see above the clouds and being able to say you did it. That’s life, and it doesn’t happen on accident.`

 

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 10, 2017

How To Become An Expert At Anything

By wise sloth

1. State your goals.

The more specifically you identify your goal the more specifically you can focus on it. Saying your goal out loud or writing it down will help you refine your goal and stay focused. However, telling other people your goals can give your brain a false sense of achievement that will deduce your motivation to complete them.

 

 

2. Study other people’s research and mistakes, and do it efficiently.

Whatever you’re trying to do has probably already been mastered by someone else. Learn from their research and mistakes. Go read a book about it. Read every book you can find on the subject. Take a class on it. The more external help you can to get the less you have to reinvent the wheel.

 

 

3. Practice.

No matter how much you read up on a subject or listen to lectures, that’s only going to help you understand the theory. Take for example the simple skill of rolling a cigarette. I can fully explain everything there is to know about rolling a cigarette in one or two pages, but even if you memorize those instructions word for word you’re not going to be able to roll quality cigarettes quickly and consistently until you’ve rolled at least 200 cigarettes yourself.

Every time you do something the neural pathways your brain responsible for processing that action will grow stronger. The stronger those pathways become the more second-nature the thing you’re doing will become.

Not only that, but throughout your life, you’ve developed a unique and extensive list of good habits, bad habits and different predispositions to ways of thinking and acting. All of these factors influence everything you do. Nobody else knows what all of those factors are. So nobody else’s instructions will be tailor-made for you. The only way for you to understand how your predispositions affect what you’re trying to do is by doing the thing you want to do.

As you practice you’ll come to understand not only your strengths and weaknesses but also the subtle nuances of the task you’re trying to accomplish, and by giving yourself hands-on experience with the task you’ll fully understand why these nuances exist, how to fix/exploit them and eventually how to change them. But those subtleties can only be teased out through hands-on experience.

The point of practicing is to understand the logic of the system better. The more logically and systematically you understand the logic of the system the better you’ll be able to master the system. As you practice, break down the system into its component parts and write a how-to manual for how to do the thing. It doesn’t matter if anyone else will ever read it. It will force you to fully articulate how to do what you’re doing and allow you to take a step back and look at what you know and find the holes in it.

Also, practice all the time. You can’t get good at anything if you only do it once a month. In between practice sessions you’ll forget everything you learned last time and the neural pathways you’ve strengthened in your brain through practice will atrophy. It’s a common misconception that some people are born experts. Mozart and Beethoven are often cited as examples, but in reality, they only appeared to be child prodigies because they devoted their entire childhood to practicing constantly. If you want to master something then practice it every day, preferably several times a day. If you can, devote your whole day to it every day.

 

 

4. Learn from your mistakes.

It’s human nature to feel bad when you fail or make mistakes. We tend to beat ourselves up real bad for it, but you never hear about baseball or basketball players beating themselves up for missing swings or throws. That’s because, in their line of work, it’s obvious that the only way to practice is by failing. This is true in any walk of life. It’s simply impossible to master a skill without failing, because failing is practicing, and practicing is the path to success.

 

 

5. Constantly ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?”

If you have to force yourself to practice then you’re not doing something you’re passionate about. Oh, you may be passionate about achieving the end goal of becoming rich and famous, but you’re not passionate about the task. So performing the task makes you miserable, and your brain constantly tells you to stop. You can push yourself through that wall for a while, but you’re not going to be able to keep pushing yourself against your will for the decades it’s going to take to master a skill. If you hate practicing them do yourself the biggest favor of your life and quit whatever it is you’re doing, and find something you enjoy doing.

You should want to practice several times a day every day. You should want desperately to cut other time-consuming activities out of your life to give you more time to do what you really want to do: practice. If you’re not like a crack addict going through withdrawals when you can’t practice then you’ve set the wrong goal. Find the thing you can’t live without and practice that, because if you do something you’re not passionate about enough to master it, you’re likely going to grow to hate it and become miserable.

If nothing else, life is short. You’re running out of time to follow your real dream…the dream you would do just for the sake of doing it regardless of whether or not you’ll ever master it.

 

https://youtu.be/oIrT1eHs1b0

 

6. Make crap.

What do you think Leonardo Da Vinci’s first picture looked like? What do you think Mozart’s first song sounded like? I guarantee you it was crap. The road to perfection is paved with crap. Rolling crappy cigarettes is discouraging. Every crappy cigarette you roll is proof that you’ll never be able to roll a perfect cigarette. Even if that’s true, you should keep rolling crappy cigarettes not because your goal is to become a master cigarette roller but because you want to roll cigarettes, and you enjoy the crappy cigarettes you’ve rolled until one day they start coming out perfect, and that day will come quicker than you expected because you weren’t constantly stressing about becoming a master. You were just doing what you want to do and enjoying yourself and learning along the way without measuring success by the end product.

 

 

7. Constantly ask yourself, “Should I be doing this?”

Maybe you want to learn how to roll cigarettes perfectly. It’s great that you have a goal, but you picked the wrong goal. All cigarettes do is get you addicted to poison and then kill you slowly and painfully. Life is short (especially if you smoke). Are you making the most of your time? Are the things you’re getting better at really important? Are they worth the time and stress? Are they contributing to your demise or the demise of society at large? Are they a waste of time? If you’re not asking yourself these questions then you might be wasting your life mastering a counter-productive skill.

 

 

8. Break the rules and cheat.

Here’s a motto you can live by, “By definition, the quickest and most efficient way to do anything is to cheat.” By “cheat” I mean break the rules. What are the rules anyway? They’re just the standard way of doing things that the people before you established. They’re not written in the fabric of space/time. They’re not like the laws of physics. They’re not even moral imperatives. Rules are just words people said. In order to do something better, you have to do it differently. That means you have to change the rules, and in order to change the rules, you have to break them.

 

 

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 9, 2017

10 Steps to Winning An Argument

By wise sloth

"Wow, that internet argument completely changed my fundamental belief system," said no one, ever.

 

Step 1:

When someone tells you something you disagree with, recognize the fact that you’ve been wrong before. Regardless of how absurd their idea is, remember how confidently you once believed the things you now know you were wrong about. The same thing could very well be happening again.

Step 2:

Assume that if this person believes what they’re saying, then they must have a compelling reason to. You might find in the end that it’s not logical, but since it’s strong enough to influence them, there must be something to it. Find out their reasons for believing what they’re saying before you disagree with them. Press them to keep talking. Find out everything there is to know about the topic before criticizing it.

Step 3:

Don’t respond yet. Tell the person, “Give me a few minutes to think about this.” or better yet, “Let me sleep on it. We’ll continue this conversation tomorrow.”

Step 4:

Assume/pretend the other person is right. Block out your beliefs for a time and look at the world through his eyes. Imagine living a life where you walk around believing what you were just told.

Step 5

Consider their arguments objectively. Imagine that you’re a scientist in a laboratory where ideas can be stored in Petri dishes. In one dish is their argument. In another is yours. Take your argument and put it on a shelf. Then take their argument and put it under a microscope. Use logic to dissect it and study it independent of how it relates to your ideas.

Put your initial hypothesis about the outcome out of your mind. This is a clinical study where scientific truth is more important than winning. In fact, the only way to truly win is to arrive at the truth. Furthermore, disregard the source of the idea you’re studying. Just because the idea came from a source you don’t trust, doesn’t mean it can’t be true. The source has nothing to do with the idea. So separate the two for the time being.

 

 

 

Step 6:

Take the results of your scientific dissection and file them away. Then take your own ideas and put them under the microscope. Even if you’ve studied them before, the fact that they’re being challenged means there’s a chance you might have missed something. Consider where your ideas came from. Did you really adopt them because you’d done all the math and arrived at the conclusion this is the correct answer yourself, or did somebody else tell you it was true? Dissect your arguments with the scalpel of logic again. Be brutal about it. Get angry at your ideas. Hate them. Tear them apart with the fury of a lover who just found out your soul mate has been cheating on you.

Step 7:

Compare the results from both of your studies, understanding that the goal of the study isn’t to determine who is right or wrong. Arguments are almost never black and white. You could both be right about some aspects of the topic and wrong about others. The goal of the study is to take the good and bad of both arguments and mix them together to create the real truth. If at the end of the study you accept or reject the opposing idea completely, you probably did your math wrong. If you do find fault on either side, don’t throw the whole petri dish away. If an idea has flaws, then fix them.

Step 8:

If you want, you can present your findings to the person you argued with, but this isn’t necessary. This whole process was never a battle between people. It was really an internal battle in your personal search for truth. Whether or not you can convince the other person of your findings is irrelevant.

Step 9:

If you do decide to continue the argument with the other person, don’t worry about winning. Simply explain your findings to them, and if they don’t like it, then end the conversation. Winning an argument won’t do anything for you except stroke your ego, which is pointless. Only proceed if the other person is willing to learn.

Step 10:

Watch for personal attacks. Once either side throws a personal attack, the conversation is over. Dialogue has broken down, and neither side is listening objectively anymore. So you may as well quit. If you draw first blood, you’re probably the more closed-minded person. If you had logical reasons for your argument you’d be using them instead of calling the other person names. The more you make fun of the other person, the more of a case you build that you either can’t handle the truth or just like to fight.

 

 

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 9, 2017

Enlightenment Through Logic

By wise sloth

Line drawing of an Om inside a gear

 

Throughout my life, I’ve taken a keen interest in meditation and the concept of achieving enlightenment through reaching the ideal mental state. I’ve read a lot of books on the subject, which on a whole confused me more than they helped me reach Nirvana. I quickly discovered that no matter what method you used to reach this state you’d find someone who would disagree with your approach. Some would even say that the more you try to reach enlightenment the farther away you’ll get because the only way to reach enlightenment is to let go of all desire and ambition until you’re left in a state of immediate stillness and clarity.

I can’t argue with any of these self-proclaimed authorities, because arguing about what enlightenment truly is…is like arguing about what a party or a lover truly is. You can define any concept however you want and argue until you’re blue in the face about what the true meaning of a word is, and nobody can say who is more correct.

Despite the elusiveness of enlightenment, there’s something in the concept worth exploring. There’s value in the theory that an ideal mental state exists which can be achieved through some kind of mental feat (or the lack thereof). If an ideal mental state doesn’t exist then it doesn’t matter if you spend your life watching cheap sitcoms and reality television; it doesn’t matter if you go to school or think or don’t think about any topic in particular. Everything is equal.

But it does matter what you think. What you think defines who you are, and who you are defines what society is and where society is going. If there were no mental standards, then there would be no laws, religions, leadership courses, degrees or awards; we would live in anarchy. And on a personal level, we wouldn’t have any goals to strive for.

Some people would say this is a good thing; that our ambitions are chains that tie us to the vulgar world, and the only way to achieve true enlightenment is to let go of those anchors and simply exist in the here and now free from ego or wants. I’ve looked at life from that point of view, and I can see the value in it. At some point, you have to just stop and smell the roses and wallow in the grandeur of existence in its purest form. If you can’t do that, then what are we doing here? We’re just chasing after goals that are going to be rendered useless by time.

Still, every generation of humans has been faced with colossal questions and problems. If we made it a categorical imperative that every human being should spend their entire life escaping thought, then we’d still be living in caves and pooping in bushes. It’s only because of the conscious, ambitious, logical, scientific thoughts that humans have cracked the mystery of the Periodic Table of Elements, The Red Shift or the Big Bang. Without logical thought, we wouldn’t have invented fertilizer, antibiotics, stitches, hearing aids, refrigeration, human rights, legal processes or any other inventions or concepts that solve the problems of life.

If we hadn’t discovered these insights into life through rigorous, scientific thought, we’d still be worshiping the sun and sacrificing humans to appease the thunder gods. So I can’t make a moral imperative out of the idea that humans should abandon logical thought in favor of pure experience… until we’ve solved the problems that hurt us and force us to waste our lives toiling away just to survive.

I can’t empirically prove what “enlightenment” is, but I know what truth is. Truth is that which is, and scientific thought tells us what is true. So my theory (at this point in my life) is that in order to understand truth and live in reality you need to follow the path of scientific thought. Once you understand the scientific nature of the universe and master the art of reason then you’ll see reality as clearly as possible. Then, after you solve the immediate problems that cause you and the people around you suffering then you can relax and soak up the grandeur of existence in stillness. But until you know who, why, what, where, when and why you are, and until you’ve solved the very real, very tragic problems in front of you than sitting around mentally masturbating is inherently irresponsible.

That’s why I hold the philosophy that enlightenment is achieved through logic.

 

 

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 9, 2017

Your Ability To Think Obligates You To

By wise sloth

Picture of Dr. House holding a human brain, next to the caption, "If you have one, try to use it please!"

 

Human beings are biological, sentient, autonomous cosmic supercomputers. You’re smarter and more powerful than the most expensive computer in the world. You’re the rarest and most valuable thing in the universe. Regardless of your personal opinion of yourself, you’re capable of looking at the world around you, identifying problems, solving them intellectually and then enacting your solution. You’re the only being in the universe that we know of that’s capable of doing that. Celebrate that fact, but know that with great power comes great responsibility. It’s your responsibility to think about the world’s problems and then solve them.

That’s an intimidating responsibility, but you shouldn’t have to be guilt tripped into accepting it. You should already be doing it out of selfishness if nothing else. You want to live in a better world, and you have the ability to make it better. You don’t have anything better to do than making the world a better place.

Even if you’re content where you’re at, the future of mankind depends on everyone solving as many problems as possible. The future has to be built brick by brick, and the more people who pitch in, the faster the future gets better. The more people find excuses not to solve problems, the slower humanity progresses and the greater the chance of collapse; there’s a tipping point where if too many people ignore their responsibility to think, then collapse is guaranteed.

We’ve spent our entire lives on the wrong side of the tipping point and don’t even recognize we’re living in a collapsed society. We take gun violence, international wars, sweatshops, invasive, predatory police, corrupt politicians and inefficient bureaucracy for granted. We even celebrate them. What we don’t do though is take responsibility for the world’s problems. We throw up our hands and tell ourselves it’s somebody else’s responsibility to fix all the problems around us. But it’s all of our responsibility to go out of our way and our comfort zone to think and solve problems. The whole reason the world is awash with problems is because most people aren’t thinking. If you’re not thinking then you’re being stupid, and stupid kills.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing. Doing nothing is evil. It’s the main ingredient in failure. If you want your life to be a success you need to think. If you want the world to become a better place then you need to think. Even if you don’t want to, the rest of humanity needs you to.

Think about this. The matter that makes up your body was present at the Big Bang. You’ve traveled through gas clouds, oceans and atmospheres to get where you are today. You’re a conscious being in a seemingly unconscious universe. You’re wasting your life if you don’t do the most amazing thing you’re designed to do. Think, and let’s build a better world brick by brick, problem by problem.

 

"What a man can be, he must be." Abraham Maslow

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

December 22, 2009

Creativity Is Logic, Not Magic

By wise sloth

Thoughts follow the same rules of science as chemistry and physics. You can’t get a new thought from nothing. In order to have new ideas you either have to learn them from a source outside yourself or combine existing thoughts in new ways. Your thoughts will continue on the same trajectory until acted upon by a new thought.

 

 

Ultimately, thoughts are nothing more than mathematical equations. Every event that happens to you is a new variable for your brain to calculate and find a solution to, and there are so many variables involved in doing something as simple as crossing the street that if you gave your full attention to everything you did you’d never make it out of the house in the morning, but that’s okay because your brain is a cosmically powerful computer and can take simple tasks such as crossing the street and calculate them practically subconsciously, and it can do other tasks, like beating your heart, completely subconsciously.

Look at how these simple concepts make complete sense of the mysterious concepts of emotions, creativity, and inspiration. Our emotions are the product of our brain subconsciously calculating all the variables in our life. Falling in love seems so mysterious, but when you take a step back and tally all the variables it makes logical sense. The logic might not add up to a responsible decision, but when people make bad decisions it’s because they don’t have enough knowledge in their brain to calculate their decisions correctly. However, to them, it appears logical because they’ve come to the most logical conclusion based on the variables they have.

This is why psychologists have a bad reputation for asking people questions and never giving answers. If the patient knew all the variables in the first place, they wouldn’t have a problem because they could find the solution on their own. If the psychologist were to give them the answer, then the ‘patient’ would reject it because the correct answer doesn’t add up using the limited amount of variables they’re working with. So the only way for the psychologist to get the patient to see the correct answer is to walk them through the problem and let them solve it for themselves. The only way they can arrive at the idea is by someone walking them through the process of combining the ideas already in their head.

If you need more evidence that emotions are subconscious logic, then look at your own dreams. Psychologists are sometimes able to interpret dreams because they’re a logical representation of the variables in our lives even though they’re almost entirely the product of our subconscious. Sometimes the logic is obvious such as when a soldier has nightmares about war. Sometimes they’re mysterious, but even when they’re mysterious we know it’s not because they’re magical. It’s only because we don’t fully, consciously understand the variables in the equation.

 

https://youtu.be/h6CL2Y4yS0I

 

Creativity is just a matter of combining variables in innovative ways. Sometimes the logic is obvious such as in the case of artists like M.C. Escher. While Norman Rockwell and H.R. Geiger may seem whimsically creative, if you walked through their childhoods you could identify all the variables that led them to develop the styles they chose. And neither of those two artists could have possibly arrived at the other’s style because the variables in their lives didn’t add up to the other’s conclusions.

Inspiration is the simplest of all. Whenever we all of a sudden have a brilliant flash of insight it’s because something caused us to combine the exact two thoughts in the exact way to come to a logical conclusion that we were previously missing a vital variable to arrive at.

 

 

Now let’s take this a step further. The sum of all your knowledge (aka variables) and thinking skills (aka formulas) yield your identity and your philosophy on life. The more variables you understand, and the better your thinking skills are, the more of a true individual you’ll be and the more successful your philosophy on life will be. The less you know, the less you can think. The less you’ve thought about the equation of life, the more incomplete of a person you’ll be and the worse your life skills will be.

 

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 

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November 9, 2009

Ten Ways People Get Dumber As They Get Older

By wise sloth

Renaissance painting of a fool or jester sitting in a chair looking forlorn.

 

1. We stop going to school.

While in school you have knowledge crammed into your head for 4-8 hours per day. After graduation, most people just stop reading altogether because they have no motivation to teach themselves new information. Most people resented and resisted the knowledge were taught when they were in school. So after graduation, they’re more than happy to plop down in front of the TV for the next 60 years and let their mind turn to mush and forget everything they did learn in school.

 

2. Even if every adult wanted to learn, a lot of them are too busy.

Between working 8-12 hours a day, cultivating (or enduring) a marriage, raising children and doing household chores most people don’t have the spare time or energy to learn new things.  There’s not much you can do about this, but even though there’s a good excuse for it the fact remains…most people don’t learn much after graduation.

 

3. We assume the education we did receive proves we know everything (or at least as much as we need to know).

In theory, this shouldn’t be true. You’d think that people who went to 4-8 years of college would have a lifelong passion for learning, but the more people with higher education degrees you meet the more you’ll find out this generally isn’t the case. Instead, the higher of a degree they’ve earned the more conceited they are about how much they know. The more conceited they are the less motivation they have to learn more. So they spend the rest of their lives congratulating themselves for their past educational accomplishments and cease achieving new educational accomplishments while forgetting most of what they had learned that they’re so proud of.

 

4. We give up.

When we’re young we tend to be enthusiastic, hungry idealists. The world is a big, open sky to us. Every adult felt like that when they were younger, but then they got out into the real world and found out nobody gives a crap about you. You’re not a snowflake. You’re a number, and you’re expendable. Nobody really wants you to think outside the box. They want you to shut up and follow their orders.

Someday you may come to the realization that idealism is cute in cartoons, but in the real world the responsible thing to do, the adult thing to do, is to get a job you don’t necessarily take any joy from and work hard day-in and day-out for 60 years without a single complaint.

When the light goes out in your eyes and your life downshifts into autopilot you don’t think of brilliant things. You lose the motivation to explore. You just fade out. You call it “responsibility,” but your willful celebration of slavery defeats the purpose of existing in the first place, and it makes the world a duller place.

 

5. We come to believe that the rank makes the man.

The purest example of this is military officers. Aside from politicians, no group of people in the world are more delusional about their self-worth than military officers. Why do they think they’re so great? Because they have an arbitrary, man-made rank that tells them they’re God. And once you’re God you believe you can do no wrong. So you don’t listen to anything you don’t want to hear, and you have no motivation to improve yourself since there’s nowhere to go once you’ve reached the top. This is as true in the civilian sector as it is in the military. Give people an important title and tell them they’re important and they’ll become delusional idiots.

 

6. We assume the mere fact that we’re older makes us wiser.

Adults think kids are dumb shits. Adults don’t try to talk sense to kids because they know every kid is so naive they’re practically, certifiably insane. Being an adult surrounded by children is like being a one-eyed man in the land of the blind. You have more clarity and hindsight than them. True as that may be, it tends to go to adults’ heads. Even if adults are smarter than children that doesn’t make them a higher form of life. And the only reason adults are smarter than children is because they were born first. Whoopdy doo. You don’t get an award for that. If you think being born before someone else makes you better than them then you’re not as smart as you think.

 

7. Similar to #6 is that we tend to assume that getting married, having kids, and working at a job makes us wiser.

Again, yes, you do learn a lot about life by experiencing these trials. But those lessons are on par for what you should learn in life. Great. You can do what you’re supposed to. That’s not going above and beyond the limits. Assuming doing the bare minimum in life makes you an expert on life is foolish and shows how little you know about life. More importantly, it causes you to stop pushing yourself to learn more than the bare minimum.

 

8. We’ve had more time to convince ourselves of our beliefs.

Childhood is defined by our quest to understand ourselves, the world around us, why we’re here and what we’re supposed to do now that we’re here. By the end of childhood, we’ve amassed a head full of answers and explanations, and a lot of those answers are wrong. Even if they were all right, our understanding of life would still be incomplete. But people get the answers they’re comfortable with and repeat those answers to themselves over and over again until they can’t see anything else outside their tiny misshapen reality. Then they spend the rest of their life defending their answers and becoming more close-minded. After we’ve spent 50 years telling ourselves the same thing over and over again, we would have to erase part of our identity to admit that we’re wrong about our cherished beliefs. There’s a reason we have the saying, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

 

9. Similar to #8 is that we’ve had more time to surround ourselves with sources that confirm our biases.

We make friends who believe the same things we do. We watch television shows that are slanted to our point of view. We read news sources that cater to the spin we want to hear. The few nonfiction books that the average person reads are written by authors who just tell their audience what they want to hear. After a lifetime of confirmation bias we inevitably convince ourselves with concrete certainty we’re the good guys and anyone who disagrees with us are the bad guys.

 

10. We’ve invested our pride and our very identity in our tiny reality.

Growth requires change, but in order for adults to change they have to admit that their tiny worldview is either wrong or incomplete. Pride alone won’t let them do this, and even if they were willing to lay their pride aside- their identity is their reality, and their reality is their identity. Changing would be tantamount to suicide, and even though it would benefit them more in the long run, most people are too afraid to walk through the darkness to reach the light. They would rather live with a comfortable lie.

 

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 

3 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Knowledge and Learning

October 30, 2009

My Two Rules About Rules

By wise sloth

Picture of a military helicoptor hovering next to a sign that says, "Speed limit enforced by aircraft." Underneath the photo it says, "THE RULES: They may be stupid, arbitrary and irritating, but god help you if you break them."

Rule #1: Rules were written by people, and most people are idiots.

If there were one lesson to be learned throughout all of human history, it’s Rule #1. Amazingly though, there are billions of people who haven’t learned that lesson. Oh, sure they’ve learned not to kill 6 million Jews, but they haven’t learned to question their employer’s rules today. As a result, they get locked into enforcing outdated or illogical rules that make people’s lives worse.

The rules they enforce might not kill 6 million Jews, but they’ll waste the short and infinitely valuable time being bogged down with needless work. This will prevent them from accomplishing their highest level goals, ironically, in the name of doing what’s right.

 

Rule #2: A rule’s only true authority comes from its ability to help people.

Rules were created to serve people. People weren’t created to serve rules. When a rule ceases to help people, it negates its purpose for existence and thus negates its authority. For example, nobody would argue against the rule “don’t kill people.” However, rules have to be judged on a case by case basis according to whether or not they’ll help or hurt people each time they’re enforced. If a situation arises where it will help people more by not enforcing the rule, then it should not be enforced. For example, if you lived next to a Nazi concentration camp, you might decide it’s moral to break the “don’t kill people” rule if it were the only way to save the lives of the victims in the concentration camp.

 

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 

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October 30, 2009

Wisdom I Learned Working In I.T. : Answers Come From Questions

By wise sloth

Picture of a woman smiling and talking on a phone in front of a computer. Below the picture are the words, "TECH SUPPORT: We can fix anything... except stupid."

 

Fixing computers for a living means you spend your whole day problem-solving. It’s insanely frustrating because you’re expected to be able to answer any question about any hardware or software problem there could ever be. Even if you went to school to study computers, all of your knowledge and experience is constantly becoming obsolete. So you have to constantly relearn your trade, but no matter how much you teach your self, you’ll never be able to memorize every error code, every symptom, and every solution to every problem that could possibly happen with every operating system.

However, you don’t have to. You’d be surprised how much you don’t have to know about computers and still be able to make a living fixing them… as long as you know how to think logically… which most people don’t. If they did, then most computer technicians, therapists, and police would be out of work. The following rules apply as much to fixing computers as they do to life:

 

Rule #1: If you want an exact answer, you need to ask an exact question.

When a user’s monitor goes blank they freak out and ask questions like, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why now?” “What the hell is wrong with this piece of shit?” etc. None of these questions are going to provide useful answers. So they call a computer tech who asks questions that cut to the heart of the issue such as, “What’s broken? What was the last thing you did before it broke? Does it have power? Are the connections loose? If we replace this piece will the problem go away or is the problem originating somewhere else?”

Life is the same way. When I’m sad, I don’t just mope around feeling miserable. I ask myself, “What is the problem? Why am I sad? What triggered it? How often does the occur and why? This keeps me from wallowing in hopelessness and ultimately leads to solutions.

 

 

 Rule #2: Use a logical, systematic problem-solving process

When I first started fixing computers I’d freak out every time I got a call about a problem I didn’t know how to fix. I’d ask myself questions like, “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?” Eventually, I stopped freaking out and learned to look at a computer with the cool air of a mysterious, wandering gunslinger. I’d take my time and break down the problem systematically starting by gathering all the facts, eliminating variables, and testing solutions one at a time until the problem was solved. And throughout the whole process, I’d keep in mind that if you’re not asking exact questions, you won’t get exact answers.

Eventually, I found my method of problem-solving worked equally well in real life. I could see it in my friends as well. The ones who had the most problems in their lives were the ones who sat around asking themselves, “Why is this happening to me?” “Why is life unfair?” These are the people who when you try to offer them solutions to their problems they argue with you and bark excuses at you for why nothing will work. The people who have the least problems in life are the ones who size up their problems logically.

 

 

 Rule #3: The quality and quantity of answers you get are proportional to the quality and quantity of questions you ask.

Lucid people know that the causes and the solutions of any problem can be deduced by analyzing the variables in the problem. The degree of success you have deducing the causes and the solutions depends on how specific and articulate the questions you ask are. Using that mindset, they don’t wast any time freaking out or getting emotional about the problems in their lives. They simply go into analytical mode and start asking questions.

When I would get stumped fixing a difficult computer problem, I would stop, take a deep breath, and ask myself, “What questions have I been asking, and why am I asking myself these questions? Which questions haven’t I asked, and why not?” If I couldn’t solve the problem, I would ask for help from someone with more experience for help, but I wouldn’t just ask them for the answer. I would ask them to explain the series of questions they asked themselves to correctly deduce the variables in the equation so I would understand the system and know the right questions to ask next time and why.

So if you find yourself getting emotional about a problem, or one of your friends comes complaining to you about theirs, the first question you need to ask is, “What questions have you asked?”

 

 

 Rule #4: Knowing where to find the right answer is just as good as knowing it from memory.

When I first started working at a computer help desk, most of my coworkers were equally inexperienced. We only had one guy on our team who could answer any question. I only used him as a last resort, because if I bothered him every time I got stumped, his entire job would consist of mentoring me. So one day I asked him, “How do you know so much? Why can you solve more problems than anyone else here?”

He looked at me like I was stupid and said, “I don’t know the answers to all the questions you guys bring to me, but I don’t have to if I know where to find them.” Then he pointed to his computer and said,” We’ve all got Google on your computer. There’s a wealth of information on the internet. If I don’t know something, I ask the internet.”

So now, when I run into a problem I’m having even a little difficulty with, I don’t ask myself, “What am I doing wrong!?” I ask myself, “Where can I find the answer without having to make every mistake myself first?”

 

 

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

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