Consider that there are probably geniuses dying in rice fields, Gaza, or crushed to effective death due to poverty anywhere. Consider also that given enough resources and attention, any donkey can be made to believe that it’s a prized steed. The only defining characteristic is luck. The “genetics” answers has been drilled into wage slaves to make them believe they’re perpetually unworthy.
All that said, if you have the time and resources to pour into unabashed and uninterrupted learning, growing and exploring, it seems to help develop above average skill. Secondly, precise and guided attention and mentoring is very effective at reducing knowledge barriers.
There are literal geniuses, like Gauss for example, who can solve something on intuition without being taught, and there are maybe like 2-4 people who are actually like this alive today. The rest are seething and coping and pretending they’re genius, and taking the rage of their insecurities out on everyone else—a genius is the last person to talk about IQ tests, wordcels or shape rotators etc. Memorizing facts is not genius, it’s a memory trick.
If SV techies want to succeed in Europe, then they should be okay with valuing what Europeans value.
Europeans are not stupid, they prioritized different things, including market socialism in different countries. The Americans also need to remove their exceptionalism glasses and take a long hard look at their own selves—the average American citizen (digital or otherwise) is socially worse off than the average European citizen. The success of American companies is based on the financing environment in the U.S. and has less to do with “friction”. The “friction” exists because on average Europeans have different values. So really, wake up SV tech bros. That whole site is a big ball of yuck.
European researchers in many fields are better or comparable to their U.S. counterparts. The main difference I find between these groups of researchers is access to funding, which is lacking for Europeans.
It would make an interesting case study to examine him neuropsychologically. I am not willing to believe such claims at face value, but there are people with interesting physiological capabilities, like the woman who can smell cancer. Studying someone like him, if he’s telling the truth, would probably help researchers understand something fundamental about long term memory formation and maintenance.
Consider working as a SWE for a small shop working in a niche industry, or trying to solve a niche problem. I wouldn’t recommend early stage startups based on what you’re describing.
Myth and folklore has always been used as an instrument for defining culture and reinforcing it. Nothing is a better example of this than the myriad of Bibles produced during Charlemagne's rein, and these manuscripts are the progenitors of the English bible. A source for the curious, https://www.purecambridgetext.com/post/charlemagne-and-the-e...
So what does this author consider “psyops”, exactly? I assume anything that subverts the culture being maintained by the ruling class in the current time for a given place.
> So what does this author consider “psyops”, exactly?
Linebarger was employed by the US Army during WWII with a Psychological Warfare MOS and wrote a textbook (with the obvious name, available in the obvious places) on the subject; after that, having been among the group that "lost China", he updated his textbook with lessons learned.
(but yes, subverting the culture* which the other guys' ruling class maintains to keep their subjects fighting on their behalf is an obvious part of the job; Linebarger gives biblical examples demonstrating this line of work, and the Cyrus Cylinder fits in his model. He was himself part of the class depicted in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo and, at least by the 1954 version of his book, was aware how this may have damaged his side's credibility in the eyes of the modal chinese peasant)
* culture explains the stasis hypothesised in 1984: because all three geopowers have superficially-different but structurally-identical socioeconomics, they have a shared interest in not attempting to subvert each other deeply, only competing superficially.
It's just such a weirdly ignorant thing to say about Islam. Like he's getting everything he knows about Islam off of Facebook.
Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter) can be pretty oppressive, if you read their scriptures at face value. They all record Bronze Age attitudes.
He happens to live in a country surrounded by people with a much more progressive take on Christianity; the Anglicans just aren't much of a threat. And good for them. But I live in America, where fundamentalist Christians are a far bigger threat to me Muslims. The Muslims here aren't especially progressive, but we have a significant fundamentalist Christian terrorism problem.
I'm a nonbeliever myself I don't want to be part of any of those religions. But all of them have healthy, modern interpretations, and Dawkins really ought to at least put in some effort to look into it. As it is, he makes atheists look uneducated about the religions around them.
> Both Islam and Christianity (and Judaism, for that matter) can be pretty oppressive, if you read their scriptures at face value. They all record Bronze Age attitudes.
The earliest of those was compiled long into the Iron Age, though some of them refer to events which would, based on the timeline in the narrative, have occurred in the Bronze Age (or the Copper Age, or the neolithic) through that Iron Age lens. And, even insofar as, e.g., the Mosaic law may be said to “reflect Bronze Age values”, its also basically declared mostly-irrelevant to non-Jewish Christians in the Christian scriptures when taken at face value (in Acts of the Apostles.)
Which is not to say that Islam, Christianity, and Judaism can’t be oppressive, and some of that doesn’t come from their Scriptures, but to the extent either of those is true, “Bronze Age values” in the scriptures “at face value” are mostly beside the point.
> I'm a nonbeliever myself I don't want to be part of any of those religions. But all of them have healthy, modern interpretations, and Dawkins really ought to at least put in some effort to look into it. As it is, he makes atheists look uneducated about the religions around them.
I understand the human tendency to belong in a group, or want to belong in a group. I don’t think any group that encourages religiosity in any way is conducive to modern civilization. I don’t think being “culturally” anything is acceptable either since part of the culture is regressive attitudes towards the “other”, and often times blind devotion to authority figures.
Aging is fine, it’s people’s attitude towards it that sucks on average.
On average it’s seems many get stuck in some existential crisis by realizing they don’t have enough time left to self actualize according to some previously realized ideal. However, self actualization requires self awareness and understanding of how to navigate changing circumstances–many would take this as being “a loser” or “giving up”, but those are either people with chronic good luck (so it’s impossible to get them to see anything from anyone else’s pov), or people who are prone to self flagellation.
Aging is great if you reframe your life, and give yourself the freedom to explore. Secondly, if you look at some aging athletes, they’re a good example of the possibilities of the human body and the fitness it can maintain with some amount of discipline and care. Exercise also staves off cognitive decline to some degree.
Sure, the human mind can employ coping mechanisms and maybe delay things a bit by taking care.
I don't see how this makes aging "fine" or "great" though. This is a big leap. It's probably the single biggest source of misery, since it affects everyone, and it also comes with a huge economic impact, causing even more misery.
All that said, if you have the time and resources to pour into unabashed and uninterrupted learning, growing and exploring, it seems to help develop above average skill. Secondly, precise and guided attention and mentoring is very effective at reducing knowledge barriers.
There are literal geniuses, like Gauss for example, who can solve something on intuition without being taught, and there are maybe like 2-4 people who are actually like this alive today. The rest are seething and coping and pretending they’re genius, and taking the rage of their insecurities out on everyone else—a genius is the last person to talk about IQ tests, wordcels or shape rotators etc. Memorizing facts is not genius, it’s a memory trick.