bishop blougram's apology

This wonderful poem by Robert Browning handles a key question in life: how much do you 'sell out' when you take a conventional career whose explicit goals differ from the implicit or hidden goals? It covers the same area as the 'changing the culture from within' argument which is balanced by the proverb- 'everything that goes into a saltmine becomes salt.

The poem is kind of off key because the young journalist is intent on proving the successful bishop a hypocrite and the bishop wants to take down the young man and quench is uninformed idealism. So it's a phoney war really since neither party is after TRUTH, they just want to win. But there is a vital argument going on that every college graduate has to face: do I get a high paying corporate job or do I do something I perceive that has more integrity?

My view from watching many of my generation do both is that those who 'sold out' don't regret it verbally though they suffer physically and mentally. Those that aren't fitness fanatics usually have health problems. What they almost all have lost though is a sense of joie de vivre and most of all: a light and playful sense of humour! Not all, but a majority- so it's a risk. You risk losing the ability to live in the moment, not in the party sense but in the deeper more relaxed connecting with all life sense...

Those who took the poor but honest path also have their fair share of mental health issues, as well as regrets about not preparing enough for the future. Unlike the previous group they aren't scared to voice regrets. But the noticeable thing is: they have kept their sense of playful humour.

My observation supports the assertion that everything that goes into a salt mine becomes salt. Eventually. I would counsel any young person considering a 'sell out' career that they have a very specific get out goal in mind that is under five years. Failiing that, work on keeping a playful sense of humour...if you value that...

how boring was that?

Human kind is on a perpetual mission to escape boredom.

Yet they have created a world that every year gets more and more boring.

Globalisation reduces 99% to being passive consumers of the lives of 1% celebrity sports and entertainment people.

Since the beginning of the agricultural revolution, ever more efficient systems of food production reduce the need for hunting and gathering. Nomadism in its many forms solves the boredom problem but nomadism is under threat now.

Though one can be stimulated by films and computer games the deeper malaise is always lurking- the bordeom threshold. When you are on an expedition, even when it's boring, it isn't- this seeming paradox has to do with a host of factors including control over your life, perceived danger and ability to chose the level or risk you are comfortable with. Also, everything is new, but in a vital sense- not in the fabricated phoney sense that a 'new' movie is new. When you see a new movie the theatre, the seats, the popcorn create an experience that is more the same than different. When almost every 'new' experience is mediated through a screen the experience is more the same than different. In order to cross the boredom threshold the experience must be more different than the same. Yet, we have a world in which that prospect fills people with anxiety...

What is your Q.I.Q?

What is your Quantum Intelligence Quotient?

I am not here refering to the largely bogus field of quantum AI, I am referring to the metaphor of quantum superposition as applied to ourselves.

Usual thinking is either/or and this picture is MASSIVELY encouraged by the success of digital programming or digital machines. The metaphor of either/or burns deep and long in the culture's psyche. Edward de Bono- still alive I hear thank goodness! made a good career by suggesting either/ or thinking was a bit limited. He took to carving out the middle ground. He even invented a word Po- which meant neither Yes or No. Sadly it looked a bit too much like Poo and so the idea died a quiet death (imagine if Black Holes had been called Brown Holes instead- goodbye NASA funding...). (Rule one of ideas- do not suggest shit in any way shape or form otherwise people will subconciously assume your idea is tainted by the brown stuff...)

A quantum state can be YES or NO at the same time- up until we poke around and demand to know which. Like I said, this is a useful metaphor for the way our own minds work, freeing us from the digital either/or metaphor.

Your whole school curriculum is pretty much either/or. The world of business presentations and law is too. And government. Anywhere where practical wisdom is over ridden by rule based literalism.

Real world engineering, practical wisdom, craft and art infused with lived experience of a useful, kind all shows that intelligence is best expressed by the ability to hold contradictory positions in your mind at the same time. Until context and necessary deployment nudge one way or the other.

The famous Mulla Nasrudin joke (sometimes retold as a rabbi joke or a goha joke) sees the Mulla presiding over a law court. After hearing the defendent speak he says, "You're right!". After hearing the prosecution he says, "You're right." Both legal teams turn on him and demand, "We can't both be right!" The Mulla responds, "You're right!".

Like much Nasrudin stuff it's a variation on the Cretan paradox- that constant warning that contradiction is built into any presentation in language and that to be functional we must be able to live with this, use it when we can, in other words: be comfortable with contradiction...be quantum intelligent and hold as many different position as you can at the same time until the REAL WORLD CONTEXT favours or demands one that fits in that time and place.

I will be offering Quantum Intelligence training courses in the near future. Feel free to apply.

the genius curve

Forget the bell curve and refer instead to the genius curve.

In a nutshell the genius curve predicts that in any sample...whatever its size...99% will be shit and 1% will be...pure genius ie. oustanding. Anyone who has judged an essay, poem or book competition will know this to be true. It's really easy to judge as within seconds you get the sinking or rising feeling. Sinking- 99% of the time, nervously rising 1% when you realise THIS IS THE WINNER- SIMPLE.

Bell curve thinking has infected every area and encourages us to use 'the law of averages' in our favour. It encourages poor sap authors to endlessly self-promote on facebook and their blogs and of course they get...nowhere. The average dude who says to himself- 'it's one in a million'- has a better grasp of the maths than the bell curve bell end...

But flip it around and ask- what's going on? A friend who attended the presigious Rhode Island school of art and design told me that all the best work was done in the first month. By the end of year one it was fairly dire and by the end of year three it was crap...why? Because everyone copied each other and tried to 'fit in' and all their work resembled each other's. The element of DIFFERENCE had been eliminated.

And it is difference that counts. Difference doesn't just get noticed it has a functionality beyond that. Difference indicates a potential new survival plan (stripping it very rapidly down to basics here). In any Milgram experiment situation the presence of an EQUAL status person who said the opposite of the evil task setter FREED people to act on their own conscience. Difference is the grit of human progress, the moment we all start acting in the same way is the moment of greatest vulnerability. So even if you produce a brilliant but derivitive art work it will be disdained for something rough...and different - just look at the bad drawings Jackson Pollock did before he embraced difference. But that sort of modern art is SHIT I hear you expostulate (well a few of you anyway) and part of me agrees. But as we all know the ability to hold contradictory opinions is a sign of true - call it quantum- intelligence...QIQ- what is your QIQ?

Back to the difference thing. It is not that difference per se is better than a sound copy of what works. It is just that the modern world is a difference engine (sorry, had to say that) which is geared up to spot difference rather than quality. The ability to spot quality is connoisseurship- but we have moved from that kind of culture ever since the first world war (for all sorts of complex cultural reasons the main being the connosiseurs signed off on Trench warfare, A Bombs and Death Camps). So in a difference culture be...different.

The bell curve makes the fatal assumption about society that in a uniform society difference will be evenly distributed. NO! In a uniform society difference is RARE. So you can see I'm tying two ends up here- we still live in a uniform society (by definition almost) but one without quality awareness- the pursuit of quality will get you nowhere without an element of difference squirted into the mix.

When you know that, you can begin to beat the odds. You'll be on the genius curve.

why science as we know it has come to an end

This is a pretty outrageous claim.

But this is my reasoning: science is a method of describing the world using precise methods. It began to take off properly when we had accurate rulers and clocks to measure things. This was how Gallileo separated what we now know as Newton's laws from Aristotle's earlier ideas that included friction in any result. We could only factor out the common sense idea of friction with accurate clocks and rulers. So accurate measuring lets us divide up the world and see things more clearly. But there comes a point when our measuring begins to suffer problems generated by itself. One is noise- at the very limits random noise interferes with the result. This can to some extent be factored away but eventually quantum noise sets in and we find we can't know with accuracy any result without interfering with it. So we rely on probability. Likewise, in outer space, we rely on models that interpret radiation to say what the universe is really like. And as you get further from earth the noise increases here too. 

Einstein with relativity and those who pioneered quantum mechanics have far less influence on our world than many imagine; they have a huge influence on telling us the limitations of our measuring though. And it is in measurment that the future of science resides. All else is just modelling and speculation. That will continue ad infinitum- becoming what I call fractal philosophy. Like the potentially infinite coast line of Norway with fjords on fjords, fractal philosophy can build theory on theory without every really increasing the useful length of the coastline or quantity of knowledge which is limited by the limits of measurement not theory.

Engineers and material scientists will continue to make astounding breakthroughs- as they always have- but we have reached the limits of academic science- it is now in a similar position to medieval scholastic philosophy aided by a university system that is a direct descendent of the monastery.

So, if you like making new things and seeing astounding stuff- quit science and take up engineering- preferably in a field that solves the problems caused by...engineering.

a footnote on quantum computing

Dr M. Vardi, a sceptical physicist writes: "An important part of the report (the US Gov. Report on Quantum Computing) is an analysis of why and how computing technology scaled exponentially in performance for over half a century. This scaling was mostly the result of a virtuous cycle, where products using the new technology allowed the industry to make more money, which it then used to create newer technology. For quantum computing to be similarly successful, it must create a virtuous cycle to fund the development of increasingly useful quantum computers. But the beauty of classical computing is that developing algorithms is incredibly easy. Every teenager writing a program is developing an algorithm. In contrast, in more than 25 years of intense research on quantum computing, only a few dozen algorithms have been developed. It is conceivable that governments will pour major investments into a small number of critical quantum-computing applications, but this will not give rise to the thriving marketplace that is needed to sustain the virtuous cycle. Count me a quantum skeptic!"

Me too.

Twigger's rule for predicting the future

Twigger's rule is simple: That which can be conceived need not be believed, but that which is made will not fade.

In other words: engineering is the real driver of techno-change not dumbass science fiction. Oh, don't get me wrong, I love sci-fi too, but it just isn't how the real world works. What happens is the tinkerers make something that has 'distinct possibilities'. They play with it, stretch it, make it cheaper. And bingo, now and again they make it do something that was 'predicted' by science fiction. There is a great episode of the Big Bang Theory in which Leonard's bullying old classmate says he needs a tech guy to make his invention come true. The 'invention' is just some sci-fi magic nonsense. And the brainboxes just say "pretty sure that can't be done". That in a nutshell is what conceiving is about. Driverless cars, AI in its more ambitious forms, quantum computing (come on!), Nuclear fusion and probably thorium fission- they are all driven by what 'should be possible' rather than engineers tinkering and making. A subset of this rule is that real advances are not trumpeted years before hand. They just get done. No one heard a darn thing about the internet and no one invested a penny till POW it was up and running. When you hear a lot about something it is usually a fanfare to get funding. So ask yourself- is this thing something a scientist conceives- ie. thinks up in theory or is it something that has been physically built and now does things. Incline towards the physical.