Category: Life

• What is done purely by law can be un-done purely by law.
• Beware of venture capitalists bearing gifts.
• Pain is a small price to pay for excellence.
• Learn by picking a goal and doing whatever is necessary to get as close as you can to it.
• Approach the ideal asymptotically, but make whatever tradeoffs are necessary to actually make it a success. Don't make tradeoffs prematurely.
• Centralized systems are inherently more prone to capture by actors you don't like than decentralized or distributed ones; even if you currently control that system.
• Don't give the state any powers you would not want your political enemies to have.

Many people struggle to find meaning in their lives.

They worry about their purpose in life, they worry about the overarching narrative of their life and how it fits into the grand narrative of the world, they worry about the purpose and meaning of the things that happen to them and how they fit into all those narratives. They also worry about trying to assign some kind of meaning to the things that they do, the objects in the world around them, and the people in their life.

Importantly, in all these worries, the concern is always with some kind of special meaning, one that they want to feel comes from outside them in some way, or is more reified, more robust, than simple doxastic belief, perhaps one that even has some kind of symbolic or propositional content.

Many people turn to organized religion for this. Most organized religions provide a hierarchy, from their gods and supernatural beings, to wise people of some kind, to the people that are merely members, where those on each lower rung of the hierarchy can be assured that the meanings and purposes assigned to them by those higher powers above them on the hierarchy are, at least for them, objective, absolute, intentional, propositional, and weave into a coherent narrative whole. And, conveniently, the final rung of the hierarchy, the supernatural beings, don't exist – for of course, what does "supernatural" mean, but simply "something we have no reason to think exists"? If something manifestly existed, then it would simply be natural, no matter how fantastic. You think volcanoes and supermassive black holes and stars and gravity aren't as fantastic as any supernatural story? – which means that they at least don't have to worry about the purpose or meaning in their lives – they can grant it to others, but the buck can stop there.

Other people don't gel with organized religion – perhaps they realize that just because a purportedly absolute, objective, harmonized purpose and meaning is assigned to you, that doesn't mean you actually enjoy it or want it; perhaps they realize that meaning is inherently something that exists between a consciousness and its experiences, and so the meaning or purpose assigned to you by others doesn't really mean anything for you unless they're either going to enforce it or you choose to accept it, which means that organized religion isn't a true way out of this problem, perhaps they have more specific concerns – but still feel the need to have some kind of more robust, reified, stable, semi-external (gained from others, written down, etc) meaning applied to things in their lives. These people seek out systems of traditions, rituals, symbolism, myth, community, and philosophy through which they can create meanings themselves, subjectively, but then obscure that process from themselves. This way they can intellectually acknowledge the fact that they created those meanings and purposes, but not have to act or feel as if they do, not have to think about it most of the time. This is the way of spirituality of various sorts, and also many non-spiritual things like Humanism, various political ideologies and movements, scientism, and so on.

In my opinion, these people suffer from a few misconceptions:

The first is caused by the promotion of objectivity even in the realm of things that are inherently subjective; absolutism even in the face of things that should inherently grow and change and develop over time; and reification of abstractions, even in the face of something that should be intimately in touch with the raw experience of life itself. The reason that people want meanings that feel external, robust, reified, is that they are caught up in a game imposed on them by the nature of living in a community of others: the tendency for communities to force their participants to be able to justify one's meanings and purposes to other people, even when it isn't necessary, due to the community's inherent nature to try to subsume and devour individuals into themselves, to force conformity and alignment on them. And justifying oneself to others is always a game that requires objectivity – so that you can point to things the other person will agree on – reification – because language involves expressing things in terms of words and concepts, which are inherently abstractions (as opposed to pointing and grunting) – and absolutism, since you don't want to have to constantly re-explain things to people, and people generally expect you to be the same tomorrow as you were yesterday and will expect an explanation if you aren't.

Thus, if the process of meaning-making is too close to home, if the fact that they are creating their own meanings is too obvious, then people feel that:

• the fact that those meanings are subjective makes them feel arbitrary, selfish, or parochial;
• the fact that these meanings are fleeting and changeable makes them weak and pointless;
• the fact that these meanings are local, inchoate, emotional, personal, instead of propositions and symbols based in traditions, makes them irrational and meaning-less.

Meanwhile, to the contrary, if we live in a world where no meanings are objective, no purposes are given, where it all stems from us no matter what we do, than there is no one that can come up to you and criticize the meanings or purposes that you have assigned to things. What grounds do they have? The ground that they've created, which has no bearing on you – they can set themselves against you with all their might, if their meanings and purposes say they must, and that is their right, but what can something they say from their ground mean to you on yours? Why must it matter to you if your meanings are arbitrary in the grand scheme, if you assigned them for personal reasons that seem right to you, that make you happy, or that get you through life? Why does it matter if they're selfish, if you are that self, and the only judge of them? Why does it matter if they are parochial, limited to your life and the things you care about instead of integrated into a grand global or cosmic narrative, when you can only experience and know about your own life anyway?

Likewise, what does it matter if a meaning changes? If meanings come from us than they will only change when they are no longer fit for purpose: when they no longer raise in us the feelings they once did – no longer make us happy, or motivate us, or reach out and grab us and intrigue us. Maybe we have changed, perhaps our context has changed, but for one reason or another a meaning that was once relevant and important can find itself in a context where it no longer has anything to point to or act on, or where other things are more important, or we change such that we simply don't care about that meaning anymore. Why should meanings not be able to change and develop with us, to ebb and flow in cycles as we live and different things catch our minds and interests?

Likewise, why does it matter if a meaning that you've assigned is inchoate, emotional, personal – incommunicable? People seem to get caught up in the idea that what they are seeking is meaning in terms of language, when what they are really seeking is a feeling, or a practice. This is the ultimate reification fallacy: if you ask someone what they truly want out of a Meaning, they'll eventually tell you, if you drill down far enough, that ultimately they're feeling sad, or lonely, or listless, or undirected, or unengaged, and that what they want is something to make them feel excited, enchanted, connected, engaged, focused, and happy.

That's all.

The "meaning" people seek is, at bottom, just a complex and deep melange of affective stances toward their life and the world around them. But because our culture, our world, even the human mind, is so horribly caught up in abstractions and language, they immediately go looking not for particular things – routines, hobbies, projects, people, places, objects, anything – that bring out those feelings in them, but for words, in the shape of archetypes, symbols, abstractions, traditions, theologies, narratives, to overlay onto life, that they hope will bring meaning to dead things that do nothing for them.

In the process of trying to find these things they often do find new routines, new people and places, new projects and hobbies, however, and so the set of words they eventually settle down with will usually be determined actually by which set of accompanying actual particulars truly evoke those feelings in them, but they don't see this. They confuse things and attribute these improvements in situation to the words and not the actual things themselves.

The fact that this confusion of words – especially narratives – for the sort of meaning one is actually looking for is a mistake can best be illustrated by the fact that, if you were to wake up today and learn without a shadow of a doubt, with all the proof you need, that there was a being in the world that had created all humanity, and had designed narratives for each of us to act out in our lives, that all weave into a grand whole, and that all meet some master plan of theirs, you can still conceive of not liking this objective, linguistic, holistic meaning you've been granted. And in fact having this meaning imposed upon you without your choice or consent if you don't like it, agree with it, or want it, is actually crushing. It would suck all the meaning out of your life! If meaning the feeling that you're seeking out and meaning the word were truly identical, if meaning being external was really such a boon, this would be psychologically impossible to comprehend, but it isn't.

What's worse, when you adopt a set of practices and symbols and words to view the world through to structure it and grant meaning for you, you give up spontaneity: now, when you find something that gives you the affective experience of meaning, you have to somehow fit it into that existing rubric, or risk overturning the entire thing by revealing just how arbitrary that rubric is, how much it is simply your choice to play pretend and follow along with. Adopting such a rubric also merely reinforces these fallacies about meaning that make it far harder than necessary to joyfully embrace, adopt, throw yourself into meanings, that make finding meaning not into a thing that you just bump into all the time, but a difficult journey. And worst of all, such rubrics make it difficult for your meaning to change, to adapt with you. If you become a Jungian occultist one year, but then the rigid myopic structure of the archetypes begins to wear on you and you want to try something new, so you become a Wiccan the next year, and then that doesn't work out so you move on to being a Neo-Pagan the next, eventually all these changes will become exhausting, and will also expose to your subconscious the artifice of the entire game. So you have a strong incentive to pick something and Stockholm yourself into sticking with it.

More than anything, though, reality isn't language. Reality isn't narrative. Reality is not symbols or abstractions. It does not owe you fitting those things, or providing easy ways to map those things onto it, and it will not do so. This means that you have the choice of either allowing your precious linguistic game to break – which threatens the safety of the entire edifice upon which you've staked all the meaning in your life – or you have to ignore things or hammer things until they fit the shape you've chosen.

Thus my advice: don't over complicate things. Throw out all the Christian thinking that makes meaning hard to identify even when it's in front of your face, hard to find, hard to accept for yourself. Throw out the word games, the linguistic farce, that locks you down, that separates you from the spontaneity of life, and detaches you from reality. Don't allow the belief that you must find symbols and meanings that can be described in language to creep back in.

Instead, look out into the world of particulars. Find real, specific things that bring you the feeling you're looking for, that engage you, that cause meaning to flower uncaused and unbidden from your creative nothing. Focus on that, don't get lost in abstractions. Experience is an infinite sea of particulars, many that will depress you, make you despair, suck all the meaning out of your life, and many that will do the opposite. This is a game of focus. Make your reality.

Think about the future when the present is terrible, because the future can always change.

Think about the present when the future looks dark, because at least you have these moments now to enjoy.

Find people who bring out the joy and wonder of the world, who make you feel like more of yourself, to spend your time with. Mercilessly cut out the people you hate, and when you can't do that, find joy in watching their absurdity, in documenting their evil and preparing for their downfall, even if it never comes.

Find something to do that you love doing, that occupies your mind, your hands, and your time. Something that you can improve at. Something that you can show others. This will be the backbone that fills everything else.

Focus on the process, not the destination. Even if you hate the process find the particulars about it that you can love and focus on those – the feeling of your body moving and working, the feeling of fighting through something to get it done, the daring rush of trying to meet a deadline headlong, the crazy pride of pushing yourself, the outlandish absurdity of your situation and what a good story it will make.

Remember that pain, disappointment, hurt – all these are also flavors of life, the bitterness to joy's sweetness and contentment's savory. Learn to throw yourself into these things to, challenge yourself with them, grow through them, struggle, fight, and love the fight and the struggle and the challenge and the growth. Learn even to love the pain and the trauma, perhaps, because that's life as we're given it.

Do, be, look. Don't worry about putting names and symbols to it. The more you try to overlay traditions and symbols and archetypes and rituals onto this the more you affirm the misconceptions about meaning, and therefore the more you turn meaning into something difficult and laborious to obtain, instead of something you can trip over in your local supermarket.

From my DMs:

There's so much that's cool and awesome and wonderful and nice and kind and beautiful and great about the world, from the grand things to the mundane things, for me, I just don't see the need to mystify it behind abstractions and symbolism. And for me, meaning-making is just something that happens without effort — things either mean and matter to me or they don't, it just flowers out of my creative nothing without conscious effort or intention, and never toward abstractions, always toward particulars, and I love that, I love experiencing that. So I don't like being told I need symbols and abstractions to have meaning, or rituals and traditions and communities to construct it — all that ruins the magic, the easy joy of it, for me. I always feel like people over complicate this and it sucks the naturalness out of it for me. Plus, every time I've tried to engage with a community around some set of practices or symbolism or beliefs it sucked and I hated it and I was disappointing and I left; I've tried like ten times in my life now. I just really love life, even the pain and disappointment and trauma is Right in its own way. I dunno.

The classic vulgar individualist quote is that communities don't exist, only groups of individuals. This is false. Communities may not exist as specific located physical entities, but they do exist ontologically, as higher-order meta entities composed of the emergent behaviors, desires, and powers that arise out of the interaction of their component individuals, and perpetuated through time by inherent self-cohesion and self-preservation properties, like gliders in Conway's Game of LIfe. The behaviors, desires, and powers of communities, are not remotely the same as those of any individual member, or even the set of such properties of all of the constituent members together – as I said, their properties are fundamentally emergent.

Therefore I am not an individualist by virtue of my denial of the ontological existence of communities, but by virtue of my belief that communities are evil and should be avoided as much as possible. They are, at best, an evil of necessity, made necessary by how much greater their powers are than any single individual or even the sum of individual efforts, but that does not change the fundamental threat they pose to individual thought, expression, and self-determination.

Thus it is my belief that communities should be viewed as temporary, local, ephemeral, and utilitarian – individuals should get together when necessary to achieve some desire, but then as soon as that job is done, the community should evaporate as much as possible – no remainder of loyalty to the group as a whole, or abstractions such as names for the group or flags for it, should continue to exist to haunt its members after the fact. If the goal to which the community is dedicated is known to be reoccurring or constant, then some low level amount of continuous organization and contact must be maintained, but it should be kept to a minimum. Absolutely no permanent or consistently-recurring organizational structures, such as leaders, organizers, representatives, spokespeople, democratic assemblies, councils, meetings, bureaucracies, or anything else should be maintained between individual instances of gathering – such things should be created in the moment they are needed, constructed of different people and places each time if possible, and torn down completely when they are no longer needed. It doesn't matter if they're nominally "horizontal" or "non-hierarchical", organization in all its forms is inherently a danger to free thought, action, and life. Need for such things should also be kept as minimal as possible through distributed, stigmergic organization whenever possible.

Why do I have this antagonistic view of communities?

I find it very strange that so many so-called anarchists seem to have an intense bigotry against homeschooling, and a strong belief in the superiority and benefit of public schooling. It seems inherently self-contradictory for those who should be fundamentally opposed to centralization, state control, and bureaucracy to embrace public schooling. It seems even more contradictory for those who should reject the regimentation of anyone's lives, the production of people as if by a factory, the structuring of their educational environment by nation-state propaganda, censorship, and corporate interests, and the dictation to any mind what they should learn, know, and be interested in to do so. And yet many do.

I think a large part of this is that in our present culture, the only subculture that has a big enough problem with the culture, structure, and/or teachings of public education, and which is simultaneously powerful enough to carve out concessions and exceptions to make taking their children out of that system possible, has been fundamentalist conservative Christianity. As a result, the homeschooling as a concept seems to be strongly associated with fundamentalist Christianity, bringing with it images of strict, abusive parents, social isolation, poor education, severe indoctrination, and limited life experience. However, obviously, homeschooling is a tool that can be used by others, and in fact I think for anarchists specifically, it offers many great advantages.

Public schooling acclimates children to a world of strict control of where they go and when at all times, of arbitrary control by random authorities, of control over what, when, and how they learn, of arbitrary systems of quantitative assessment being forced on them to make them legible to bureaucratic assessment and control, to police, to institutional punishment. They also raise children in, essentially, a locked cage with a vast mass of largely unsupervised peers, which creates almost prison-like social dynamics, including painful bullying, ostracism, peer pressure and conformism dynamics, and in essence all the absolute worst of the problems of communities, without any of the mitigating factors of adult emotional maturity and experience.

This creates adults who are often deeply and horribly scarred by their experience in numerous ways – think of all the people who learned they can be bullies because they were in high school, or the people who peaked in high school, or those who were savagely bullied and ostracised at the time and carried the trauma of that into adulthood, which can permanently harm their ability to socialize with other adults, or make them resentful – and who are also browbeaten and broken, either into submission or just into burnout and failure.

Public school also places the education of children under a centralized nation-state bureaucracy, and thus subject to political capture and control, and where the corporate nation-state is free to indoctrinate and propagandize them – more subtly than the hamfisted and obvious attempts of fundamentalists, but indoctrinate them just the same.

Additionally, the teaching model of public schools is just horrendous in my opinion: it's far more important to be very deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic about a small number of things than it is to have a shallow, broad, and unenthusiastic knowledge about a large number of things, and public school, due to its one-size-fits all methodology, can't accommodate that style of teaching at all.

Those who have a small selection of topics that they're deeply interested in and knowledgeable about have something unique and specific to offer the world through that specialization, for two reasons. First, because that specialization – especially with how their individual preferences, other interests, and predilections will mix and change their investigation of any topic – is unique to them, not something many other people have. And second, because you can get exponentially better at a topic through studying it deeply, so they'll be far better in those specializations than other people are even in the sum of the various subjects they know shallow things about. This means they'll feel more purpose, direction, and meaning in their lives, as well as just being more useful to the people around them.

Additionally, by focusing on the selection of topics children are actually interested in, you follow and reinforce their love of learning and exploration. Whereas if you force them to learn an endless litany of factoids about subjects they literally couldn't care less about, they begin to associate learning with listlessness, boredom, resentment – with having things shoved down their throats, with rote memorization, with painful hours bent over a book that is quite literally boring them to tears. This killing of their love of learning is a large part of how we've created such an ignorant, unempathetic, dull society of drones

Implicit in the foregoing is the idea that learning must be student-directed: the job of the teacher should be to teach them how to think, how to read, how to understand, how to remember, how to organize information, how to find it, how to identify reliable sources and cross-reference things, and in general how to be an autodidact; then to keep the curiosity of the students perpetually fed with a feast of reliable textbooks and information as they ask questions, as well as to suggest new avenues of inquiry, or suggest when they may have misunderstood something. The job of the teacher should not be to assign, and certainly not to assign a vast, shallow sea of uninteresting and factory-produced slop for students to consume.

Obviously some general broad base of knowledge is needed, but it should probably be much more limited then it is, and should be provided through the encouragement of students to explore the links between the subjects they're interested in and other subjects, or to satisfy their natural curiosity about the world, which should do enough to provide students with a decent base of general knowledge. Where it does not, we must remember that this is the 21st century, and the vast wealth of textbooks, encyclopedias, and courses available online – if someone knows how to learn, how to identify trustworthy sources, and how to think critically, the internet is a treasure trove. We just don't teach people how to do that in public school, not really.

Furthermore, the strictures of public schooling, with deadlines and due dates, tests with no second chances, quantitative assessments and grades, and all the rest of it, is a recipe for horrible stress and anxiety in students. No one learns well under a deadline, with no second chances before they're just thrust onward, assessed by broad-strokes quantitative metrics that can bring down horrible consequences on their heads if they don't do well on those metrics, because no one learns well under extreme stress. Extreme stress, in fact, tends to make one's mind work worse, and remember less. There's a reason we all joke about not remembering a single thing from high school!

Of course, at this point, some afficionados of fringe educational methods will butt in. What about Montessori education they'll ask – doesn't it satisfy all of the requirements I've outlined above? Yes, and if we had public schools that used Montessori that would be very nice. However, we don't. Moreover, even if we did, they'd still be centralized and state controlled. Why should real anarchists want that?

Moreover, I believe regimentation and quantitative metrics would begin to eventually creep back in, as the general voting population, whose tax money goes to funding the schools, decided they wanted a clear way to see results. When parents are individually on the hook for the costs of their children's education, qualitative metrics are fine, because the parents ostensibly have enough time to assess their children, and are also relatively close to their children and so can absorb a lot of tacit knowledge about how their children are doing; however, when an entire democratic collective is responsible for paying for all their children to be educated, no individual voter has enough time to read through the qualitative assessments for everyone's kids, so they're going to want quantitative ones.

At this point, the inevitable hysteria about "socialization" will arise. How can homeschooled children learn proper social skills, learn to interact with their peers?

Well, I certainly didn't, and I turned out just fine. :)

On a more serious note, it's very easy for homeschooling parents to just drop their kids off to attend public school clubs and/or hang out with the public school kids. My parents did it. You can also form anarchist homeschooling associations in the same way fundamentalist Christians form fundie Christian homeschooling associations, so all your kids can play together or even learn together if you want. It's really not that hard, you just need an ounce of creativity. This also solves the problem of your kids not getting to interact with people from other religions, classes, ethnic groups, queer kids, etc – hopefully, one would think, your local anarchist collective is sufficiently diverse…. right? And if it isn't, you can always fall back on public schools.

One of the things that I've never really understood is the tendency of people to have heroes. To look at one particular idea, achievement, cultural contribution, creation, that someone has made, or even a whole string of them, and conclude from that that they're going to look up to this person as a whole human being – to admire them, imitate them, see them as a role model, whatever.

The reason I don't understand this is that it seems almost like a target location error to me – a confusion. You look up to them, admire them as heroes, for the particular things they've done or contributed, not for their existence as full and complete human beings – in fact, in most cases, you don't even know them as full and complete human beings. So it makes so much more sense to me to admire what they've contributed – the actual thing you care about – and ditch the individual entirely.

Thus, I've never been interested in individuals at all; I'm only interested in ideas, cultures, achievements, creations, contributions. I don't really care very much who made them. To the degree that I even know the names of the people who made them, it's in the same way that I know about brands – vaguely, and usually just as a sort of tag for a Bayesian prior that I'll like whatever else they do in the same domain of the things I previously liked from them. Sometimes I'll pick up fun little anecdotes about them, but that's it. This is especially true for people who were only or mostly notible for their participation in a particular milieu. For instance, I can name a few of the MIT AI Lab hackers, but I don't really care about them as individuals at all. Instead what I care about is what was done at the MIT AI Lab and the culture that was born there.

To be clear, this isn't borne out of some kind of bad experience with meeting your heroes – not at all. I just… don't find individuals as interesting as what they've done. And this is the crucial difference: many people take a retroactive "death of the author" approach when they find out that the creator of something they like also had terrible views or did terrible things, or went on to create some shitty and uninspired things later on; or they'll laugh and shake their heads in a sour grapes manner and say "well, they always say, never meet your heroes!" when they inevitably do meet their heroes, full of hope and respect, and find out they're just people, often shitty ones at that; meanwhile, I'm taking the preemptive approach. I simply don't intrinsically care much who the person is behind a good idea well expressed or executed, or an important contribution, or the core ideas behind a positive culture.

More, my endorsement of one particular idea or contribution to whatever field of theirs is not an endorsement of how they live, how they treat people, anything else they've done or said, or who they hang out with. And for the most part I literally couldn't give less of a shit about any of that either. I might check out the other work they've done along similar lines to the work of theirs I liked, but I don't take it as gospel, or hang my hopes on this also being good. I may support them if I want them to keep doing things, or go to lengths to avoid supporting them if I don't like what they do. But that's not about heroes and hero worship, that's paying for what I want more of. That's market logic. I especially don't back-read the other things they've done or said into the things they've done or said that I like or agree with, if I don't want to – I steal what I want from them and move on, unbeholden to them. Because the insight, wittiness, accuracy, power, or usefulness of (my interpretation of) an idea, even encoded in the original expression it was founded in, doesn't evaporate or change just based on other only transitively related things. That's part of why I have the Mirrors Page on this blog: to hold the ideas that I like and agree with and that have influenced me, detached from their authors – stolen.

This is in contrast to how many on the left seem to process ideas, creations, and achievements, where the author seems to be all-important even as they profess "death of the author": where negative moral properties of the author, or low quality in their other works, or whatever else, seems to cause this need to treat whatever that they liked from that individual as tainted by association, as unclean and impure, and to retroactively rationalize to themselves how it was "really bad all along" in order to make it psychologically easier for them to divest themselves of whatever it was they liked in order to stay morally pure. This is, of course, a horrible tragedy: it causes us to engage with art, or practical achievements, or culture, as an exercise in Christian purity testing and purification, in refusing to associate oneself with things marked impure even for secondary characteristics instead of inherent properties, instead of an exercise in appreciating achievement, passion, and skill. It also causes us to willfully wreck our ability to even clearly see and acknowledge achievement, passion, and skill wherever it arises in an attempt to align our perceptiosn with morality. And worst of all it cuts off our access to these things.

If we instead steal from the author, and kill the author's hallowed place in our heads preemptively, we can allow ourselves to see and engage with art and achievement for what they are and what they bring uniquely to human experience and reality without a moralistic dimension, allow ourselves to take and use what is good and useful for us, without thereby tainting ourselves. This ultimately denies these people power over us, even the power to withdraw their works from us.

I like being anti-social. Those who are pro-social tend not to be able to comprehend this, but I like my independence from the herd, and even my opposition to it. This is not something to be fixed. Any notion of anarchism that does not leave room for someone like me is oppressive. You can't do comrade conversion therapy on me to "fix" my dislike of you people.

Things I believe about intelligence, in no particular order, based on what I've observed in the world:

• Intelligence is multiple, possibly overlapping, innate talents or aptitudes. However, intelligence is not isomorphic to individual skills a person might have. The kinds of intelligence instead grant aptitude for generally broad fields of endeavor, such as:
  • Communication
  • Theory of Mind
  • Visual-Spacial Reasoning
  • Planning
  • Linguistic Reasoning
  • Mathematical Reasoning
  • Pattern Recognition
  • Working Memory
• The last two can generally enhance the speed at which the other forms of intelligence operate, since they allow someone to work faster, or hold more in their head at once, but many very intelligent people have horrible, or just average, memories, and must suppliment them with personal information management systems of various sorts. Likewise, pattern recognition can be as much of a hindrance as a help, and some very intelligent people prefer to manually reason out what a pattern must be instead of jumping to it immediately, to make sure they got it right.
• Intelligence is aptitude, not skill: it means you can learn faster, and have a greater capacity to do complex or novel things with what you learn. But it does not automatically make you good at whatever you try your hand at, or automatically right on first blush about whatever you think about. Don't fall into the trap of armchair reasoning or hubris about fields you know nothing about: intelligence does not absolve you of spending the time to actually properly read, research, and listen to other people to gather information, and understand their perspectives and arguments.
• IQ tests, insofar as they test anything other than being good at tests, being educated, being in good health, etc, test maybe two or three kinds of intelligence (visual-spacial reasoning, pattern recognition and working memory). There are many other aspects which they don't even begin to cover.
• Intelligence is as much about personality as it is about mental capacities/aptitudes:
  • someone who is too prideful or insecure to listen to what others say, revise their ideas when they're wrong, consider alternative ideas or reasons that they might be wrong, or relentlessly pursue possible counter arguments, is likely to be forever locked in a mental prison of their own creation – their stupidity will have a much higher level of complexity, but they will remain stupid, although occasionally have moments of brilliance.
  • someone who is too myopic, who gets so caught up in the technical complexities and details of whatever they're working on that they lose sight of whether their ideas are actually practical to put to use, will actually achieve the overarching goals in the most effective way, or whether their goals are even worth reaching in the first place, is likely to just get stuck digging a rut for their whole lives, missing the larger picture. See also.
  • someone who is too impressed with the beauty of theoretical abstracts which their intelligence allows them to see, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, are really falling into a sub-category of the same failure as the previous point – myopic, useless, missing the forest for the trees, just in a different direction.
  • Someone who has, for whatever reason, become anti-intellectual, who refuses to use their mind, will never gain the benefit of whatever intelligence they may have. Again, their stupidity may be more baroque, but that doesn't change what it is.
  • The most important personality component of intelligence is wanting to think, and being motivated to think and improve one's thinking and learn.
• I don't really know if intelligence can be taught or not. It seems to me that it's probably locked in sometime in early childhood, based on how someone was raised and what they were exposed to, as well as natal or even genetic aptitude factors. But who knows, really. We should try to give everyone the best environment, exposure, education, and support we can, even if they don't seem smart, to see what they can do with it. Doing so will enhance the achievements and lives of even those who aren't notibly intelligent in some way.
• Intelligence isn't a hard requirement for going into any field. It just makes things easier, and makes you more likely to do something really interesting or novel. That's all.
• Intelligence is not an indicator of human worth. We are not equal in intelligence, but there are many other reasons that a human might be worth a lot of things. You can be wise, loyal, have a ton of experience or knowledge on a subject, hardworking, athletic, kind, funny, observant, and any number of other things.

:PROPERTIES:

New horrors are born every day. Many people seem to think there's some kind of obligation to be informed about all of them, to have an opinion on all of them, to have some kind or prepared statement about them to weave them back into the grand narrative of whatever ideological clique you're a member of. More than all of that, many seem to think that there's some sort of obligation to look at these horrors – to stare at them until your eyes bleed, drinking them into your soul, forcing yourself to feel the proper pain, fear, grief, or humiliation. As if that's some kind of penance for not experiencing them yourself, or as if it might help those suffering, or – if it's a horror that may effect you in the future – as if it will do anything to avert it.

They're wrong. This won't help anyone. This won't make you a better person. This won't even make you more philosophically correct.

Instead, focus on what can be practically done, and who is effected, in widening circles.

If you're the one affected by the horror, do what you can to alleviate it; if you might in the future be effected by it, do what you can to prepare for it; and once you've done those things, forget about it for the moment. You'll deal with the rest when it confronts you in the street – only then will dealing with it more become necessary. In the meantime, focus on what you can do to make your life better, and on making sure you continue doing the things that give your life meaning, whether that's taking jogs, or petting your pets, or walking with your partner, or writing, or drawing, or programming.

If the horror affects your friends and/or family, or will in the future, then try to find ways to help or comfort or prepare them. And once you've exhausted the options – again, forget. You and they will deal with the future when it arrives. In the meantime, spend time with them. Enjoy life. Try to relax. Focus on doing the things that are most important to you.

If the horror affects your local community, or a subseection thereof, then do the same things as above, on a community level. This is called mutual aid.

And if the horror affects none of these things, then forget about it entirely, and refocus on other, more important things, local to you, your loved ones, or your community. You are not going to have a meaningful impact on national or global policy or politics unless you've already made it your life's mission to do. Be ready and willing to help those who have, if you see an opportunity to do so, but don't let it drain you.

Worrying about things far outside your realm of experience and control is a recipe for exhausting yourself before you've been able to do all you can for the things you can really, truly, meaningfully effect.

Even at the best of times my predominant intellectual ability is being very good at applied ontology: at figuring out the correct categories and organization and architecture of things, at describing what I want and following the logic through. Not creative or lateral thinking. My brain is like a Bugatti Veyron: very fast in a straight line.

This is very helpful for things like programming and writing in some sense, because I'm very good at seeing the joints in reality and describing things how they need to be described to work correctly. It's also very helpful for things like argumentation and philosophy, because I can usually immediately spot where others have made a leap in logic, or are relying on intuition, because I usually won't be able to automatically follow them. This means I either have to sit down and construct a linear argument to get me where they're going or make them do it, in the process usually clarifying the leap and seeing if it's actually valid. Sometimes I'll make automatic leaps or intuitions too without noticing it (I just can't do it on command) and usually being such a linear thinker can help with that as well, because then I can just revisit the text later and immediately see the gaps, because I won't be able to follow them anymore.

This way of thinking can also be extremely detremental to things like doing proofs, or poetry, or at times even in my own chosen fields when lateral thinking is required: I can sometimes get stuck down one set of train tracks, and not be able to hop the tracks to another path in order to solve a problem. I'm not really sure how to solve this in the general case, but usually asking for help is enough to get me going again.