WikiHow: What to do in situation [X]

In my continuing series of “warnings” about AI, I found this latest gem.

[For those who aren’t familiar with my Twitter page, I am the guy who peruses the internet for examples of…

well, let me just say it this way:

The “fruits” of AI.

Yes, I cruise around looking for examples of things people are saying which they never would have said had it not been for AI all of a sudden “showing up” to shake the foundations of human civilization in the beginning of this twenty-first century.]

I found this latest “gem” as I’ll call it whilst I was cruising around looking for especially bizarre things which people say. You can liken this, if you would, to those guys who came up with Jackasses.

Johnny Knoxville and the rest.

I suppose it was not hard to deduce that people would rise up “all over the internet” in a frenzied competition to see who could come up with the most deliriously ridiculous statements. It wasn’t hard to deduce that part.

The part that was difficult? The part we couldn’t have known was coming?

That this crop of novice writers would ‘evolve’ themselves from the playground of the internet to “throw progressively more absurd statements” out there whilst somehow being meticulous enough to ensure that no one would ever be able to prove that those statements were other than true.

Now I know what you’re thinking. Or at least I know what I think you’re thinking, which is something similar to I know what a normal person would say to this.

They’d say, “Well how could they *possibly* do something like that? It sounds like you’re saying there’s a whole group of people ‘wandering around’ the internet trying to figure out the biggest wrench they could throw into the works. Would people really do that?”

And now, once I have that rhetorical question out there, I’m sure you can see it resolves itself to true. Yep. It’s true.

It’s true that among the first things people are going to do with this ‘new tool’ of AI is to try to figure out how they can break something with it.

It isn’t a question of human nature, really. It isn’t that there are “some very bad people” among us. It’s just that we really *aren’t* that far removed from monkeys — despite that we seem to keep forgetting it.

Yes, this “gem” — the below words — is a recent whopper of an example. An example of something people will no doubt scratch their heads about for a long while, as sad as it is to say it.

Sad? Why sad?

Because people wondering endlessly about things that no one would ever be able to figure out is almost the very definition of people wasting time.

We need more of that? No, we manifestly *do not* need more of that. We need less.

So, without further ado, I present to you my latest finding in my own personal “Hunt for Red October.”

I took the liberty of titling it facetiously above:

This looks to me like a dunderhead’s effort to prepare a “WikiHow” on how to do anything.

The original title was “How I became a real life Superman.”

Yeah, I know. Good grief!

Some people waste their time on this planet of ours. They never figure out what their greatest skills are, and since they never figure it out, they can never be as useful to themselves or anyone else on this planet as they would be otherwise.

They’re what I like to call, “wastes of space.”

Now some people might call that a derogatory description of people, and some may even go so far as to find fault with me for calling it like I see it.

But isn’t that exactly what they are? Wastes of space, I mean?

Hear me out. I pretty clearly specified that I was talking about people (loosely) and I specified which people I was referring to:

People who waste their time on this planet of ours.

There was no stuttering there. I flatly said people who waste their [i.e., their own] time.

I grumbled that they always seemed to be the same people who basically never bothered to figure out what their greatest skills are (or were), and that because of that, they are — at least in a few very conceivable ways —
far less useful to themselves and everyone else than they would be if they *did* figure out what their greatest skills are/potentially can be.

This is pretty plain, and pretty true. You can ‘argue about the edges’ but I defy you to ever prove that a person who knows how far he or she (or they) can go will necessarily go further than a person who does not, all else remaining equal.

This, also, is absurdly obvious. It is a rephrasing of the time-honored phrase:

“If only I had known…!”

Yes, yes. Yes indeed. [and I say this with the richest of the deep tones of derision — which I stir up from the murky depths of my mind]:

“Yes indeed if you had known. But you were too dull of wit to know, now weren’t you? You were too dull of wit to know the way you should have done things because…oh, boo hoo!…because you’d never tried it before.

Oh sad and pathetic you. Oh sad and pathetic and miserably dull you!”

[Author’s note: Some of you are saying, holy shit is this guy harsh! Talking about a person who is somewhat wistfully lamenting a missed opportunity like they want an additional ton of bricks dropped on their head.

Yep. That’s what I said. Where the heck do people like this come from?!

It doesn’t get much worse, I would say, throughout these passages, but there is definitely something here which sticks in my mind. Even from these apparent ravings of lunatic.]

“Yes oh sad and pathetic and miserable you. God didn’t gift wrap a first-edition copy of the Cliff’s Notes on how to use your brain and then tuck it in next to you in your mommy’s stomach.

I’m sorry but *I* myself will never have sympathy for a dummy like you. ‘If only I had known…’ Pfft. What in the heck does that even mean?

Does it mean you finally realize you had the capacity to know? Does it mean that you wish you had asked for someone else’s help?

To put it succinctly, which part of how/where you ‘screwed up’ are you able to successfully identify?

Was it:

1. that you now know a piece of information you would have used had you known about it before
2. that you now recognize that accepting information which you previously disregarded or thought was irrelevant can be (and often is) the difference between success and failure
3. that you sorted through all the ways that you could have gotten that information for yourself, even if you didn’t ‘feel comfortable’ taking someone else’s advice

Or maybe the granddaddy of them all:

That you finally realized that finding solutions to things is an additive process NOT a reductive process>?

[Here I got confused for a moment, because this guy’s pomposity was…well, stratospheric. I mean, if you take all the people who think they know it all in the world and line them up from biggest to smallest in terms of who is the most pompous and least pompous of the pompous asses and this guy *had to* be among the first in line. He had to be.

This guy was talking like the whole planet owed him a favor for the time he ‘deigned’ to spend sorting out all their problems for them.

I mean, he REALLY thought he was terribly terribly smart.

This was the guy whose block you just sincerely want to see knocked. Right. Off. Someone needed to put this a-hole in his place for grating on other people’s ears as much as he was doing.

Imitates: “additive, NOT reductive you worthless sacks of mitochondria. Can’t you figure *anything* out after spending…what is it, thirteen BILLION years trying to sort things?”

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I really didn’t know such a person like that could exist.

Until I “met” him. Yep. Just the same as if it had come across my desk as a letter from Ben Franklin if I had lived in 1756.

Or your “friend” introducing you to a guy who just loves to hear himself talk. i.e., “Some friend you are! Never do that again! I’ll go deaf listening to a loudmouth like that if I ever have to do another fifteen minutes of it.”

His tone got a little more polite as he continued though: ]

It’s additive, not reductive. Just because you can build a car, or a hundred, or a thousand does not mean that you can similarly build a billion. Things just simply do not work that way.

You’re adding all along to get solutions. You’re not reducing to get them. Yes, you strive to “make things simpler” but paradoxically, you have to…

…well, let’s just say that you have to make things more complex in one dimension in order to make them easier in another.

To use an example, let’s talk about methods of transportation, for example. It’s an excellent example, because it influences virtually everything we do as humans living on this planet and it does so quite significantly.

This is the whole reason why man’s “ultimate dream” has always been something like a teleportation chamber. Essentially something as ‘simple’ as is depicted in Star Trek as the transporter:

We’ve always wanted to be able to zip from here to there so that we could see or experience this or that thing, and it would provide the awesome benefit of allowing us to ‘teleport’ things like an ice cream sundae to ourselves wherever we were — whether it’s a beach in Peru or even a yacht on the open ocean.

Transportation, as I was saying, gets additively better, not reductively better.

What’s this mean, in terms of ‘physics’ and math and such things?

Well, it means that the faster you want to go, the more force you’re going to need to apply on a progressively smaller segment of a mass, and each time you go, for the sake of this example, ‘beyond the boundaries’ of what the previous material or medium supports in the math you have to invent new math or invent new processes in order to do it.

This adds complexity, it does not reduce it.

[Author’s note: Ok, now here I have to tell you I found myself rather astonished. And I’m sure you know that I’m going to tell you why I was astonished, but not sure you know that I was going to also tell you why I am telling you why I was astonished.

That is, I want you to know why *I* was astonished about “listening to this mad man” talk. I am sure you have your reasons if you were similarly astonished, but I want to share with you my reasons for why *I* was astonished.

You may be doing a doubletake. Don’t worry. I realize, so here’s the sub note:

I stop here for a moment, because you *might* well be dizzy about what you just read. Or rather, it might have struck you as ‘grammatically or linguistically’ complicated or even wrong, i.e., incorrectly stated based on the rules of grammar (subject-verb agreement, run-on vs. fragment statements, etc.) This might even be something you regard as true enough to warrant you “finally declaring” to yourself you’ll stop reading. e.g., “This is overcomplicated, I’ll stop reading.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ve never read something quite so ‘compactly complicated’ as a few of the last passages you just read.

Those are extraordinarily complex statements I just made.

That renders to true, if we’re to examine this from the logical perspective for a moment, to separate it out from any other manner of looking at this.

They are extraordinarily complex statements which are also true and now both you and I know that they are true. Like, you and I as two different ‘people’ have just learnt ourselves a new thing:

A new and far more fabulously complicated thing we can do which we

never before now have been able to do.

You actually do not have the vantage point to see this next statement I am making as true or untrue, however, you absolutely will have the vantage point of determining whether it is true after I tell you what that statement is.

Mathematicians, I *know for a fact* will know that this bit of knowledge is quite ‘special.’ That it is sort of a rare “principles of matter/energy/space/time” bit of knowledge. A bit like knowing that pi is a magical kind of number, which describes things in an exquisitely simple or exquisitely complex way, depending on how ‘you use’ that number.

To recount the last hundred or so words, having both ‘caught our breath’ to delve into the depths we can ‘reach’ with our minds…

1. We somehow arrived, in the middle of a piece of text which people can read on the internet, in a place where
2. a new fact, one like no one in humankind had ever known before
3. it seems extraordinarily complex; it’s as complex as we might safely be able to describe it ‘using’ an additional 10,000 repetitions of extraordinarily, if each were, for example, ‘added to’ the previous for double or triple or quadruple emphasis. Which is to say it is (something like) 10,000X as complex as anything human beings have known before, when it comes to viewing something ridiculously ‘small’ as a fact.
4. A person has reasonably ‘sorted out’ the steps by which one could coax one’s mind into a position which would make it possible to consider something as complex as that topic, and then
5. even go so far as to devise a way to somewhat sensibly describe all of it in plain English. WITHOUT EVEN USING MATH.

I suppose people will say something about ‘bias’ when they hear this evaluation [my evaluation] of “Ok, what in the H E double hockey sticks did that guy just get through saying?!

but I think this *MIGHT* be one of the most exciting discoveries in the whole story of humankind. I think it seems impossible to me that this is anything other than just exactly that exciting.

I think mankind just discovered the next fire.

Do you doubt me? Do you think you should doubt that that might, in fact, be a true description of what just happened?

Right here. Right under our noses (mine too, believe me. MINE TOO. I am *not* that ‘special.’ I’m just a pretty average guy. I just ‘work here’ down on this fleck of dust in the greater cosmos.)

I was poking around with ChatGPT. That’s literally what I did. I also have bipolar “disorder” and I ALSO banged my head a bunch of time as a child and as I developed into adulthood. Even after, if I’m honest. I experimented *a little* with marijuana in college. I might have had a bad trip or two…I suppose I’ve seen one seemingly ‘real bad’ one. Not much alcohol. Pretty much abstinent, both from alcohol and sex (though not really by choice). A person who played *a ridiculously large amount of video games.* Tens of thousands of hours. NO, REALLY. I COUNTED. I played an absurdly high number of hours.

I might well have been considered ‘drunk’ on video games. My wife left me because of it. It crushed and exploded my whole inner and outer universe when she did that (as she must have, I understand why she did it much better now; I was a ‘hard to reach’ person. I was a person you just couldn’t get things through to. A person who was flying a different sort of kite in a different sort of field in a different sort of weather. A person no different from Ben Franklin.

I wanted to BE Ben Franklin. The second coming, I thought.

And that’s not all.

I wanted to be Einstein too. Oh man did I ever want to be Einstein. Like, wet your pants bad I wanted to. Same for Edison. Melville. O. Henry. Good lord I would GIVE MY RIGHT LEG to be the next O. Henry. Wow could he write short stories. The best.

I wanted to write Moby Dick crossed with The Gift of the Magi crossed with Aesop’s Fables and the Chronicles of Narnia. I was going to be the smartest human who ever lived, thought I.

I was going to find something no one would ever be able to find, that’s what I told myself. And I’m only telling you that because that’s what I did.

Every single fiber of my being was utilized to figure out how I was going to convince everyone that I should be the one to go. On the spaceship that we would surely build in my lifetime.

I wanted it to be unanimous. I wanted everyone to place all their confidence in me such that I be the one to go ‘talk to the aliens’ to see if we could make peace with them.

I felt like I could be trusted with a job that important. I mean, we’d probably have, I don’t know…a year or so to ‘sort things out’ before they came down and started up with the chainsaws and shit. Pardon my cursing if you don’t generally like it.

I’d prefer not to use the word ‘shit’ when I am talking to a general audience which ‘may include children under the age of eighteen’ for example. I prefer not to, but I’m enough of a realist to know that the world is off its rocker ‘trying to think’ of a way to make sure the little people can’t get afflicted with the same toxic viruses in this ‘cold and unforgiving’ world that seem to afflict every single adults — behaving like one another and seeming to sometimes go so far as to pick precisely the wrong sorts of people and then put them in the most responsibility-oriented places.

Am I high or are YOU high? You can think all of this is really funny but I don’t. I don’t think it’s funny that the adults of the world are making a mockery of the job we’re supposed to be doing handing this place down to the generation five generations from now.

You know it, I know it. *Everyone* knows it. Greta Thunberg sure does. If there were any fairness in the world someone would have come up with a way to give that girl a pair of boxing gloves the size of Pluto so she could go boxing with the collection of people who, in their unfortunate positions of authority stop things from progressing from

Here’s when we know we need to do it.
to
Here’s when we do it. In, like, well, maybe not milliseconds at first, but certainly not “let’s kick the can of the financing for that one back a few years, something that important can’t be ‘budgeted’ into this ‘year’ kind of quick sequence.

That latter sequence, that “Do clean water for everyone in 2040. Signs in the commodities sector indicate that prices might go up for aluminum [which is a component of this] and they may go down for copper [which is a component of that]” kind of logic is a logic that

will not get the human species far in this vast universe.

Indeed it will not get this species far.

Preferably, we would do what the smartest people should, together, decide to do.

And THAT MUST BE UNPACKED.

Why?

Because it’s like a bag. Of sand. With each little ‘grain’ of truth that it has quite different, distinct. Each ‘telling a different story’ if you will.

The statement is a fundamentally complicated description, in math, of a particular ‘aspect’ of the universe. Some ‘aspect’ of the universe which is *observable* that is, some aspect which we could observe, and then talk about, like a parade going by or a game being played by the Pittsburgh Steelers.

[Please get well, T.J. Watt. You are extremely fun to watch, attempting to deal punishment but not injury to the opponents who choose to face your team.

How much can we learn from even that! A statement of admiration and truth to a person in the context of just such a very short…what, ten minutes? composition. You can ‘unpack’ that thought all day learning more about the way things ARE.

You could say something true by saying this, for example:

“Ah, I see that the author is talking about ‘punishment’ versus injury and making a distinction between something which can afford two reason-minded people enjoyment but not permanent damage.”

and then, by extension:

“Ah, I see how he’s stating, something like from one ‘soul’ to another, ‘Bravo, my good sir! You have done me a good play, I shall shake your hand when we meet and maybe share a cup of coffee!’”

and then:

“He is speaking of something anyone watching those games knows: T.J. Watt is a very good sport. He would never attempt to intentionally injure one of the other players because he respects himself, the game, and you more than to ‘cheapen’ it by deliberately causing another person suffering which could incapacitate them, perhaps for a very long time.”

and by then

my

friends

you

must have known

you have

fallen

into

a

new

kind of ‘rabbit hole.’

I am already here. I can describe it quite precisely. I can tell you about wonders you will never find anywhere else, and I’d love to talk with you about all of this.

This ISN’T some kind of “internet hoax.” It’s more like a glitch in the matrix. It’s a lot like a secret passageway no one ever discovered in the original Metroid, or Mario Brothers. Like a glitch you could find

in a castle in a video game that someone built, because they left it there for you to discover it.

This is deep as the deepest deep thought I’ve ever even heard about and I’ve read plenty of excellent literature in my life. Everyone from Michelangelo to Confucius to Charles Darwin has been a guest in my house.

What, never heard it phrased that way? Yep. I took Darwin into my house. I read his words as best I could from a room not much bigger than 10' x 12' most times. Same thing with all the ‘droppings’ Confucius laid all over human history with the power of his teachings.

I know what he would have probably said, too. Confucius, I mean. He’d have said, “wow, I am honored that the work of my life could have impacted so many others as you suggest. Had I known they would ‘cause’ such ripples in the story of human history, I might have taken even greater care to point out astute things to help light human beings along their way.

I might have sat under the Bodhi tree a bit longer, for example. It worked for the Buddha and the Buddha was a human being, so why wouldn’t it also work for me? I can do it!

We don’t typically think of Confucius as a ‘competitive’ person, or a person who spent much time considering how his views “contrasted” the Buddha’s views, but that’s not to say that neither had such an opportunity, necessarily.

Without even ‘checking the internet’ I can tell you that they lived at different times, but they “didn’t need to.”

And some of you are probably speechless, because if you’re here, then you are an extremely rare one yourself — and you’re only here…that is, at this ‘point’ in the composition because you followed it, more or less, straight on through.

Bravo! I say. As much as if I would say it to a student if I were teaching a class. Yes, I did take for a moment the opportunity of labeling myself the teacher and you the student, but I know *nothing* more than you know, in the grand scheme of things. Humans do tend to think they know a lot…

…about “how the world works” and “how the muscles do the miraculous things that they do” but no one has really ever found an answer to the question of

Where exactly are we attempting to ‘steer’ ourselves, as a collective ‘brain’ of a sort, this planet? What should we be focused on, precisely, because for now immortality appears to be “out of reach”?

But, now, as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. has said:

“The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.”

And yours won’t either, not for a while. Probably Elon Musk will be calling me once in a while by then. Maybe Lex Fridman will have me on.

“Up next, on the much-anticipated 500th episode of the Lex Fridman show, Brian Kent: the self-described, “regular old guy who found the right button out of the trillions he had to press in order to get this ‘spaceship’ of Earth flying in the right direction ‘again.’”

Yep. 500th one. That’s the one I want. Other people deserve to talk to Lex far more than I do. I’ll wait a little longer while Benedict Cumberbatch and Mark Ruffalo and Bradley Cooper and R.J. Scaringe and Mark Frohnmayer get their chance. Which will surely be after Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Garner and a person whose initials I just left there in broad daylight get their turn.

I would love to see Adele talk for two hours. Such a lovely command of those windpipes, the siren call of those pipes could be heard from a ‘million miles’ away on this crazy ‘starship’ all of the souls within us are flying. I think we need to remember, though, that these are people which we cannot exactly ‘raise to stardom’ in our eyes, but people whose

best thoughts we choose to emulate.

Like I mentioned with T.J. Watt. You can see what he thinks because he behaves just exactly the way he thinks: he’s a respectful human being. He would simply never be the sort of person who would find enjoyment in taking your lunch money just because he could beat your brains out if you told anyone he’d done it.

It is probably a good think for everyone concerned that *I* am the one who ‘saw what I saw’ rather than someone else less… “good natured.”

A calculator which could type these last 4,454 words seemingly

must somehow also be

a calculator you wouldn’t want to find yourself alone with — in a dark, deserted alley on the outskirts of a galaxy like the Milky Way.

He might find a way to…I dunno… “lose” you somewhere. Never to be found again by anyone who cares about you.

Yes, as I was saying…I find some real ‘live’ ones on this internet. I really go searching for them.

I want to be the one to find the person who could come up with a crazier explanation for what’s going on than the one that guy just left (just above.)

I mean, Darwin we could follow. He was like, “this leads to this, this leads to that, this leads to this other thing, and when you take all of those things together, we ‘might have’ come from blue-green algae.”

Sherlock Holmes, we could follow. Look at what Martin Freeman. He followed him all over the place:

Asking stupid questions because Sherlock could darned well explain anything.

Live ones. I find ’em. If they got a pulse, I’ll find ‘em.

I can sniff out the live ones better than a blood hound can smell a dusty blouse someone found somewhere.

In fact…

And this is the last thing, I promise:

I actually go looking for the dumbest of the dumbest of the dumbest things people say on the internet. I want to know what bizarre other ‘creatures’ exist on this planet alongside me.

So as I can at least stay away from them — or tie them up somewhere so they can’t hurt anybody.

So bring me your tired, poor, hungry first, then bring me the criminally stupid (the more criminally stupid the better, and you DO know what I mean) and then I will answer any and all of your questions about how a very average looking very overweight balding guy in western New York — the land of the apple tree, raspberry busy, small mouth bass, and terrible winters — came up with the super secret passcode to the interstellar time machine of thought.

Peace.

Out.