Ignorance

The single greatest enemy of humanity is ignorance. Every war, every human rights disaster, every crime, every injustice stems ,in some way, from ignorance. 

When we look around, we see the more proximate  causes: some country was threatened, some other country responded, there was a fight, war broke out. But in every instance, you can look into this and discover that somewhere behind all of it was ignorance on the part of one side or both. 

Let’s take World War II for an example. The very existence and rise of the Nazi Party and its success stemmed from widespread ignorance. There is no world in which people really understood how civilizations and humanity work where a populace would accept (and so vehemently support) that sort of fascism. 

“Oh”, but you argue, “the German people were so negatively affected by the reparations imposed upon Germany in World War I that their economy had been destroyed. They were primed for a firm leader who would reorganize them in some direction that would save their country.”

Okay, well, guess what? The reparations imposed upon Germany in World War One also stem from ignorance: ignorance of how economies work, ignorance of why World War I had been started, ignorance of the motivations behind the Weimar Republic and the problem that group of people was trying to solve. And frankly, those motivations also stemmed from ignorance. 

Eventually, you can trace a lot of this back to the ignorance of feudal lords who had no idea how to actually run a country and the ignorance of their populations, some of which was imposed intentionally on those populaces. Why would you try to make people ignorant? The only reason you would do that is if you are ignorant. 

Why did Rome fall? Ignorance. Why did almost a million people die in the Rwandan genocide? Ignorance taken advantage of by a very small number of truly evil people. Why do economies crash and people starve around the world? 100% ignorance. 

We have at our disposal all the tools we need in order to have a peaceful, stable society in which people can build the lives they want and thrive across the entire world. This planet has dramatically more resources and space than is required for its present population, and we have all of the technology we need in order to take advantage of it. There is no good reason for oppression. When somebody tells you that you or somebody else must be oppressed, they are hoping that you will remain ignorant enough to believe them. That is it. The key to the solution of all the suffering, all the misery of humanity, is understanding.

“What can I do about that,” you ask yourself. “Everything is so big and I don’t know how to affect any of it.” The simplest answer is this: you can start with yourself. If there’s something happening you don’t understand, you can find out about it. You can learn facts. You can learn _how_ to learn about it. You can discard any fixed idea you might have about a situation or person and just _look_. 

Every evil person in the world is hoping very dearly that you do _not_ look too closely. They want you to be ignorant so they can use you to forward their destructive aims. They love it when you fight with your fellow humans, because it brings them one step closer to their insane goals of ruining humanity. They love it when you post untrue thugs on Facebook because they “feel” right. That’s what they were hoping you would do. No movement, no mass disaster, no human catastrophe proceeds without mass agreement. Literally all you have to do is look and disagree with those who encourage you to hate, to fight, to destroy, to build things that destroy, to block off some part of humanity and say “those are the bad guys,” to invent fictions of your own that spur hatred, to exploit others, or a million other things that all act as a distraction from our shared goal of building a human civilization that we love.

The enemy is not “AI”, it’s not “Iran,” or “America,” and it’s definitely not “the Republicans” or “the Democrats.” All of those are vast generalities that get used as terms in order to control you by keeping you ignorant of the specific people, places, or things that actually exist. The real enemy is ignorance, and the very small number of truly evil people who intentionally push it and perpetuate it. 

The best news is this: all we have to do to change the world is to increase the understanding of ourselves, our friends, and our fellow members of humanity. Is that as easy as it sounds? No. I have no illusions about the present state of the world. I’m not saying that we will all just read books or something and the world’s problems will go away. (After all, the authors of a lot of those books are somewhat ignorant, too.) But I’m saying there is hope, and it’s a hope that each and every one of us has the power to participate in: seek to understand. Seek the truth. Be willing to truly confront the facts of a situation, not just what somebody tells you or what “feels” like it’s _probably_ true. 

It is, very honestly, a hard road to walk on. But I have to say, maybe it’s better than living in a world that is constantly being broken all the time. 

I Was Sick, and Now I Am Well

I was physically ill for six years, and now I am well. Some of my friends know this story, but most don’t. I don’t like to share bad news without some solution, and the solution took a long time, in this case. I feel like the situation is finally resolved, so I’d like to tell the story now.

Background

Starting around when I was 12, I would often fall asleep almost uncontrollably after eating and stay asleep for about four hours. I also would sleep a lot at night, sometimes up to 12 hours, and was very hard to wake up in the morning (like you had to yell at me or physically drag me out of bed). Some people attributed it to “being a teenager,” but there was more going on than that. It kept happening, and finally when I was 18, somebody mentioned to me that a friend of theirs had a similar problem and it was related to eating sugar. So I cut out eating sugar (super hard, by the way, for the first two weeks, and then it gets much easier) and things got dramatically better. I still had trouble with staying awake or falling asleep sometimes, but it wasn’t happening all the time, anymore.

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Why are so many Americans overweight?

A frequent comment from my European and Asian friends is surprise at how many overweight people they see in the USA, and how overweight those people are.

If you search on YouTube, you’ll find a bunch of videos explaining “the one reason” why Americans are so overweight (and why there’s such an epidemic of diabetes in the country). However, none of these videos are right, because there’s really about four reasons, two of which are more important.

  1. Extensive poisoning of the food supply
  2. Frequent eating
  3. Portion sizes
  4. Less walking

Extensive Poisoning of the Food Supply

You can find about a hundred thousand videos on YouTube with titles like “This difference between European food and American food with shock you!” One will talk about differences in farming. Another will talk about high fructose corn syrup. Others will talk about sugar, what people eat at meals, how people prepare food, etc. The problem is basically all of these things. For some reason (that I do not fully understand) the USA has extensively poisoned its food supply from production, to processing, and even to packaging. It’s provided pots and pans that will poison you if you cook in them. It’s made it super convenient and very cheap to eat foods that will slowly kill you over time, or at the least, mess up your hormones and lots of other systems in your body. It provides no education to its children about how or what to eat, and leaves that all up to junk food advertisements, apparently.

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Smart People

Very smart people often express frustration to me about interacting with less intelligent people, and vice versa. Even though they are very smart, one thing they have never figured out is how to communicate successfully with people who are less smart. I think I’ve isolated one of the reasons for this.

One of the primary aspects of intelligence is recognizing specifically what you don’t know about something. For example, somebody says, “John wants to shoot your sister.” A pretty stupid person just takes that at face value, questions nothing. A somewhat smart person might think, “Huh? Why?” A smarter person might think, “Why are you telling me this? What’s your motive? Is this true? Shoot how? Are we talking about the same John? When does he want to do it? Is this urgent? Did something happen? It seems like there’s some story behind this.” And so forth. Many people will actually have all of those questions basically at once, instantaneously. It will be “obvious” to the smart person that they don’t know these things. The less intelligent person will be vaguely aware that they are missing data. The stupid person will have absolutely no idea that they are missing anything.

So when a very smart person and a less intelligent person talk to each other, the smart person often totally overlooks this. They simply get frustrated with the less-intelligent person. They are confused. “Surely this person knows they don’t know, so why are they behaving this way? They must be trying to do the wrong thing, or something?” And the less intelligent person is totally baffled. “Why is this smart person being such a jerk to me? I’ve told them the truth and they can’t seem to see it.”

So what you get is smart people just being critical about “stupid people,” without any effective solution or ability to communicate, and less intelligent people being frustrated about geeks or “the intellectuals” or nerds or whatever—feeling like they are being talked down to, disrespected, and generally invalidated.

Humanity Loves Death

Humanity makes beautiful those things that will kill, destroy, or harm it.

One of the coolest museum exhibits I ever saw was medieval weaponry. The quality of the craftsmanship of the armor and the weapons was truly beautiful. True, not every sword in the world looks nice, but a lot of them do. In modern times, guns are similar—they are often quite beautiful when you see them in person.

Some of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been have been wineries—places dedicated to making a substance that poisons people. (Sorry, alcohol is poisonous–it’s why it gets you intoxicated. It’s a toxin.) Hard alcohol bottles are often works of art.

Candy and desserts are almost always beautifully done.

We go even further than this, and we celebrate success by giving people things that are bad for them. If things are getting better for them, we celebrate with sugar and alcohol. “You did great, so here’s something bad for you.”

True, there are beautiful things in the world that are pure good, or at least neutral. There are many awesome works of art, architecture, literature, music, etc. However, most of those were created by determined individuals who wanted to break the mold. In fact, I suspect that if you just let a group of human beings follow their natural tendencies (requiring them to act as a group with minimal individual thought, and with individual creative expression suppressed) the only things they will make beautiful will be those things that are harmful to themselves or to humanity.

There’s no particular moral to this one. It’s just an observation that frequently strikes me that I thought I would share with all of you. That’s all.

Don’t Sympathize, Be Effective

One of my problems with the way that people talk about oppressed groups today is that instead of trying to free them from oppression, they seem to want to make them more comfortable, create outrage about their oppressors, encourage sympathy for the oppressed, or do other various things that are about the problem, but aren’t solving the problem.

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Science vs. The Scientific Method

I frequently see people believe that something is “a science” just because scientists have engaged in the scientific method to perform a study on that subject. That’s not true, though, and I think it involves a confusion between “science” and “the scientific method.”

Science

Science is essentially the philosophy that the most important statements are ones that accurately predict the future.

“What, wait,” you say, “I thought science was about doing experiments and wearing lab coats, or something.” No. Science is in fact a philosophy that was developed at various different times on this planet depending on what part of the world you’re in. The core of this philosophy is the thing that I wrote above. But what does that really mean?

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Addiction and Propaganda

There are some facts that are worth knowing about addicts and addiction, because these facts have started to broadly affect the world. Not just that there are a lot of addicts, but that some aspects of their behavior have started to influence the culture. But first, let’s talk about those facts about addicts.

The first and most important thing to know about a person with an addiction is:

AN ADDICT WILL SAY ANYTHING IN ORDER TO GET THEIR “FIX.”

As the addiction increases, they will also start to do anything in order to get their fix. Essentially, they will use every power at their disposal in order to be able to do or have the thing they want to do or have. If they are smart, they will use the whole of their intelligence to manipulate others. If they are charming, they will use the full power of their charm to deceive you. At first they will attempt to limit themselves, but as time goes on, their ability to control themselves will lessen and they will take actions that are more and more destructive in order to accomplish their goals.

This is not me talking theoretically. This is me talking from personal experience with myself, with personally counseling addicts, extensive reviews of case histories of addicts, and much more. The reason addicts behave this way is:

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Effectiveness

In the world today, there is a lot of celebration of the completion of work, but not as much celebration of the effectiveness of work.

You see this in all industries and in all subjects.

It is very common to see a news article celebrating the fact that some project has been done, and then operating on the assumption that it was successful because it was expensive, or beautiful, or done by some famous person/company. Rarely do you see actual numbers demonstrating the effectiveness of that work.

I see this often in my field, where some company in Silicon Valley will publish an article (or a research paper) about its own technology that it developed. It will celebrate the existence of the technology, how complex it is, how difficult it was to get it right. But it will rarely talk about the important things: Do its users love it? Did it make some measurable impact on the business? Are significant numbers of people within the company actually using it?

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