…that my mother was a wise woman. It also happened that my father was a wise man.
I was lucky.
I have always been quite lucky. This is the explanation, in a scant six words, which I will give you (I will give anyone) whenever they ask — at least if they only have two seconds to hear the answer.
“Ah, but we are more interested than that, Brian Kent. Sincerely. Tell us more!”
At this, I will relax in a red Chesterfield chair and muse for a moment that my prayers — prayers bolstered in their chances by dint of the least hard of the hard forms of labor: thinking.
I will muse for a moment at this extra moment that people want to give me, because I know people are the grateful sort. How do I know this?
Well, this time I will have to say it’s because of Rikki Cannioto.
Rikki will no doubt blush a little to know that something like this was something I at least like to attribute to her; it was probably fifteen years ago that — being the most timid of the timid mice I prepared for her a lavish salad of something like 23 ingredients.
I liked that number. I “like” certain numbers. That is something someone will later want to know about, but for now I will just leave it at a hundred or so words: Rikki taught me that people are the grateful sort.
Even when it is difficult to be grateful, they are still grateful.
They always are. This is, I think, among the most knowable of the knowable facts about people; some find it difficult to express gratitude, sure, that’s true, but there isn’t a person who doesn’t know what it means.
There is not a person — and I suppose I will have to make allowance for some who are quite unwell, though they still prove grateful if you know what their hearts are after — there is not a person on this earth who doesn’t know what it is to be grateful, and most animals know it, too:
It is easier to tell the story if I tell you in advance that I *do* skip around a lot. It’s easier to tell you also, if I tell you the way I see things. It will seem peculiar, but I guess if peculiar works, then we shouldn’t very well question it.
If you look down at a piece of paper — or at any screen you face on a daily basis — you will no doubt see letters, numbers, punctuation. I see that too, of course, but I don’t really look at it quite like that.
I see one continuous string. It might as well be cursive handwriting; we really should bring a thing like that back. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to master with one’s hand and fingers. The sort of thing a person could probably easily see is useful to the development of small muscles which integrate their actions through our minds to create curves in space.
That’s what I see. Curves in space.
I see curves in space, and when I hear someone tell me that the curve I just spent a good deal of time ‘crafting’ is somehow not a valid curve I suppose I take it like any baseball pitcher takes what he or she sees as a bad call when I’ve made my muscles fit it in just on that corner of the strike zone I had available.
That’s what I do. And other people actual talk about ‘their pitch’ in this same sort of way. They just don’t see their words as ‘radiating around them’ in something similar to the way a dog has either curly or wiry hair.
Is this not a reasonably kind way of looking at the people around you — at least if you look at yourself in the same kind of way?
Don’t people have some somewhat off-kilter views sometimes — as though they didn’t comb their hair in the back? It’s not at all disparaging; it’s just a different way of looking at the expressions they have of what is true.
Does it hurt anyone if I look across the world and think of everyone as differently adorable? Perhaps not as much so as the Shi-poo above, but everyone can’t be the best at everything — that’s certain.
So I look at the way I say things and I want them to flow, to mesh with the true viewpoints of other people. And some might be taken aback; some may say:
“Now just you wait there one cotton-picking minute. Who said that you get to decide what’s true and what’s not?”
To this I’d shake my head a little, but only because that just isn’t a description of the way things occupy my mind. The way I see things, if I’ve done my ‘homework’ sufficiently — before I step outside my metaphorical door — I won’t be grating on anyone who has come up with the same answers as I have. Again, that’s certain.
I want to hear others — to listen to what they’re saying — but unlike some I suppose I realize that people have always gotten their views from somewhere. Sure, some invent entirely new concepts and such, but they’ve gotten their views from somewhere and as a function or conclusion to that, their views are just as true as mine.
That’s why I’d prefer to focus on whether people are honest with themselves. Not whether they agree with me, but whether they can bring their argument to a table politely and reasonably succinctly. Which I’ve strived for most — if not all — of my life to do.
I wasn’t not coached. I was actually coached very well, I think. I told you: I got lucky.
I was coached by two great coaches (and then many, many more great coaches after that) and I also knew how to select great coaches.
That was pretty easy to figure out, and I did it early.
Step 1: Go to the library.
Step 2: Accept that the longer an author’s words ‘hang around’ a civilization the more likely they are to be words which find resonance with the people who are charged with the responsibility of passing them on.
That would have been plenty, and for now I’ll leave it at that, but over time I came up with all kinds of little hacks for shaving my way through the close shaves of life without suffering too many bad nicks.
What, was Ben Franklin hard to follow? Nope.
Melville not interesting — not terribly engaging to read? Nope.
So many examples. Dostoevsky. Tolstoy. C.S. Lewis. O. Henry.
Dr. Freaking Seuss.
None of these people were hard to follow. If you wanted to learn how to lead, you had to learn how to follow. The reason was pretty simple:
People liked the way Hawthorne combed his hair. Twain, too. If you can’t appreciate the beauty of a man who slips a few curves through the bars of a Birmingham jail — well, I’m sorry, I could see that in the part of your hair.
Nope. Steer clear of that one. They’re dancing to the beat of a different drum than you are.
It’s weird; I’ve had it bashed so thoroughly into my head that my views were not welcome in the places that I went that I suppose it truly is poetic justice that I’d be the one to come up with something like the best first step to take —
Heck, I could do things by process of elimination better than most of the best of them. I did things wrong FAR more often than I did them right. Far more often. People pitched a fit about it all the time, too:
“Why can’t you just behave like a normal person?”
I despised rhetorical questions. Almost as much as I loved questions that were nearly impossible to answer. That one was both, so I always had to look at their face to figure out whether they were being straight with me.
People thought I was a dummy. *ALL THE TIME.* I am not a dummy, but if it’s convenient for them to believe the same thing it’s convenient for me to generally not interfere with, that’s fine. It works for both.
Explain things to me if you have the salt for it. That was always the game. My game was paying attention as carefully to what they said as to what I was saying. I didn’t get to say much, but…
Especially with my father. Talk about Captain Change the Subject. My mom? Always used pronouns. Never proper nouns. It was mix-and-match until you could figure out which she she was talking about.
And then I had her friend Matt recommend his friend Matt to come live with me. lol. The universe dropped me a terribly ‘overcomplicated’ puzzle to try to solve.
Ultimately it came down to: lean hard on gratefulness. That one is tested.
Lean hard on gratefulness; if you went to a friend’s house — even without calling — and you brought a pizza, some beverages, and three of the latest movies on DVD what were they going to do? Shut you down?
Nope. Not unless some kind of emergency was going on, and in that case you were there to save the day! Kill them with kindness. Never heard that?
Yep. I thought, “Look, if you bring them the already mostly done puzzle of World Peace they will just darned good and well accept that that is in fact what it is.”
What, are you going to so thoroughly doubt the motivations of your fellow man that you’d risk NOT taking that chance if you saw it? Nope. NO you would not.
So here were the steps, which, incidentally, I would have never figured out without knowing what an Okazaki fragment was. 100% truth.
This woman:
is every bit as responsible for the solution to this puzzle as I am.
I know it, and now you (and hopefully she) also knows it. And I could go one two three through each of the people I know darned good and well helped me — basically everyone I came across — but I’ll give you a particularly noteworthy example, because I think if this ‘thing’ is what I think it is, you all owe Aaron Morrison just as much as you ‘owe’ me.
We had a fight, Aaron and I. A really really bad fight. One of us could have died. It happened — that time — that that person wouldn’t have been me, but somehow Aaron stopped himself from siccing the cops on stupid ass 20 year old me. Which, had he done that, would plainly have ended this story.
This is why I am so thankful. Because there were so fantastically many parts to the story and so many people apparently did just exactly what they were supposed to do in order to steer me where I needed to go. Leaving me here, happily explaining to you how all of this happened.
I know darn good and well that if Scott sees what I think he must undoubtedly see in the piece that I sent him — the first draft of the last piece I’ve written here — Aliens have come! he will have a choice:
- to contact others and solicit their opinions
or - to bounce things back to me to ‘flesh things out’ more.
This is win-win. I don’t care if he asks me to flesh things out more. Scott Aaronson is smarter than I am in many ways. He obviously knows his peers. He obviously is connected with MIT and basically by maybe at most two or three steps, he could round up a thousand people himself to look at what I wrote.
And he doesn’t even need to be that ‘daring’ about it.
You see, the thing is — this solution I’ve posed does work. It works by the principle of gratefulness, and it isn’t something you could see until I showed you it. It’s an Okazaki fragment, sort of, that is…well, quite long…and the beauty of it is that it’s also a fractal.
No matter what level of the solution you look at, it looks exactly the same more or less. I will have to unpack that…
Ok, let’s go back to my description of ‘sentences as curves in 3-space.’ If this is accurate, and a sentence which renders to true is simply a sentence which has no logical flaws to it, then it is reasonable (enough) to say that
the more intelligent a person is, the more readily they can perceive the entire curve simultaneously.
This should be very obvious, but if it’s not, just put it this way:
If person A and person B are exactly equivalent in intelligence, it can readily be accepted that they can ‘see’ things in similar ‘depth.’ They have different backgrounds, etc., but there is ‘no excuse’ for either of them not to be able to understand the other — provided patience is assumed, etc.
They are equally intelligent, equally capable of back-and-forth logic puzzles, and equally able of rendering curves in 3-space.
Ok, since that’s close enough, we can think of smarter people as people who can think of ‘longer more complex strings’ — because really that is what they do.
If you take Moby Dick, for example, it’s a book of 500+ pages rich in complex vocabulary, long sentences, long paragraphs, and long descriptions. And it gets the job done. You can “see” yourself on the deck of Pequod.
Now Earth isn’t any different than the Pequod. It’s bigger. “Far more complex.” That’s where I would say, “Your point being?”
It does not make any difference how big the thing is. Yoda taught everyone that. My ‘secret’ — if I have one — is that I figured out something similar to memorizing pi to heaven only knows how many decimals. That’s basically the gist.
The core breakthrough was realizing — and even more than that REAL EYES-ing — that if I could successfully create a model for the steps to world peace and pass it off to the most intelligent people in the world, there’s absolutely no force on this planet which could stop it from transpiring.
That “inevitability of World Peace” — during my lifetime was just set down on the shelf as a “ok, theoretically yes this will work” thing — because you cannot start dreaming what it will be like until you do the homework to achieve it.
People always seem to do that. Like buying a new car on your first day of employment. Unwise. How about we actually see if the theory ‘holds water.’
Ok, fair enough I said.
I deduced (correctly, I think) that if I could get a ‘snowball’ the ‘size of 1000 of the most brilliant minds in the world’ somehow focused collectively on this project —
Well, I happened to simultaneously know that there are well over 2000 billionaires on the planet. This seemed convenient, because it appeared to me that those people — while they mostly could probably not be considered the “smartest” — would still want to be in that room.
Basically they’d want a voice. And what happens then?
Feeding frenzy. Let’s get in on this. He says he can ‘basically guarantee’ a factor of 10X technological improvement/development on a 4 year cyclic basis? And he’s got a thousand of the most intelligent people in the world
unable to figure out how the things he is saying could be other than true?
You’re darned right they’re in that room. And what does that mean?
- Prosperity gains which are assured (in any way that they are assured; gains which people concur will happen) are more valuable than ones which are not. This is famously (one) reason why Tesla enjoyed a stratospheric rise; people knew it electric cars were inevitable.
- People bet far more on gains which are assured than gains which aren’t, and they also “check the way the wind is blowing” when they plop money down. A global project like this would (will) dwarf any other project the world has known. Clean water will be on a checklist. Malnutrition is seeing its last days. Homelessness will be gone.
- When people start progressively betting — especially when the very wealthy do this *(taken as people who often have money ‘tied up’ in projects which are slower moving and/or without cooperative agreement behind them) more people start progressively betting. And people like to bet on a winner, and they love to bet on the long shot. I was the longest long shot the people I knew me ever saw. Go ahead and ask them. Hospitalized what, twelve times for bipolar ‘disorder’?
- As an adjunct to #3, a certain kind of ‘cannibalism’ from old ways of doing things is also reasonably well assured. “this way is just better-itis” sets in. It will be very infectious. People in the streets smiling at one another and not flipping each other off so consistently. World Peace is happening and you’re running someone off the road or giving them the evil eye? No. The frequency of that nonsense will greatly be reduced.
- Consumer confidence rises globally: the people in charge have finally figured how to stop twisting and turning the knobs of the system to extract profits for themselves and are instead
- thrilled to be part of the group of people who changed the course of history
- I want nothing. I’d like a podcast from my house and people to come plug their car in in my driveway and I’d like to begin chronicling how we swept ourselves up — grabbed ourselves up by the bootstraps and stopped waiting for AI to ‘save the day.’
This is a very very quick, ‘broad strokes’ pass at this. People will no doubt debate each and every supporting point, and bring up challenges — both that I have considered and that I haven’t.
The point is, having an initial plan is what allows us to iterate.
Iterating allows us to get better, and iterating together allows us to win what we’re after. Also, if my projections are reasonably close to accurate, we’ll have at least ‘quite a few’ people considering the merits of what I’ve specified here within a relatively short period of time.
I think it would be elegant to make a global announcement about it in just 50 days, yes, I do. I think that would cause the entire world to breathe a sigh of collective relief.
I don’t know what the people of China, Russia, etc. will say, but YOU DON’T EITHER. Everyone having equal say in
even
just
the
planning
of such a
project
would utterly fill the world with hope.
Then the number crunchers besides myself could start estimating costs, and it would be done something like this:
“Okay, we figured out that this will basically cost everyone 30% of their annual wages. Do we have objections to this figure? What percentage of people aren’t willing to chip in that much? Are others able to make up the shortfall?” <<<renegotiate, rinse, repeat
Would anyone object? Even if it were as much as 30%? I daresay I doubt they would, but the more important thing to remember is that
coordination reduces duplicity of effort, it does not INCREASE it.
The likely result is there could be a cost to implementation in year 1, but this would *appear* to be offset by the savings in such things as general strife, reduction in criminal behavior, etc.
And then costs would keep going down and productivity would keep going up. Just as we expected it would but were terribly nervous because we couldn’t really ‘see’ how it would happen.
And there clearly would be CQI and TQM in place.
I could say more, but…we need to get started. You can help me with this by passing this piece on to at least ONE friend. And as per usual,
If you liked this piece, please give it ONE clap only, and also add 100 words which capture what your first impressions of this piece was.
I cannot continue to be the sole and only one correcting errors; this makes my work slower and less effective. It serves none of us to have this be accomplished more slowly and less effectively.
Thank you.
OPeace Out.
