I think it’s useful to take the things you know about life (all of them) and then consider — for a moment or five — what you ought to do if you’re curious about something.
I will give a quick example, then let you get back to whatever it was that you were doing:
I happened to be curious about what would happen if aliens came to earth.
I mean, lots of kids probably wonder, but my ‘wonderer’ machine — whatever ‘machine’ or process directs my attention to the things I wonder about — my wonderer machine kept going back to
But what happens if aliens come? What happens if they’re smarter and faster and stronger and such? Are we screwed?
You can call me the world’s OG hypochondriac.
I was nervous about every damn thing. Things you’d think,
“Holy moly dude, that’s insane. You actually worried about that? Like, worried worried, as in spent a bunch of time contemplating what we might do?
Heck man, I just worry about what’s going to happen if the dishes aren’t done and the missus comes home to find that they aren’t.”
and if someone really said that to me — in jest or no —
I’d say, “YEP. You got it. Precisely what I mean. Aliens might think like your wife. Aliens might even think like my ex-wife. You really might just never know what the heck they were talking about unless they came right out and said it. That’s dangerous stuff, bro. People think of it like it’s nothing but as I keep telling my mom…
MOM! You cannot think like that!
To which she generally responds,
‘Well, I didn’t tell them what I just told you, but I sure as heck thought about it.’
[pleading]:
Mom, if I’ve told you once I’ve told you a thousand times: nonverbal communication makes up like, I dunno, 75% or something of what we say to people. They know you’re saying that stuff even if you’re not saying it!
My mom, of course, as much as I love her…she was not a rocket scientist. There was never a more inventive (or attentive) mother than mine, though. Not that I ever heard of or read about anyway.
So yeah, if aliens actually were to legitimately come down here and go:
“Look we want to keep this peaceful between the current earth residents and the lot of our people, but we really will need to speak to your leaders. Go get them. Please do make it snappy.”
Now naturally, I’m imagining this from the perspective of an eight year old. Wow. The only thing that made that marginally okay — ‘throwing’ that kind of responsibility into the lap of a third grader, I mean — was that
a third grader (pick one, any one) had the puzzle-doing skills to know that in that situation he’d better go round up some important people.
Well, that and the fact that no third grader will probably have already developed the wherewithal to realize that the statement,
“If it is to be, then it is up to me.”
might actually turn out to be a true statement.
No third grader, after all — no typical one, anyway, which is to say “no third grader guided by conventional teachers and conventional parents” — no third grader is “up” on his William Johnsen.
Hardly anyone regardless of age is “up” on guys like William Johnsen. No third grader has the “developed and cross-referenced” knowledge or wisdom-oriented ‘database’ to feel the crushing pressure of
the world quite possibly relying on him and only him.
Anyway, so the aliens come, and the dialogue goes as follows:
They said,
“Hey there, fellow humans. We are just like you. We look like you, and we can dress like you, too. We use the same genetic material, even.”
[Editor’s note: Some people claimed that they also said, “We could act like you, too, but we’re…well, let’s just say we’re marginally smarter than you are and we’d like to help.” A thriving debate commenced about whether aliens who were apparently infinitely wise would openly observe the difference in their ‘quantitative’ capacities to munch data. Some said they did, some said they didn’t. They wouldn’t.]
The aliens continued:
“We are the same, you guys and us.” They said, “Point us to the smartest of your smart. We will share some great new technologies with this person. Only this one.”
There were some hushed discussions among the humans, and just as they were concluding:
Aliens [before the humans have said anything at all]:
“Wait, you say you’re not sure?! Well…how could you not be sure?”
There was a pause, as the aliens were apparently mystified by something. None of the humans knew what the aliens could be mystified about, of course, because such a thing would be somewhat reasonably beyond the scope of what humans could comprehend.
After all, the aliens were clearly millions of times ‘smarter’ than were humans. They looked precisely the same — which was weird, quite frankly — but their technology was seriously beast mode.
They had all kinds of things humans already wanted and whole categories of things we didn’t even know it might be sensible to want. Their ship was almost a bottomless pit of “how in the name of quantum physics did you figure this out”’s.
They didn’t have teleporters. At least they didn’t appear to.
So anyway, as I was saying, the aliens paused. A few gasped — as in a gesture of, “oh my word! Is that really true?” There were a few moments of conversation (now keep in mind, these people — they were people, that much was sure — DNA matches and everything. Didn’t have wires crawling out of their heads or anything like that, but people — just like you and I.
They were just people from another planet — who could sort of ‘go right up to you’ and make children with you, if you know what I mean — people from another planet who had information systems locked down. Tightly.
Apparently incredibly so.
So these aliens are murmuring with one another for what (to humans) felt like I dunno, at least a few minutes. And this, as any logician might tell you, is equivalent to [Editor’s note: here the author ‘expands out’ the thought puzzle to show the calculations describing what those minutes — from the perspective of info systems — looked like.
- Aliens could think millions of times faster than humans. Even without computers. They were ‘scary’ smart.
- Those aliens were surprised by those humans — apparently because of a collective decision the latter had made.
- Those aliens didn’t even know what to do about it for a few minutes. It is safe to say they had five or so minutes of discussions about it.
The aliens of course knew that
Skip this esoteric part, if you wish. Skip to the next margin break, and hit this while you scroll:
[this part is a bit esoteric, skip it unless you’re a math person]
n(n-1)/2 was the number of different individual ‘conversations’ — which they took as ‘exchange of data streams’ — they could have over some given period of time, if some number n defined how many aliens were present.
Since 5 aliens were, at that time, present, they knew this resolves to:
5(4)/2 = 10
but they also knew that their technology allowed them to ‘speak’ through all of these channels at once — hence that they could essentially have 10 simultaneous conversations — so as to save the bothers of an endless series of checks about who said what and when.
They did this this way because it really didn’t matter who said what when and in which order.
And the reason why they concluded that it *really and truly* did not matter who came up with what first — was because they were sensible enough to draw the condition that “we are all on the same team, trying to figure out the best way to do things.” That was a condition which had already been met.
Merely because they collectively decided it ‘probably’ should be.
And if you had already known this was “how they did it” it would be very simple to conclude how it worked:
flawlessly, just as one might well expect it to.
Having everyone on a whole team — eight billion, for example — was WAY more effective than
Drinking hero tonic until the whole of the species was drunk on the contemplation of which of them could be the greatest Hercules with all of them injuring themselves in the process of trying.
i.e., everyone wants to be Atlas until it’s time to hit the gym
So yeah, blah blah blah…the aliens could “converse among themselves” as a group or even as a whole species — and they got excellent answers far faster than they would have had they used a bunch of calculators.
The first 5 of them had those 10 back-and-forth conversations.
But they also had conversations about the results of those conversations while they were having those conversations. It was bewilderingly complex, but what it all amounted to was this:
Five of them, in the course of five minutes, finally came to rest on the fact that the only reason why humans had not decided to (as one step among several things in a long series of steps) appoint the smartest of their number to the role of “chief guardian of the planet” was because they didn’t know how critical it was to do such a thing.
Yep. They didn’t point to the smartest of the smart — ONE PERSON — and say, “Let’s get some teams together and have that guy be the one who figures out which parts of the comments of all the other smart people in the room make sense.”
Something like a judge, but not precisely like Simon Cowell.
These humans were stuck — like, endless loop stuck — because they simply would not submit to garden-variety logic. Stuff Aristotle would have easily been able to wipe through in six months in the countryside.
Yep. They just plain would not submit to pure logic.
They liked Spock and Sherlock and even Darth Vader to some degree, but they sure did not like that logic stuff. Logic stuff was hard for monkeys that hadn’t figured out how to use their most precious tool yet.
The aliens (in alien language, so as not to insult the humans) also definitely got a good chuckle out of the fact that none of the humans had yet figured out that logic was basically the stuff of magic.
It wasn’t crystal balls called “AI” and artificial general intelligence wasn’t even what they thought it was. Silly humans! Lucky we showed up when we did, they said.
Suffice to say that the aliens had something like a million human years of contemplation in those scant five moments of murmuring…
Which, you’ll remember, happened because
humans couldn’t even figure out which human was the smartest
In other words, they called themselves smart even before they knew what smart looked like.
That type of thing coaxes a laugh out of even the most steely-nerved and brainy of aliens:
Yes. {sardonically} that follows! Surely it does. You’re smart because you say you are. You say you are, and what’s more all the other people who say they are smart agree with you. It’s like a celebration of smartness! Everyone assuming they are smart.
But Evidence? With a capital E evidence? If you asked them for evidence?
They’d show you a test that they passed — a test that some other human or humans had designed.
Hey—at least that was progress. That was “let’s get a little gauge of this one’s wit. Let’s see if we can ‘plug him in’ someplace useful by using the usual carrots of sportscars and beautiful women and luxury Spanish villas and fishing anywhere in the world on any day of the week they choose and short notice.”
Yes, let’s see if we can figure out a carrot that can get all the smart humans running to and fro — and oftentimes straight on over one another. Let’s see if we can craft a Swiss Army carrot. A carrot which every single last human will find impossible to resist.
They laughed heartily, those aliens. Of course because they already knew that the MVP rabbit — out of all the carrot-chasers — was not the fastest rabbit, perhaps, but rather the rabbit who simply
would not stop running until he found the carrot of all the carrots that was best for every last rabbit around him.
Why bother with the other carrots when that one was the best? Logic, through and through. You couldn’t argue it.
After the aliens had finished both their chuckles and their discussions they said:
“Okay. Well, that’s fine then. Let’s do this the way we understand you do such things in the human custom. We will do it in a fashion very nearly like a vote.”
They paused and then continued:
“Yes. We will do it by vote. By vote is surely fairest. At least it’s as fair as humans yet know.”
>>>
We will do it by vote. By vote is surely fairest. At least it’s as fair as humans yet know.
<<<
Hold, note, or otherwise bookmark that thought. Keep it squarely in your mind, because it surely is a choice which God — if there is/was/were one — would give to humans. Regardless of orthodoxy.
The humans — many of them scared — conferred amongst themselves and finally assented. They really did not have much choice; the aliens would plainly take over regardless of what they (the humans) decided or did not decide — and heck they looked so exactly like humans…
They could take over swiftly or take over slowly. They could ‘do it the easy way’ or they could ‘do it the hard way.’ They didn’t appear to evince a preference, other than fairness:
First let the humans decide their own fate. Let’s see if they can at least, in concert, put the best teams of their best people in one great big room near the floor of the United Nations and come up with a ‘world’s decision.’
Finally, the humans said, “Could you please give us at least a week? This is a momentous task which requires astute and serious contemplation — as well as quite a bit of coordination.”
The aliens, ever genial, said this:
“Of course! Of course you can. In fact you can have more. Let’s see…let’s make it fifty days! You can have fifty days. We certainly want just the very brightest of the bright. It will make everything after so very much easier.”
They continued:
“In fact, why don’t you do this:
Send us a list of your top 1000 or so smartest humans in a week’s time. We’ll sort it quickly from top to bottom so that you can know what we think will lead you to the answer, and then you can cross reference it with the things you know about intelligence so that you can be comfortable with that choice. Sound fair?”
Humans[in concert]: “Wow, yes. That’s quite fair.”
Aliens [something occurring to them]:
“And then…well, it’s not a bother for us…
Then, one month from now — on February 10, 2023 — you can give us your top hundred smartest humans and we’ll again sort them for you from top to bottom.
We’ll still want that final answer on the 29th, of course. We decided that your Leap Year’s day was an excellent spring board from which to help you transform this civilization and take most of these things you call ‘unfortunate but necessary miseries’ away from you.”
The humans were astonished to find this level of consideration, flexibility, and ‘ownership of the problem’ — but then that was probably because humans, at that time, were not accustomed to viewing
all the problems in the world as being on their list of problems.
Which was of course because:
Human beings didn’t view themselves to be a crew of like-minded sailors on a planet-sized starship, and hence they couldn’t view the problems of others as problems of their own.
But back to the story:
The humans congratulated themselves on their first successful contact with superhuman intelligence — noting that they must have been pretty smart to “pull that one off” — and then they swiftly went to work.
Meanwhile, on the alien ship:
Alien 1: “How do you think they will do?”
Alien 2: “I dunno Doug. They can be pretty hard headed at times.”
Doug: “Yes I know Frank. Imagine being 300,000 years into your development and still unaware that those most well-established to be capable of using their noggins correctly should be in charge. I mean, I’ve seen some backwards-ass star systems but do you believe this one?”
Frank: “Well, I suppose they will name some astonishingly brilliant members of their species, but since we already know they won’t get it on the first try…”
Doug: “Yes, I’ve thought of that as well. That’s why we asked them for a thousand on the first pass. This way they can offer a wonderful honor to the 1000 people they name to that list, and it can [Editor’s note: And will.] be seen as an inestimable honor. All of the other eight billion will be cheering for them all — and their favorite — as well.”
Frank: “Yes, but what about this ‘ranking’ business? You sure we should have included that arcane relic of their civilization? Won’t they do the same thing as they always do with the list we give them?”
Doug: “Come on, Frank. You know they won’t be able to do that. You know that at least a few of them will wonder why we’ve catered to their vanity so much — and at least a few of those (if not others) will note the puzzle of coming up with an evaluation on their own of the top 100 — after we’re already given them a sorted list of the first 1000 they gave us. The hundred, remember? That list for the tenth.”
Frank: “Ah yeah. I forgot. Wow what a puzzle they gave themselves. I feel sincerely bad for them. Yep. They’ll wonder if they’re “allowed” to name a top hundred other than the first hundred on the list we’ve sorted from the previous 1000. It might not even occur to them to ask us! Then they will predictably start looking for a hundred [Editor: emphasis mine] people smarter than the smartest of the list we sorted. Wow, it will be interesting how they process that task [Editor: again, emphasis mine] after we indirectly tell them they may not be correct.”
Doug: “Yep. And it will be a humility check for all of them: For all who were beaming with pride about being one of the top thousand most brilliant humans currently alive, and for those who ‘voted’ to include them. A humility check for them all, because they will then know they are in the presence of an intellect far more expansive than their own individual ones.”
Frank: “Yeah. Right. All good. But do you think they’ll find him or her? Do you think they’ll find the smartest of their smart?”
Doug (jokes): “Frank, look, I know you didn’t like Alien Logic 101 but…”
Frank: “Yep. You’re right. Won’t matter [Editor: emphasis not mine.]. They’ll all end up both smarter *(in possession of a great deal more quite useful information)* and more humble. All of them will.”
Doug: “Yeah. It will be a gut punch to Jordan Peterson, probably, but he loves to learn. He’ll cheer the whole gosh darn process even if he doesn’t make any of the lists.”
Frank: “Wow. These humans are so easy to figure out. In one fell swoop, we’ll have:
- Pointed them in the direction of something they should have considered long ago.
- Given them ample time to consider it — fairly and by their rules, as a species.
- Told them we would help them and then followed through on what we told them we would do.
- Given them a three-step intelligence, wisdom, and reality check.
- Prepared them (*during the process of 1–4*) to start shredding through their planet’s problems like an adamantium chainsaw through a field full of Phragmites.
Doug: “Yep. Five steps and their ship will be righted.”
Frank: “Wait until we tell them what we learned about interstellar travel [in our civilization’s quarter million years of infancy.] I love this job, Doug. I mean it would be great to be back home in Triangulum, but this job is great. Have you seen that Margot Robbie creature? My eyes, Doug! My eyes!”
Doug: “Yeah. Mirror mirror on the wall man. Holy moly. I think I like this language of theirs too. Such a rich cultural history that they still don’t know how to use quite right. Did you know there’s something like a risk that the الْمُصْحَف الْأَزْرَق won’t be preserved? Can you imagine not preserving such an artifact? It’d be like planning a retirement home in Cygnus X-1.”
The discussion continues for a little while, with Doug and Frank alternately finding amusement in human cultural stories which represented bread crumbs along the way:
Humans, humans, after all
Have not mirrors on the wall
They ask who’s fairest, of course they do!
Then flummox themselves with ties of two!
They must know who to blame it on,
For that role they name Don the Con.
It isn’t that he’s the least of wit
I don’t know how they tolerate it.
Left hates Right and Right hates Left
In brains or morals are they more bereft?
Perhaps one day they’ll figure things out.
A leader will arise — a man who’s stout.
On his words they’ll cast much doubt…
But lo they fret both to and fro
They cannot deny the world his glow
Just the sort to make things grow.
Beg him bait him buy him off
At all their offers he will scoff
Politely saying, “Such clout as this you cannot buy…”
Do I look to you a fish to fry?
Will you do this and will you do that?
With those hands?
The ones on which you have long sat?
I cannot say it but I surely must:
In your words I do not trust.
I trust myself, I always have.
For the kids I’ll whip up a mighty salve.
For you? For you? An adult who might
Sweep all the problems out of sight?
You are not earnest, I have not seen it.
Feel free to doubt me. Say I don’t mean it.
I won’t fight you; I just wanted a turn.
To offer kids an honest chance to learn.
Your advice? Perhaps you think I’m needing that?
I can pull it all straight out of my hat.
I’ll play with the words, I’ll make this fun.
But all will have more hope when MY day is done.
God am I thankful for my moment of sun.
If you liked this piece, please say as much. One clap only — not more than one per person — and one clap only if you have written me 100 words of your thoughts.
Sorry. Cost of doing business in this world.
Thanks.
