Stubbornness

There's good stubbornness: the kind that makes a person work and work and work until he or she achieves great things.

And then there's the kind of stubbornness that's just stupid, where people who know give you sound advice and you just don't take it.

People often talk about intelligence as if an intelligent person is intelligent pretty much all the time. Is this accurate? If so, then I and my brother are unusual.

My brother is very, very intelligent. No really, he is. He's a rocket scientist. And I don't mean that as a mere figure of speech -- he has worked at Martin Marietta and TRW designing things which went into space. He's a mechanical engineer with 2 degrees from MIT. After the rockets, he switched to something he enjoys more: designing cars. Several Camero and Corvette desginers are part my little brother. At the present time he supervises other engineers. There's no doubt that my little brother has a very large brain.

And yet, sometimes there's that bad kind of stubbornness. Once, he owned a Jeep and was driving it over some dunes on the shore of a lake for fun. He hadn't driven on dunes very much at all. Several times during the course of 1 morning, actual experts in dune driving, people who'd been doing it all their lives, told him he had way too much air in his tires and was liable to break something if he didn't let about half of the air out. He good-naturedly dismissed all of this advice, and that afternoon, out on the dunes with tire pressure which right for paved roads and wrong for the dunes, he snapped one of Jeep's axles.

Why hadn't he taken the experts' advice and let half of the air out of those tires as they had urged him to do? I don't know any good answer to that.

Like my brother, I am extremely intelligent. Just look around this blog: I'm awesome. And yet -- for the last year or so I've been the same way with the stupid stubbornness. Is this genetic? Are a lot of wicked smart people really stupid a lot of time, or what? Is my behavior typical for old people with new technology, even if the old people are smart?

I've had my Galaxy 6 for about a year and loved it, but whenever it prompted me to hook it up to wifi, I said to myself: No, better not do that.

Why?

I don't know any good answer to that question. Same as with my brother and the tire pressure.

But today, I thought about the tires and axle of my brother's Jeep, and more to the point, I thought about all the times I had had to go outside during a phone call on the Galaxy because the connection kept breaking it up, and wondered whether there just might be some connection to my refusal to take the recommendations about the wifi.

I hooked up the wifi and sure enough: the call quality on my phone improved tremendously. Call quality had been my only big complaint about the Galaxy, and it's fixed because I did something the phone kept suggesting I do -- for a year. I suppose with my earlier smart phones somebody in Customer Service had done this for me.

Hopefully we've all learned something here, and are headed for a brighter tomorrow -- a tomorrow during which our huge brains will be in use more often.

Afraid Of AI? You Got It Backwards

I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence. I don't see it coming anytime soon, for one thing. You disagree? Take the most advanced computer translation program you can find, use it to translate a simple 5-word English sentence of your choice into Japanese, take that Japanese sentence and use the same program to translate it back into English, and then we'll talk. As Stephen Root said in the 4th-season episode of "News Radio" entitled "Super Karate Monkey Death Car":

"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business come to my hut, but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung. Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match! The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey."

You can call that hilarious, you can call it great TV. One thing you can't call it, in my humble opinion, is evidence of the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence.

But even if I'm wrong, and AI is even now on the verge of happening -- it doesn't worry me. More intelligence? That would be great. That would be most helpful. The main threat to humanity is the very opposite, the same thing it's been for thousands of years: a lack of intelligence. Any threat posed by artificial intelligence is laughable compared to the constant threat posed to us by natural stupidity.

The most obvious current example? The moron who was just elected POTUS and all the millions of morons who voted for him. We were on the verge of cutting US dependency on petrochemicals in half, on the verge of getting a smart grid, on the verge of shoring up the social safety net, on the verge of making minimum wage a living wage -- but all of that and a whole lot of other very good stuff is just going to have to wait now, because of stupidity. Because of nothing other than stupidity. Artificial intelligence would be great right now. It could be a tremendous help with that question so many of us are asking: "What the Hell are we going to do now?!" It's not as if there's an overabundance of intelligence currently working on that one.

Another example of stupidity being the greatest danger to humanity? Hitler. Some say he was an evil genius -- to that I say, "Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!" Hitler believed that the Soviet Union and international banking were united in a Jewish conspiracy to impurify the "German race." He actually believed that. He was a moron.

Artificial intelligence? Bring it on! Artificial intelligence, natural intelligence, hybrid intelligence, any kind of intelligence: we need it, we need more of it, we need much, much more of it, just as we have for thousands if not millions or billions of years.

Big And Little Ideas

I'm an idiot. I'm not being modest, I really am. Undoubtedly, some of you are muttering to yourselves, "We KNOW you're not just being modest," but in case some of you are reading along who need more convincing, I will give you 2 very striking examples of my idiocy: in the first case, I ran out of scotch tape. This lack of tape was very inconvenient on quite a few occasions, I was annoyed by this lack of scotch tape for years, literally for years, before it suddenly occurred to me that it was within my financial means to go to a store and buy more scotch tape. Years. I'm not exaggerating. I really am that stupid. The second example: where I live there are 2 different spaces, each one lit by a single light bulb. One of these spaces was too bright when you turned on the light, the other not bright enough, and this too went on for years, it went on until today, when it occurred to me that there was a solution even simpler than the solution to the tape problem, a solution which required no money and no trip to a store. And so about a half hour ago a third light bulb went on over my head -- a very dim blub, certainly, but finally I switched those 2 light bulbs, and already the improvement in the quality of my life has been immense.

So you see, when I tell you I'm an idiot I'm not joking. And yet, there are some things I'm smarter about than average. I've scored very high on IQ tests, and the uselessness of IQ tests is demonstrated not only by their not having caught the idiocy demonstrated by my problems with things light tape and light bulbs, but also by the fact that they wouldn't have given anybody a clue about the following.

I'm good when it come to grasping certain realities having to do with macroeconomics and politics. For example, when I read in Trotsky's history of the Russian Revolution



that events in political revolutions are directed not by changes in political classes but by sudden psychological changes within political groups which had already formed before the revolution, I was very pleased, not because I read an idea which was new to me, but because I was relieved to know that someone else besides me had had that insight, and wrote it down in a book which many people have read. For example, when I first saw Zipcars, I was relieved to see that someone was realizing the idea of car-sharing which had occurred to me as a child in the 1960's, the first time I saw a large city with huge parking lots absolutely full of cars going nowhere, lots surrounded by streets clogged with cars going slow.

I'm not as smart as Trotsky. I got the thing with the psychology of classes before I read Trotsky, but I'm 53 years old and I haven't actually done much of anything. By the time Trotsky was 53 he had published many books and articles, helped overthrow the Romanovs, been the 2nd most powerful man in the Soviet Union for several years, then been toppled from power and eventually exiled by Stalin but still remained one of the world's most influential political writers. I saw the situation with cars in cities but was never able to do anything about it. Right now I'm able to see more clearly than many Americans can the benefits which proportional representation would bring to our country, but I don't seem to be able to communicate those benefits very well, or to convince very many people at all about much of anything. Or to get the attention of the publishers or literary agents who would be able to put my writing before the eyes of large numbers of people who would like it and find it useful.

I NEED HELP. I'M AN IDIOT AND I NEED ALL THE FREAKIN HELP I CAN GET. I'm not kidding.

Some Aspects Of My Autistic Experience Of Life

On "Homeland," Saul once said to Carrie, "You are the smartest and the dumbest fucking person I have ever met." The producers apparently liked that line: they added it to the audio of the next season's opening montage. (I like how cable series still have what would have been considered "full-length" opening montages on network TV until 1990 or so, when the networks started making them shorter and shorter, and/or running the main credits over the beginning of the episode, sometimes eliminating the opening montages altogether, not to mention what they do with the closing credits. All to make more time for commercials. NOT TO MENTION RUNNING GODDAM COMMERCIALS DURING THE SHOWS, POP-UP COMMERCIALS ALONG THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN, THAT ARE GETTING BIGGER AND BIGGER AND LONGER AND LONGER, AND MAKING OUR LIVES MORE AND MORE CLOSELY RESEMBLE CONSTANT NIGHTMARES. Maybe 1990 was when the MBA's started to take over network TV from people who actually knew something about TV and to systematically ruin it, as they've ruined so much else in our lives. Anyway, although I like how cable shows still consider opening credits to be worth doing, it disappoints me that they tend to run identical opening credits every season. The only exception I know is "Homeland," so good for them.)



Anyway, the line struck me too, because more than once someone has said the same thing to me. One difference is that it hasn't been said to me when I was a top-echelon CIA agent by my good friend, a former and future Agency Director, but when I was working for minimum wage at McDonald's, or for 50 cents an hour above minimum wage at a national-chain bookstore, or for 2 bucks an hour above minimum wage for a year-round outdoor graveyard-shift job in Alaska. Yes, it was colder than a welldigger's ass. Colder than penguin shit. Colder than -- well it was pretty cold, and I had chronic bronchitis, so I finally had the sense to quit before it literally killed me.

But I'm accepting that I've had it this way because I'm autistic. Not because I'm lazy or something like that. On some of the aforementioned entry-level jobs, some co-workers, emphasizing my exceptional intelligence more than my exceptional stupidity, assumed that soon I would be moving up in the world. They seemed to take it as a given that I was going to be doing something much more interesting and making much more money doing it.

Over and over I encountered such assumptions about myself, and before I was diagnosed, these assumptions puzzled me. I always felt more convinced by the assumptions of different people, who assured me that I would never amount to a sack of shit. Now I know that I'm autistic, and those two radically-different attitudes toward me and my aptitudes, taken together, make sense. Am I a genius? No. Am I a moron? No. I'm a genius and a moron. I'm a mutant. An alien in your midst. (Have no fear: I come in peace.) Sometimes I can solve a problem that's had you completely stuck and sometimes you'll need to explain something to me like I was 5 years old.

Some autistics have elite, top-government-clearance jobs. I don't think Carrie Mathison is autistic, but she's definitely neurologically divergent, and being atypical on a fundamental, neurological level often brings with it being very smart and very fucking stupid compared to average. Some autistics die homeless or in institutions and will never get even the lowest-level government security clearance. Most autistics my age or older haven't been correctly diagnosed. Consider Rain Man: correctly diagnosed even though he was older than I in 1988, smart enough to help you count cards in a 6-deck shoe, but too stupid not to tell the casino that you're counting cards. Didn't even seem to understand that he'd done something wrong by letting them know. The Feds aren't going to give him any kind of security clearance. In fact, it's pretty hard for me to imagine any sort of job for which Rain Man would be suited, other than charging admission for people to come and observe him. And believe me, I've given it a lot of thought. Why? Because I have a lot in common with him.



My arithmetical ability to do things like count cards in a 6-deck shoe and multiply 4-digit numbers in my head is somewhat less than Rain Man's, but it's way, way above average. And my tendency to tell the casino that we're counting cards seems to be very high -- my sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate to say in a given situation is very weak, that is. I'm guessing here, going over events in my mind which completely puzzled me at the time and trying to figure out what happened. Sometimes I'll figure out years after the fact that I should have said something at a particular point, or shouldn't have said what I did. After years of pondering it the way Rain Man ponders Abbott & Costello's "Who's On First?" sketch without getting it at all. Sometimes years after the fact I'll figure out something that someone said in a joking way.

For example, about 15 years after the fact, I finally put it together that a guy I'd known had been making fun of me by comparing me to Rain Man. (Politically-correct folks: sit the fuck back down and shut the fuck up, this was a very nice guy, an extremely nice guy, a perfect example of the point I often try to make in this blog that you can be extremely politically-incorrect also and a loving, generous, caring Left-wing Democrat staunchly opposed to all bigotry and prejudice, or politically-correct and also a hateful asshole.) That's why he would often mimic Rain Man and say thing like : "Yeah... Yeah... Yeah, definitely." He was mocking me, because, apparently, sometimes I act a little bit like Rain Man. Or maybe much more than a little bit. This was 1997, 10 years before I was finally diagnosed.

After 15 years I figured out he did his Rain Man routine in order to mock me, which gives me hope that eventually the real Rain Man, with the loving, dedicated, although occasionally impatient and not necessarily always politically-correct help of the young Tom Cruise, may finally figure out what the "Who's On First?" sketch is about. It does not give me a lot of hope that I will ever be a certain sort of sparkling social butterfly who gives inspiration to the next Noel Coward. I'm more likely to inspire someone like the next Mel Brooks or the next Farrelly brothers. (And that's okay.) Like Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory," I have a crazy-high IQ while at the same time there are very important, basic areas of human intelligence in which I'm very, very stupid. No doubt there have been very many incidents in which I have behaved very stupidly and never noticed that something was wrong. Sheldon's Mom had him tested but she didn't follow up with that specialist, so I've had several years' worth of opportunity to become more aware of my neurological situation. I don't have a prestigious job like Sheldon, but I can drive (3 speeding tickets and 0 collisions in 39 years). I don't know Klingon but I know Latin. Sheldon's pronunciation in German is just freaking terrible for someone who insinuates that he's read Einstein untranslated.



Where was I? Just recently I've become aware that I constantly go off on tangents and that this is common among autistics. Been doing it all my life, just very recently became aware of it and began to ponder the consequences of it in my social interactions with the Earthlings.

Then there's eye contact: I'm not so good with the eye contact. Back in 1988, that acting teaching in Acting 101, did he tell us about how we could look at another actor's forehead onstage, and to the audience and even to the other actor it would would look exactly as if we were making eye contact -- is that something he always said in Acting 101, or did he toss in that tidbit because he noticed that I pretty much couldn't maintain eye contact for more than a second or so at a time? I've been working on eye contect in therapy, but I don't see any reason to expect that I'll ever become normal in that respect. "Look me in the eye, boy!" "Nossir, don't think I'll be doing that."

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Valete. E pluribus unum. Aio, quantitas magna frumentorum est.

Being Smart -- A Good Thing, Or What?

Not long ago, in an online discussion, in the middle of a somewhat garbled rant which I didn't try very hard to decipher, someone asserted that a certain cultural tendency had been around for 2000 years.

I replied that the tendency has existed for at least 30,000 years, and maybe much longer than that. Maybe 100,000 years or even longer.

The writer of the first comment asked me, with an lol or 2, why I was bringing numbers into this, and claimed that -- something like: nobody knew what the real numbers were because "they threw the numbers out when they made the calendars," and called me a smart guy.

I pointed out that it was he who had brought numbers into the conversation, and quoted Catullus: "Risu inepto res ineptior nulla est." (More than 2000 years old, that quote.)



He responded with a couple more lol's, repeated his charge that it was I who had brought numbers into the conversation, and asserted further that a smart guy had been called out. I went back to his original comment, thinking that I might want to go to the trouble of cutting and pasting the part about the calenders and 2000 years -- it would be a good opportunity, I thought, to point out that calendars as well as religion were more than 2000 years old -- but I saw that he had edited the comment and removed the part about 2000 years.

So I gave up on that guy, and here I am talking to you instead.

It seems that everybody likes to think they're smart. (Cue the Fredo Corleone "Not like everybody says. Like -- stupid! I'm smart!"-- clip.)

I watched "The West Wing" for several seasons until I decided that it was a Democratic fantasy world, a fantasy of great Democratic success distracting us from the real world, and that reality urgently needed more of our attention, as indicated by non-fictional events such as George W Bush being elected President. "The West Wing," famously employing several former Clinton White House staffers as technical advisors to achieve its hyper-"realism," went so far in its denial of reality as to create a Republican Presidential candidate clearly based on W, Gov Robert Ritchie of Florida, and have Jeb Bartlet resoundingly beat the fictional W in his re-election. In 2002, just to put a cherry on the sundae of unreality.

Not only does Bartlet trounce Ritchie, there is a specific moment, quite a while after the re-election campaign has begun, when he decides he's going to trounce him. It's during a private meeting of the two, sometime after Bartlet has inadvertently been caught on-air insulting Ritchie for being dumb, and immediately after Ritchie, in their private meeting, very deliberately insults Bartlet for being smart. Bartlet gets up to go and tells Ritchie he's decided to kick his ass (his words.)



The theme of intelligence is emphasized over and over in "The West Wing" -- mostly in the form of it being remarked that Bartlet and his staffers are incredibly smart, just the most intelligent people in the entire USA. Above, I mentioned the denial of political reality embodied in the show creating a W-like character and having the Democratic hero trounce him. Is that the extent of the denial involved in the program -- or is the constant emphasis on how brilliant the regular characters are also overcompensation for feelings of insecurity on the part of the actual former White House staffers and "West Wing" technical advisors about their own intelligence?

And who feels insecure about their intelligence? Those who have reason to. Actual geniuses don't go around screaming, "I'm not stupid, like everybody says I am!" I don't think they generally need constant reassurance that they're smart. Maybe "The West Wing" was realistic inasmuch as the Clinton staffers did constantly tell each other that they were astonishing geniuses.

Think about how much taller Rob Lowe is than George Stephanopoulos, and then try to tell me that no flattery, conscious or subconscious, was going on on "The West Wing." (For all I know, Lowe is actually more intelligent than Stephanopoulos. He certainly has a better sense of humor.)

Anyway, I'm not nearly smart enough to have any idea of what to do about all of this. Well... you could vote for Democrats -- real Democrats, not the feel-good fictional kind with which some Democrats in Hollywood have been flattering me and you and themselves. Voting for real Democrats will increase support for real education.