When you spot a cheat

SAY SOMETHING.

That is the rule. It’s a simple rule with a simple premise.

You know that. I know that. Everyone knows that. Meerkats do that. Vervet monkeys do it. Prairie dogs, ground squirrels, African elephants, and marmots do it.

We can’t do it?! Wow. What, are we de-evolving?

Please, for the love of anything you regard as dear — God or no God, family or no family…

please, I continue, even if you have to consider these the ‘hottest’ and most ‘burningly uncomfortable’ words you see all day — this 10th day of January, 2024.

Please, for the love of God don’t be such a blissfully unaware human — so ‘head-and-mind’ “bashed up” by the contemplation of all the complex things you need to consider on a day to day basis living in the world today —

PLEASE look at those 139 words as something other than a sales pitch.

This IS **NOT** A SALES PITCH AND YOU OUGHT TO KNOW DAMN GOOD AND WELL THAT IT ISN’T.

It is not double, triple, quadruple, or quintuple reverse psychology.

I’m asking you for a few minutes of exquisitely careful, sincerely we-MUST-not-simply-blow-this-off-as-“some novel new blowhard seeking everyone’s attention” attention. Careful attention. A few moments only.

Do can we not even tell the difference between ideas that should be pushed and ones that maybe should not be? Take the car with four wheels or the one with one quite obviously missing?

I have begged you before. This is the last time.

I cannot emphasis/plead/make ‘louder’ these words and I am *clearly* telling you that you can spot a cheat better than you think you can.

I’m showing faith in you is what I’m doing. Not interested in claps. Comments, fine. Claps? What do they do for me?

Do they move clean water closer to people who need it?

You can do thit, and even if you don’t know you can, you have my faith that you will be able to realize you can a whale of a lot better *after* reading the scant few words which comprise the rest of what I’m saying here than before.

There’s no way that I’m the dumbest of the dumb. There is *NO WAY* that I’m “the only one” who could have figured out something this apparently obvious.

I broke that up fairly. 139 words — not even thirty seconds of your time — ‘pointing’ very carefully at the next however many, together comprising 383 words which are a bare 90 seconds of seemingly quite worthwhile reading time.

You can’t trust HIM you say. “Anyone could say such words!” you protest.

Oh, really? If you are so certain of that then you won’t mind a little wager.

$100 of my money versus a single dollar of your own that — even if you could ‘figure the first 383 words out’ that you will not be able to figure out how I arrived at this next 300.

Yep. That IS NOT what you imagined I would say, when, of the first moments of the precious budget of your time I asked politely for, I indicated that:

“From this spot (the spot of worrying about a ‘cheat’)…go to this one.

Surely it is safe to, within one’s mind’s eye consider a known “place or perspective” of thought, out of any a person might take —as ‘standing here or there’ in the midst of our minds as we do.”

“Yes, from this spot (worrying about a cheat) go to the spot of (it might be that you and *only* you can sort through the rest of this; it might be important that YOU, meaning you, yourself, figure out. You. The one your mother and father knew was their child. The one each of your kids knew as a parent which is also (much more simply) the spot of *consider your own viewpoint on things not just important but critical to the safety and well being of others around you.*

Yes, it’s a “long winded” way of saying, “Go from here to here. In your mind please do it. You will not suffer any kind of perceptible harm when considering things from this particular frame of reference.”

That is, sincerely, the best I can do to PROVE, beyond any measure of doubt that I am not here “pulling a fast one.” I am not ‘cheating’ you to observe that you can observe things like this.

I am not cheating you to honestly and somewhat succinctly be *almost frighteningly meticulous about how carefully I am handling what strikes me as a ‘neutron bomb’ of contemplation.*

I am not cheating you to bring you a piece of information which to some extent ‘gives me the willies.’ I am not cheating you to bring it to you as fast as I could and as briefly as I could — just 697 words into this thus far.

In short, I am handling MY JOB as a writer just as carefully as I know how to handle it, and I am asking you…I have asked you…I am begging you…

I am telling you as much as I would climb the outskirts of a building I do not even own, then subsequently light myself on fire and then leap from that building to draw your attention…

RIGHT. FU(KING. NOW.

Not later this morning. Not Tuesday of next week. Now. THIS pitiful “puzzle” of logic must be done

AS SOON AS HUMANLY POSSIBLE

by such “smart guys” as Scott Aaronson, MIT complexity researcher.
…Lex Fridman, runner-up in last year’s good-natured competition to determine the person most people in the world would say “could figure out anything”
…Nick “I know I am quite bright but I dare not compare my ‘brilliance’ to the words of ‘such an obvious’ madman” Bostrom

And other people I respect and admire — like Yoshua Bengio, for example.

In short, if (yes, I realize, many people abhor that extra-specially safe but annoying in that it carries dependencies, conjectures, etc. conditional statement way of phrasing thoughts)

If, as I say, you read through the above 866 ‘plain old’ English words and somehow believe you probabilistically could have typed them before I reported them to you, you are either a fool or a liar.

Which is to say, “If you think it is so easy, just explain what I’ve said in simpler language. I will bet you $100 against your own slim dollar bill that as soon as you try to do it you will find yourself in a particularly perplexing — even scary place.”

This is the easier and much more true version of “shall I compare myself to any man? Let me compare myself — which is to say let me compare my own wit ‘against’ the wit of this other man, who appears to “think he is terribly clever, perhaps even wise.”

The conundrum is an ancient one: How does one identify a wise man versus a fool?

How does one identify a person who is wiser — not smarter, mind you, but wiser than you are?

It isn’t particularly simple. It’s pretty hard, actually. Mark Hamill definitely knows this. He’d know it whether he were ‘in character’ as Luke Skywalker.

Here:

Ben, who we think of as a wise old seer — perhaps even something of a prophet — says,

“Leave that to me.”

The wise man says “leave that to me.” Han promptly responds:

“Damn fool! I knew that you were going to say that.”

and then everyone remembers this part:

“Who’s the more foolish, the fool or the fool who follows him?”

and so now I ask you…

Are you foolish for ‘following’ me to here, as in, if I’ve ‘directed your attention’ — (more fairly it is said: I’ve politely, albeit ‘pedantically’ or in ‘too many words’) — to the point of the end of this sentence, such that you are now ‘looking at’ the period at the end, or perhaps even the question mark?

Are you foolish, I mean, if you — however smart you are or previously believed yourself to be — are you foolish for finding yourself reading the words of a person who seems to be “claiming” the “discovery” of

the universally-foolproof means of spotting the difference between a fool and someone who is most emphatically *NOT* a fool

Are you foolish for reading the words of someone who might seem to be cogently claiming ‘something like that’?

I say, are you a fool for “laboring your way” through the 1292 words of that “convoluted jungle gym” of thought I’ve just placed above

or

perhaps not a fool because it was, at least, “very good exercise” for one’s brain.

You might be neither.

Yes, I dared to say it. You might be neither a fool nor not a fool.

How in the ever-loving-analysis-of-pointful-or-pointless complexity could neither of those things be true?

Well, it’s simple, really:

1. You are definitely not a fool, because if you have made it this far you see something quite peculiar about this piece of writing — though you may not be able to “put your finger” on it.
2. You definitely are a fool because even if you are here you (not just you, but actually everyone in the world around you, as nearly as I can determine things) obliged someone who was sincerely (I am sincerely) exerting an incredibly significant amount of his efforts on your behalf to take a “more words than he needed to say” approach to goad you to the point of quite simply…
3. Considering a particular thing far more particularly than you had before.

Those things are all true. They ‘render to’ true. Just as much as, for example, the following (complex, but far less complex than above) statement:

“If all the smart people in the world think they are smartly working on the thing that most benefits the world, and all of them happen to be wrong, then this species will surely kill itself before it enlightens itself.”

Nope. No stuttering. Pretty simple, again:

If *ALL* of us smart people — all of you smart people who did not compose this thought experiment *AND* me — this is to say,

If ALL the smart people in the world — every single last one of the people who are in some way, shape, or form “currently in charge” of this ‘spaceship’ of a planet we call earth —

If ALL of those people are wrong, we *definitely* (and desperately) need to figure out how all of them could agree on something which is…

Well, it’s only 1638 words, which in some way must be “inherently simple”…

We are probably in trouble.

Yes, if we cannot — at this stage of human civilization/evolution — spot the difference between a true fool and a true wise man, we probably ARE doomed.

I never claimed I was wise. Not once. I just posed hypotheticals to poke, prod, or otherwise ‘compel’ you to consider a viewpoint that you quite frankly never considered quite so thoroughly.

Should you feel bad? Ashamed? Um, no. Obviously no. Why?

Because you were occupying your brain with a different aspect of the puzzle. Because you have your ‘job’ in the cosmos and I have mine.

I’m not ASKING for your help Jeff, Scott, Lex, Omer, Sarah, Bill, or Tony.

I am asking you to seriously and for the last time consider whether you are, in fact, wiser than am I about this one single particular aspect of considering ourselves, life, and the world around us.

I am asking you to concede THIS SINGLE POINT. It is the last one I care to stand on. I will stand on ceremony about it like a pouting little 4 year old who is demanding his Fruit Loops and not the Wheaties.

I will NOT concede this point, and if you think you can force me to do so you had better bring one helluva lot more in the way of both force AND brainpower tracking me down at my house with your fucking paddywagons.

If you fuck with a ‘tidbit’ of information as alarmingly important as this one, you might be one of those responsible for not just killing many or all of us, but quite possibly even snuffing out the chance we ever make it out of this current millenium alive.

Head out of ass, pronto. You understand what I’ve said, there’s no mistaking what I’ve said, and if I have to spend one more minute composing a ‘more compelling’ explanation of it — using math, physics, whatever — I’ll be saying both to myself and to all of you that

“they just couldn’t sort it out, regardless of how blindingly simple I stated it for them.”

YOU were the one who decided to engage in this ‘war of wits’ with me, my fellow residents of planet earth. You were the ones whose behaviors ‘forced my hand.’ You were collectively the ones — each and all of you with the decisions that you made and the ones that you didn’t — who drove a man such as me

a regular old garden-variety dunce of a man like me — who went to Cornell but never struck anyone aside from himself as particularly brilliant

to the point of contemplating things so long and so hard as to figure out among the most important of the fundamental principles.

And now that you’ve done it, you and everyone else bloody well owed me this last ten minutes (and another hour or so if you’re honest) as well.

Do NOT fuck this one up. I don’t care what your name is. DO NOT pause for however long you typically pause for and give me substanceless bits of crap in response such as:

“Wow. You’ve really said something there. I’ll consider it further.”

or

“Wow. I see that you think this is so important that it appears you’re ‘on the edge of your seat’ contemplating [facetiously] who you have to murder for someone to start paying attention more carefully than a monkey with the controller for a flight simulator.”

Don’t tell me things like,

“Wow, you seem passionate. If only you’d channel your passions into something more constructive Brian Kent. If only you’d use your talents rather than letting them go to waste.”

Don’t tell me that, whoever you are that might tell me that. I assure you, if you’re in my physical presence when you utter such stupidity I will make sure you are promptly and permanently out of both my sight and my mind.

Which, because that sounds “vague, and ‘quite scary’” only means

I will never consider one single stinking thing that you consider important — from your dog to your house to your car to your spouse — I will never consider one single stinking thing that you have, you own, you offer as a sign of peace or goodwill

as something I will even BOTHER TO CONSIDER.

If you ignore me this time, it IS war. I will declare war on you, each and every single stinking last one of you human pieces of extraterrestrial horseshit. I will declare war on you and you will then be even more fucked than you already are because there is no way on God’s green earth that you will win.

Stick that in your current AI “digital knowledge washing machines” and see if you can ‘parse out’ what I’ve said.

<mutters to himself>

Good god why did you have to surround me with such simpletons?

If you liked this piece *SAY SOMETHING.*
If you DID NOT like this piece *SAY SOMETHING.*
If you found it sincerely confusing, *SAY SOMETHING.*

I will do better on later passes, but here it ought to be abundantly clear to you that while I have nearly infinite patience for stupidity, I’m not planning on using my time here on earth for any other purpose than

jumping as purposefully and carefully from my place in the passenger seat to catch hold of the slimmest bit of the steering wheel.

Don’t like that I’m “in the world” with you? Well I don’t think it’s convenient for a blockhead like Vladimir Putin to quite literally be in charge of the largest country — by mass — in the entire earth.

Blockhead? Simpleton? What would you call a guy who presides over that much land who then proceeds to believe it’s in *anyone’s* interest to try to annex some more?

He’s a blockhead. Yes he is. And now that we have at least ONE person with the spine to say so, there WILL be others.

[Personal note to Vlad: Time’s up. Stand down or I will as much as put you in a burlap sack and hang you from the rafters so that people can take turns swinging tube socks with 99.44% pure bars of Ivory soap against your back and your front.]