a theory on improving college education

The value of a college education is undeniable. Unfortunately, that value is difficult to quantify.  Perhaps this is part of the reason why the higher education system is racked by some major problems. Costs are prohibitively high, drop out rates are unacceptably high and a college degree doesn’t open as many doors in the job market as it used to.

As a result of these problems many students can’t get into college much less finish. Most of those who do will be burdened with crippling debt for half their adult life. Business are having difficult time finding skilled labor, and many (but not all) of the graduates coming out of university have only mastered rote memorization and test taking skills.

These are dynamic problems that require dynamic solutions. However, one thing is certain, we’re not going to get different results by doing the same thing. If we want a critical change in the results we need to make critical changes to the fundamentals of system.

Here’s one fundamental change we could make the university system that will seriously improve the matriculation and retention rates of students as well as improve the quantity and quality of graduates entering the work force. Of course, this isn’t a cure-all, but it will bring about a great deal of the change our society desperately needs.

Eliminate the standard bachelor’s degree that requires students to major in one core subject, minor in a secondary subject and take a number of classes that don’t directly apply to their career path. Instead, only require students to take the core classes related to their career path. Once those classes are completed give them a mini degree. Then if they want to go on to study a more broad spectrum of useful subjects then let them pursue that path, and give them another mini degree for having completed those classes. Remove the requirement to minor in a second subject altogether but leave the option open.

Now let’s weigh the pros and cons of this kind of system and see how well it will fit the needs of the modern world. We’ll start with the pros. Each item on the cons list will be followed by an analysis of how insurmountable that problem is.

Pros:

• Students who can’t afford 4 years of school will be able to attain valuable job skills previously unavailable to them.

• Students who can are willing to take on debt will have more options to choose how much debt they need to take on.

• Students who could excel in a career field but can’t excel at the extra classes required by the current system will be able to get a useful certification.

• The drop out rate will shrink drastically.

• The equivalent of a full bachelor’s degree will be more valuable when competing against the mini degrees.

• Workers will be able to enter the career field quicker.

• It will be quicker, cheaper and easier to earn a second degree if you want to change career fields later in life

• A more focused path of education will allow less freetime for partying, which will force students to focus on their studies.

• A more focused path of education will force faculty to better streamline their courses to follow a more logical, goal-oriented curriculum.

Cons:

• Students won’t get as broad of an education.

It would be more accurate to say that every student won’t get as broad of an education. Those who want to take more general classes will still be able to. Students who don’t want to, don’t need to, can’t afford to or aren’t academically inclined enough to won’t have to. And not every student needs as broad of an education, nor does every business want/need to employ/pay renaissance men/women.

• A degree won’t mean as much.

A mini degree won’t mean as much. A full degree will mean more.

• Harder for students to switch majors.

This will only be as difficult as colleges make it.

• Students who want to change majors will have wasted their time and credits.

This is true to an extent, but this is also often true in the current system. Plus, if students are forced to focus on their career path they might actually discover that their current path isn’t for them quicker than if they piecemealed it over 4 years.

• Harder for schools to start new courses.

While this is true it would be more accurate to say that it will be more difficult for schools to start new classes that don’t fit a career path. In that case, this would mean it’s harder for schools to start new classes that serve no purpose.

• Less flexibility for universities will drive up costs.

Yes. There are instances where this will be true. However, if students don’t have to pay for 4 years of school it will be easier for them to pay higher costs if they have to pay for fewer classes.

10 reasons you’re surrounded by idiots

10. Cultural Isolation:

Great leaps in human progress have often come from the meeting of minds. The Crusades brought Europe out of the dark ages. Christianity would have never evolved out of Judaism were it not for the cultural diffusion the Romans brought to the Middle East.  The founding fathers of America based many of their political ideas on what they learned from the Native Americans. The printing press made the Renaissance possible by making ideas cheaper and easier to transport, and the internet has sped up the growth of human knowledge exponentially.

But throughout history our minds have been cut off from each others by physical, linguistic and political barriers, and they still are. This is most clearly exemplified by American trailer trash rednecks living in small towns in the middle of nowhere, crazed Islamic extremists living in caves and the primitive tribes in the far corners of the world who still don’t know that the world is round.

If we had free energy, one language and no political barriers our knowledge would explode like an algae bloom in the ocean…but the people with the power to remove these stumbling blocks from our path fear change. So despite the globalization that is shrinking the world, all of our minds are still limited by the relative cultural isolation that remains.

9. Stress

The greater the disparity between the rich and poor becomes the less wealth there is for the poor to fulfill their base needs/desires with, and since they still have to fill these needs they have to work harder and longer to do that. The harder and longer they work the less time, energy, opportunity and motivation they have to turn their minds towards self-actualization and learning for the sake of learning.

Throughout history the gap between the rich and poor has stretched and contracted in cycles, but the contractions have been few and far between. If human nature wasn’t to be so greedy and the distribution of wealth had been more equitable all along the human race would have progressed at an exponentially fast rate, but since the vast majority of humanity has been poor and stressed throughout history we are suffering the compounded consequences of generations of ignorance.  Even today most people are still too stressed over their base needs/desires to turn their attention to becoming better people.

8. Peer Pressure

Like the rest of the universe, society is in a constant struggle between entropy and equilibrium. The determining factor between whether or not entropy or equilibrium will win is whether or not the environment we’re analyzing is an open or closed system. Society more often than not is a closed system, especially now that we’re running out of places on this planet to escape to. So society gravitates towards equilibrium. Despite how much we claim to love diversity and independence the modus operandi is that the nail that sticks up will be hammered down. In layman terms, we don’t like it when people act differently. So we ridicule, pick on, ostracize and punish people for deviant behavior. Unfortunately, progress is deviant. So we tend to indiscriminately oppose progress and maintain our current level of ignorance. And unfortunately it works. One of the big reasons we’re all so dumb is because we’ve beat the courage and inspiration out of each other.

I guarantee at some point in your life you’ve stuck your nose up at or made fun of someone who was better than you. Ironically, the smarter you think you are the more often you look down on people who are smarter than you.

7. Media caters to the lowest common denominator.

If you don’t know about Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs you need to turn off your television and throw away your magazines until you fully understand the concept. It says that people will be instinctively drawn to fulfill their most immediate needs. We almost never eat because we intellectualize that it’s a good idea. We eat because we’re hungry. We eat because our instincts draw us to do it, and if we don’t have the money to eat we’ll rob, cheat and steal to get food. Once that need is secure though, we’re drawn to other higher needs, not because we intellectualize it but because our survival instincts tell us to.

Once our need for food, clothing and shelter are secured we’re drawn to sex. We’re drawn to love (because love leads to sex and protecting our group and thus survival of our gene pool). We’re drawn to prestige and wealth because they fill base biological needs. Even when all of those needs are met we’re naturally drawn to fulfill our self-actualization. That’s why emo kids exist. They have everything they need, but they’re miserable as shit. To the have-nots, emo kids look like whiney bitches. In reality, they’re legitimately miserable because they’re starved for self-actualization in our sterile, boring suburban environment.

The media could help enlighten those who live enough of a life of leisure to be able to philosophize, but instead it’s picked up on the fact that people will always have that part of them that’s drawn to their most base desires: fortune, glory, sex and shiny objects. So they sell us that. Hell, the push it on us, and we eat it up because our brain is wired to respond to that stimuli. Unfortunately, when the only thing our brains ever get fed is puerile brain candy our brains don’t grow. In fact, they regress.

6. Government doesn’t make education a priority.

The world wouldn’t be so dumb if the government devoted its resources to educating its citizens…and I mean, really educating its citizens, not just giving them enough education to perform menial tasks. Unfortunately, governments spend more money on prisons and wars than education. Ironically, if we’d spent our budget on education we could end the need for most of the world’s wars and prisons.

5. Academic philosophy has failed humanity

Ideally, school is supposed to teach students to be curious, to seek knowledge on their own, to ask questions and seek answers. Unfortunately, academia has suffered the same fate as any large, hierarchical bureaucracy that controls vast amounts of wealth and power. It has come to defend the status quo and ridicule, ostracize and punish deviant thinkers.

College rarely teaches people to think for themselves. More often than not it teaches them to think what their professors think. And the professors at the tip of the spear of the search for truth (professional philosophers) have become more intellectually corrupted than any other teachers save theologians.

The quickest way to get in a fight with a modern philosopher is to suggest that philosophy is about finding answers or even being useful.  Philosophers will sneer at you with a mixture of disgust and pity and tell you that philosophy is above such limitations. In fact, mainstream academic philosophers are likely to label you as short-sighted or considered close minded if you ever claim to answer any question because it’s become fashionable to insist that nothing is real, there is no truth and everything is relative. If you want notoriety in philosophical circles your best bet is to not think at all but to just memorize everything the celebrities of philosophy ever said and then out-quote everyone around you.

I’m not saying there’s no value in pure theory or in studying the history of philosophy, but in a time when the world is drowning in blood and misery, if you have the intelligence to solve the very real problems tearing lives apart and you choose not to then you’re not a genius; you’re irresponsible. Mainstream academic philosophy has steered what should be our brightest intellectual leaders away from solving important real world problems that would improve everyone’s lives, and as a result, the masses don’t have the time or resources to devote to improving their minds. From that point of view modern mainstream academic philosophers are doing more to promote ignorance than enlightenment.

4. Religion has failed humanity.

I’d have to devote my entire life to writing only about this topic and nothing else to cover every reason why this is true, and since religion fails the test of truth so completely that the only way to take is seriously is to abandon all logic and accept it on faith then all the reasons in the world won’t convince the religious believers why those points are true. So I’ll keep this as short as possible.

In reality the only way to arrive at actual truth is to use objective logic. Religion tells people it has all the answers. So there’s no reason to seek truth elsewhere, and even if you wanted to seek truth elsewhere, religion forbids this. For those two reasons religion stops people in their intellectual tracks. This holds people back from fulfilling their potential and actively propagates real world problems.

Religion has been doing this for all of human history. If religion had been replaced with useful philosophy from the beginning of human history we wouldn’t have had to let deviants sporadically piecemeal our progress step by step. Instead we could have harnessed the collective power of every religious follower in history to build a more intelligent, progress-oriented civilization, and then every generation could have built on the progress of the previous generation, which would have increased our progress exponentially. But as it stands, religion has kept us in the dark and will continue to do so until children are systematically taught to value curiosity and objectivity before they’re systematically taught to value blind ignorance.

3. Social leaders don’t know what they’re doing, and they lie about it.

Society is so lost we don’t even know we’re lost. This is true for lowest street sweeper all the way up to the highest political leaders in the world. We have no idea what we’re doing, and we’re just guessing while putting on enough airs to make it look like we have it together. In this kind of world it’s natural to look to leaders for guidance, which wouldn’t be such a bad thing except that our leaders are just as blind as the rest of us. The only difference between us and them is that they’re better at lying. This causes 2 problems. First, when we attempt to emulate our leaders we end up emulating shit. The second problem is that our leaders are leading us in circles as our world becomes overpopulated and better armed.

2. Parents don’t know what they’re doing, and they lie about it.

That’s all I have to say about that.

1. Evolution has designed us to be stupid.

All of these problems aren’t accidents or anomalies. They’re all inevitabilities considering how evolution has designed us. As surely as evolution gave us hands, feet, eyes, ears and noses to help us survive it also gave us pain, pleasure, hunger, fear, love, greed and all the other emotions and base desires that steer us away from logical accountability. It also put shortcuts into our brains like cognitive dissonance, cognitive bias, schemas, trust for authority, fear of change, the fundamental attribution error and a slew of other mental processes that reduce our need to think about what we’re doing and encourages us to sleepwalk through life on autopilot fucking every potential mate we pass and fucking over every competitor in sight.

It’s a terrible thing to realize, but it’s necessary to face this demon in order to fulfill your potential. We were born to be stupid. You were born to be stupid, and make no mistake, you are stupid. I don’t say this because I’m better than you. I’m no better than you. I’m stupid too. The big difference between me and the gangstas, rednecks, preps and religious fanatics that infuriate me day in and day out is that I’m afraid and ashamed of my stupidity whereas they celebrate theirs.

How terrified are you of your stupidity? Because the greater your terror is the more motivated you’ll be to truly do everything your power to get unstupid. The more confident or even resigned with who you are the less critical of your own stupidity you’ll be and the more you’ll wallow in your own stupidity, infuriate the intelligent people around you (who you will have ignorantly mistaken for being stupid) and waste your life in vain while making a mockery of the infinitely priceless gift of life.  And make no mistake, we’re all stupid. The question is only a matter of degree.

16 tips to overcoming writers block

This list is arranged in a semi-chronological order relative to the career of a writer. Beginner writers will suffer from writers’ block for different reasons that professional writers, and professional writers will suffer less writers block because they will have already overcome the hurdles at the beginning of this list. Most of the items on this list will be ongoing issues in your life that overlap each other. Some of them are things you’ll do your entire life. Also,…. it goes without saying that no two writers are alike, and no two methods will provide the same results for any two writers. So bear in mind that I’m presenting this as a guideline and not as a rule book. The exception is  point #1, which is a rock solid rule.

1. Know Thyself.

If you’re suffering from writer’s block it’s because something within your mind or your life is preventing the flow of ideas. The better you understand your motivation, your strengths, your weaknesses, your resources, your style the better you’ll be able to use your brain to generate your ideas effectively. In fact, I could end this list right now because every other step in this list is going to involve a certain amount of self-awareness.

2. Analyze and reaffirm your motivation.

The reason we have the term “writer’s block” for writers who can’t write, but we don’t have the term “lover’s block” for lovers who can’t love is because when you’re in love it comes natural to love. It comes so natural that you can love someone so much that you ignore other aspects of life (sometimes to impractical and dangerous extremes). When love dies we move one, and if we don’t move on after love had died our friends tell us to seek therapy because we’re holding on to a dream that wasn’t meant to be.

As a writer, if you truly loved to write then you would write no matter what. You might even write more often than is responsible. If you can’t write then you need to seriously question whether or not writing is something you’re passionate about. If it’s not then that’s okay. Life is about defining yourself and exercising your free will. As long as you follow your passion you’re doing “it” right. As long as the only reason you’re writing is for fortune and fame then understand that even if you ever did become rich and famous it would be because you’ve spent your life doing something you’re not passionate about, and in that case your life would have been wasted anyway. Remember, don’t be a write unless you’d still write even if you knew you’d never get paid for it.

If you do decide that writing is something you’re passionate about then you would do well to write down why it’s important to you. Then, if you ever get stuck or discouraged about writing you can look back to your mission statement, your love letter and remind yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing. That alone may provide the motivation you need to get out of your slump.

3. Improve your technical skills.

Trying to write like someone else almost defeats the purpose of writing. It certainly takes the passion out of writing. However, there are core technical rules for writing that exist for a purpose. Think of it like baking a cake. There’s no right way to bake a cake, and if you make a career out of baking cakes by strictly following other people’s recipes then you may be able to make some money, but your job would be as rote as any office cubicle job. If you decide to bake cakes for a living, but you don’t know how to bake a cake you’re going to get very frustrated and discouraged. If you would quit trying to be creative long enough to learn the core technical skill of cooking your job would be made exponentially easier, and you could modify the recipes quickly, creatively and effectively. If you’re having a hard time writing it might be because you don’t know how, and the only thing you can do to eliminate the frustration and discouragement you’re facing is to go back and study the fundamentals of how to write.

4. Improve your creative logic skills.

Writing is a creative endeavor. If you don’t know how to be creative then you don’t know how to be a writer. If you think creativity is magical, unscientific and can’t be taught then…well, you’re wrong, and it will be impossible for you to master the art of creativity. If you want to write well then you would do well to study logic, the psychology of creativity, and this blog:

http://wisesloth.wordpress.com/2009/12/22/the-science-of-thought/

5. Have something to say.

If you can’t think of anything to say then you should seriously question whether or not you have anything to say. Similar to point #2, if you have something so important and so vivid to say you’d be saying it regardless of how well you’re able to express yourself. The words would just force themselves out of you. If you ‘re having a hard time writing then put your paper down and turn of your computer and spend some time thinking about what it is you have to say. If you have nothing to say then writing well is the least of your problems. You need to go out and live life.

6. Live life, and observe it.

If your writing it dull, it might be because it reflects the dullness of your life or your understanding of life. Your writing will only be as good as your comprehension of life, and in order to comprehend life you have to have new experiences. Having new experiences won’t do you any good unless you pay attention to them, analyze them and remember them. Most of the work of writing happens when you’re away from your computer; it happens when you’re digging into the nature of life trying to find those gems of truth to relate through your writing.

Note: You can combine points 3 and 6 by reading good writing.

7. Resolve your problems in real life.

Creativity and technical skill tap vast amounts of mental resources. Nothing ties up more of your mental capacity than stress. As a result, stress caused by real life problems will stop you writing dead in its tracks. Likewise, happiness will give you energy and motivation to plow into your writing career. So in order to get back into writing you need to solve your real life problems. At any rate, your real life problems are more important than writing anyway.

If there are problems in your life that are preventing you from focusing on your writing you’re going to need to analyze them and express them. Since writing involves analyzing and expressing life, you can kill two birds with one stone by writing about your problems. This also provides the added benefit of making your writing meaningful. Just be aware of the danger of getting locked into a cycle of wallowing in self-pity. This will make for boring, nauseating, melodramatic writing and won’t help you either.

8. Improve your health, or at least get some rest.

There doesn’t have to be anything wrong in your life in order to be depressed. In the same way that depression will sap your body’s mental and physical energy, an unhealthy lifestyle will also sap your body’s mental and physical energy. If you never seem to have the energy or motivation to write it might be a symptom of an unhealthy lifestyle, and all the tips and tricks and how-to books in the world won’t help you write until you start taking care of your body.

If you do live a relatively healthy lifestyle you might just not be getting enough rest. Try eliminating some activities in your life that are stretching your time too thin and get some more rest. Then you’ll have more energy to solve any problems in you life and clear up more time to get adequate rest and eventually to focus on your writing with a fresh, energetic mind.

9. Just say it.

Have you ever tried to express you’re feelings to someone you cared about? After hours of trying to find the right words you finally decided the only way to express what you’re trying to say is to just blurt it out? That’s how writing works, and after you’ve blurted out what you had to say, then you can refine the details, but first you need to create that solid, core expression.

This is also how you develop your own style: not by trying to perfect someone else’s art, but by saying what you have to say in your own voice. The only way you’re going to find your own voice is by saying to hell with everyone else and using your own voice naturally. If you can’t do that you shouldn’t be a writer anyway…unless you want to be a technical writer or an impartial journalist for a news media outlet, which is fine.

Note: This is one reason so many authors swear by alcohol. Alcohol reduces your extraneous mental functions and forces you to be honest and blunt whether you’re typing on your computer or shouting at your best friend. If you’re having a hard time understanding how to “just say it,” you might consider getting drunk and getting some experience. However, becoming an alcoholic won’t help you in life or in writing in the long run. If you can’t write without using a crutch then you’re not a real writer anyway.

10. Write crap.

This could be included in point #5, but it’s important enough to warrant its own bullet. The term “writer” is a misnomer. It would be more accurate to call writers, “rewriters.” The concept is simple. You’re never going to get anything perfect the first time. Even if you could, it’s much easier to rewrite crap and turn it into something good than to write something perfect the first time.

If you’re getting frustrated and discouraged because nothing you write is perfect then you should stop trying to write perfectly. Write crap. Have fun with it and actually get it onto paper. Then rewrite it.

11. Get in the mood to write.

If every time you sit down to write you find that you’re not in the mood to write then you can either wait until you’re in the mood or you can get yourself into the mood. Any “how to write” book will tell you to get into a habit. Write at the same place, at the same time everyday so your brain comes to associate that time of the day and that place with writing. Then your brain will automatically go into writing mode. You can further trick your brain by performing a ritual right before writing. It doesn’t matter what that ritual is, as long as it’s consistent. Eat eggs, take a walk, clean your room, wear the same hat, perform a séance. Once your brain associates this activity with writing it’ll put you in the mood to write.

But you can take psychology one step further. Your brain is most creative when it’s in a relaxed state nearing mediation. This is why you hear many authors swear by drug use. Drugs force your brain into that alpha wave state of mind. However, drugs also burn your brain out over time. But you don’t need drugs to put your brain into its most creative state. You can do yoga before writing, lay down and rest, listen to music, read a book, watch a movie. Find some form of relaxation technique that will help get your brain into the right gear before trying to write, and you’ll find that writing will be that much easier to slip into.

12. Diversify.

Maybe you’ve tried to establish a pattern, but it worked so well that now you’re stuck in a rut. There may come a point where you’ll benefit more by diversifying your projects as well as your methodology. If you’re working on more than one thing at a time you can jump to another project when you get burned out on your current project. That will keep you working and allow you to come back to the burned out project with fresh eyes later.

Maybe all of your ideas aren’t waiting for you at your computer desk. Maybe some are at the park. Try writing in a notebook for a change. If you always write in a notebook try writing on a computer for a change. Try stream of consciousness writing, try brainstorming, try outlining. Try everything and figure out which combination works best for you. In order to be a good writer you need to know what works for you. If you’re stuck in a rut it might be because you’ve neglected to figure out how you work best, and now is the perfect opportunity to finally figure that out by experimenting.

13. Reread your work.

One of the best way to gear up for writing is to reread your own work. Don’t worry about fixing it. Just reread it. If you see a glaring error, go ahead and make that little change. Then keep reading. If you see another little error, go ahead and make that change. Don’t be surprised when an hour later you’re pounding away at revisions with the fervor of an inquisitor when all you sat down to do was read over your older work.

14 .Start over.

If you can’t seem to get anywhere on the project you’re working on then maybe the problem isn’t your methods. Maybe the problem is your project. Maybe you’ve just written yourself into a corner. In fact, I guarantee that eventually that will happen. At that point the only thing to do is start over. You don’t have to delete your old manuscript. Just save it and put it away. Then start over from scratch. This will be extremely painful and discouraging at first, but I guarantee your ideas will flow out better. You’ll say what you have to say better than you did before, and inevitably there’ll be segments that you can cut and paste back into your new version from the old version. So you won’t really have to rewrite it all anyway.

15. Don’t talk yourself into writing when you don’t want to.

This isn’t like one of those diet fad promises where I tell you that you can lose weight and eat anything you want. I’m not going to tell you the easy answer you want to hear: that you don’t have to work when you don’t want to. No. Eventually you’re going to have to write when you don’t want to. And it’s going to hurt, but you’re going to have to do it anyway. However, the trick to doing that isn’t to talk yourself into it.

Think of it like cliff-diving. Cliff diving is horrifying the first time you do it. You may stand at the edge of an cliff 8 feet above the water and work up the courage for an hour before jumping. The secret to cliff diving isn’t to work up the courage to jump. The trick is to shut off the part of your mind that tells you not to jump. Eventually that’s the point you’re going to come to anyway if you do reason with yourself. You tell yourself, “And that’s why I’m going to jump.” Then your brain clicks off and you jump while your brain is silent.

Writing is the same way. Don’t bother arguing with yourself or debating or working up the courage. Just tell yourself, “Brain, I know you don’t want to do this. So we’re not even going to talk about it. I’m just going to turn you off and sit down and write. I’ll pretend I’m not even here if that’s what it takes.” And when you do that you don’t have to be strong or brave or disciplined. You even without those virtues you’ll cross the line as surely as if they were there, and everyone who sees what you accomplish will assume you possess all those virtues and more.

16. Quit.

If you’ve tried all of these techniques and you still can’t write then maybe it’s time to admit that you’re not a writer. And that’s fine. That doesn’t make you a failure. What would make you a failure is chasing after a dream that isn’t yours. Maybe you should focus your time on knowing yourself and figuring out what your passion really is.

the age of consent

Children aren’t considered to possess the soundness of judgment to drive a car, watch a violent movie, see naked bodies, have sex, smoke cigarettes, vote or drink alcohol until they’re between the ages of 16 and 21 years old…

so why do we assume they possess the soundness of judgment to understand religious propaganda from infancy?

Obviously, we don’t expect children to be able to understand religious propaganda. In fact, religious organizations count on the fact, but that’s irrelevant to the point I’m about to make. By the legal standards we’ve set limiting children’s actions until they’re of sound enough mind, it should be illegal to expose children to religious propaganda. However, by the legal precedent we’ve set by allowing children to be exposed to religious propaganda then children should be able to do anything regardless of how sound their judgment needs to be before they can fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.

11 ways mainstream academic philosophy has come to resemble religion

Note: This list is based on the way I have witnessed mainstream academic philosophy being practiced…It is not based on how philosophy might have originally meant to be practiced or theoretically should be practiced.

1. It has a set canon of books that are studied redundantly.

2. The canon has a few good ideas, but much of it is archaic, garbled, over generalized, subjective, culturally biased and sometimes even flat out wrong.

3. Followers’ understanding of life begins and for the most part remains within the framework taught by teachers as opposed to each individual systematically figuring out life for themselves starting with what’s most important and working down from there.

4. Insanity and incomprehensibility are often mistaken for genius.

5. People who criticize the ideas taught in the canon are ridiculed and ostracized.

6. Any criticism of the canon’s shortcomings can be dismissed by saying, “You just don’t understand our ideology. If you were smarter and studied it more you’d get it.”

7. Winning an argument is more important than arriving at truth.

8. What cannot be disproven is given equal standing with what is provable…when it’s convenient.

9. The ability to quote great thinkers is mistaken for being a great thinker.

10.  The people within the group are considered the elite, chosen or ubber. People outside the group are considered unworthy, subhuman and not worth living.

11. Violently and dogmatically defending prepackaged beliefs is only viewed as being close-minded when someone outside the group does it.When someone inside the group does it they are viewed as strong.

predictions on the future of publishing

In order to understand the future of publishing you have to understand that E-readers are going to make paper books obsolete. In less than 10 years paper books will become primarily a novelty item, and only a handful of books will actually still be used for functional purposes.

Here’s the short explanation of why. E-books cost a fraction of paper books. Many of them you can get for free. You can fit thousands of them in the same amount of space 1 paper book takes up. You can download them from anywhere that has internet connection without having to drive across town. The selection is better. You can adjust the font to fit your eye sight. They’re more versatile as you can pay to read the chapters you want, and in time many authors will publish their books by the chapter as they write them instead of waiting until the entire book is finished to make it available to the public.

E-books are cheaper, more portable and more convenient. Plus, in time everyone is going to have a hand held device capable of providing access to E-books. So everyone will be faced with the question, “Why not use the functionality I have available to me?” The only chance paper books have of continuing to outnumber E-books is the majority of the population decides to choose the more expensive, less convenient option available. If you think mainstream society is going to do that then you don’t understand anything about human nature.

If you want to understand the future of publishing, the only question you need to ask yourself is, what will the impact be of E-readers replacing paper books as the standard medium of the “printed” word?

The impact will be that books will become indistinguishable from any other content on the Internet. Once every school child has an E-reader there will only be one book: the internet. When that happens every book, news article, blog, essay, comic, movie, etc. will have to conform to the same standards of presentation. They will all be reduced to the web site format. When that happens the best-practice business model of publishing will become indistinguishable from the best-practice business model of web sites.

How is this going to affect the publishing industry? First of all, large run prints will cease to exist. If there are still any large run prints, it’s likely that only the top 10% of writers (who have already established their careers) will get this privilege. Everything else will be print on demand. Large publishers will likely transition their business model to providing print on demand kiosks where anyone can print a book from a list in a few minutes at the mall. It’s unlikely that publishers will be picky about which books they will offer to print at these kiosks as there’s no risk to lose money if they offer titles from unknown authors.

This is good news for writers because it means the days of submitting query letters and hoping to get “picked up” will be over soon. This is bad news for writers because it means they will not have the muscle behind the publishing houses to put their books on shelves…not that it will matter much if your books are on shelves because most content will be purchased online in digital format. This means that the publishing houses that remain in business will have transitioned much of their resources to advertising for their writers, not publishing their writers’ works. Not having a publisher won’t be as anathema as it used to be though, because new authors will be able to whore themselves out on the internet or hire private advertising agencies to advertise for them. For better or worse this means that mediocre writing will be able to thrive as long as the advertising behind it is strong enough.

The big question left is how writers will make money in the digital age. The answer is that they’ll make it the same way bloggers do. You can either charge for (full, partial or recurring) content access, make money off of advertising or provide free content and charge for consumer merchandise related to your writing. That’s just how it’s going to be.

My final prediction about the future of literature is that solo work will become less common. As the rules of literature bend to the rules of blogging, writers will find that in order to stay competitive they will have to produce good quality content very frequently in a respected web site that has a strong advertising department. This means that websites like www.cracked.com that have multiple writers, editors, thinkers and support staff will have a distinct advantage over solo operations.

If you want to be a (financially) competitive author in the near future you need to start studying the rules to successful blogging and find a venue where you can collaborate with other writers. However, if you just love to write and are good at it you will find a new world opening up to you where you can express yourself, build a following and enjoy a moderate amount of recognition without having to prostrate yourself before the exploitative bureaucratic monolith of the soon to be obsolete publishing giants.

an old man from jersey explains: philosophy

So I was sitting on the front steps to my apartment building the other day watching the people walk by when this kid comes up to me and says, “Hey mister.”

I say, “What do you want, kid?”

He says, “Can you explain philosophy to me?”

I think about it for a minute, and then I ask him, “Where do you want me to start from?”

“From the beginning.” The kid says.

So I think about it some more and decide this is the first thing a kid needs to understand about philosophy.

“In the beginning humans were just dumb animals shivering in the cold, unable to speak or build tools, and all we did all day was look for something to eat and someone to fu…aall in love with. Ugh Hmmph. Our minds were raw awareness and emotion.

Over generations though our brains grew, and as our brains grew they got better at thinking. We figured out how to communicate, make tools, devise strategy, form complex relationships, create art, that kind of stuff.

Once we were able to pass on knowledge from generation to generation by word of mouth and especially by writing our knowledge started to compound. After that…”

“Hey, what’s this have to do with anything?”
“Seriously, kid? Let me finish my story, and you might find out a thing or three.”

“Sorry.”

“You’re gonna be if you interrupt me again. Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah.

Try to imagine what life was like for those human beings who were alive just after we learned to talk and write but before history began. They were completely lost and bewildered by the universe. Nothing made sense. What’s the sun? What is lightening? How are babies made? Why do we get sick? What happens after death? They had all these questions with no answers. So people started asking questions.”

“So philosophers are people who ask questions. Got it. Thanks. I’ll see ya later.”

“Hold your horses, kid. Get back here. Yeah, philosophers are people who ask questions, but that’s oversimplified to the point of being wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, anyone who builds a house is a carpenter, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, anyone can nail a few boards together and make a roof over their head, but if you did that you’d end up with a dilapidated shanty that’s going to fall down and kill you in your sleep. It takes a lot more to be a proper carpenter and make a proper house. Same thing with philosophers. Want me to explain?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“There’s a good boy. You’ll go far if you can exercise a little curiosity and patience.

So, as I was sayin’, people started asking questions about the universe. ‘What’s this?’ ‘Why does this happen that way?’ ‘What happens if I do this?’ Yadda yadda yadda.”

“But the sun and lightening and getting sick and all that’s science. You’re talking about scientists, not philosophers.”

“Hey, weren’t you the one who said you didn’t know what a philosopher is? I’m trying to tell you.

In the early days we didn’t distinguish between philosophers, scientists, psychologists, mathematicians and whatever else. There were just people who were trying to get it all figured out. The people who were trying to get it figured out where philosophers.

Only problem was that they weren’t very good at it. They were like shitty carpenters trying to build a house. So they came up with a lot of shoddy explanations for things like, thunder is made by giants in the sky shouting. Sickness is caused by evil spirits. The universe was created in six days, and bad things happen because a naked lady in a magical garden ate a magical apple given to her by a talking snake…”

“Wait a minute! You’re talking bad about Jesus. And that’s not philosophy. That’s religion. And you said philosophers were scientists, not preachers. My mom says…”

“I know what your mom says. At least, I can guess. But your both wrong, and I haven’t contradicted myself. Religion was invented by philosophers using what little knowledge they had to make sense of the world around them. Sometimes they did it with good intentions. Sometimes they did it with selfish intentions that hurt other people. That’s water under the bridge at this point. The point is that they were trying to find truth and make sense of life. They just weren’t very good at it.

Anyone who asks questions in the search for truth is a philosopher, but only the people who follow solid, useful rules when asking questions are real philosophers in the same sense that only the people who build houses using solid, useful rules are real carpenters. You see how I’m actually going somewhere with this? I’m not jerking your chain here.

And just like with a house, the most important thing to figure out first is how to make the foundation. The second most important thing is the structure. Then there’s the functional details, then the aesthetic details. Then, once you’ve mastered the fundamentals you can start getting theoretical with your designs because only then are you not going to build some piece of crap that’s going to fall down. Again, it’s the same thing with human beings’ understanding of the universe and life. Good philosophers ask and answer the most important, fundamental questions first.

Anyway, the first philosophers were theologians…that’s people who make up religions or more accurately, mythology. Then, as human knowledge improved theologians lagged behind in solid truth seeking and scientists took up where they left off. Once scientists answered the most fundamental questions and coming up with math, physics, chemistry, astronomy, and what have you then the latest brand of philosophers turned their attention to psychology, sociology, anthropology and metaphysics.”

“So those old guys with pipes who talk about things nobody can understand are the real philosophers?”

“You tell me, kid.

No. Never mind. I’ll tell you.

After humans had been preserving and passing on knowledge for roughly 10,000 years there came a point where most of the cut and dry questions had been answered. That laid the foundation for certain thinkers with the money to afford an education and the time on their hands to sit around wondering and writing to fill a number of books about their speculations on the nature of reality.

That, in and of itself, was a good thing. The only problem was that, like with mythology,  there were a lot of people who took these thinkers’ questions/conclusions as authoritative. So a lot of people stopped searching for truth in the fundamental sense and just regurgitated…”

“What’s regujidaded mean?”

“It means to throw up something you ate.”

“Oh.”

“Anyways, people started regurgitating these thinkers questions and answers over and over and over, and they got so caught up in reanalyzing these old questions that they never asked new questions and found new questions with new answers.”

“But if they were smart enough to understand all that stuff that nobody else understands then how come they weren’t smart enough to figure out that they were just rejugilating old stuff and not doing anything new and useful and answering the rest of the questions?”

“Good question, kid. You just might make a philosopher yet. I’ll tell ya why. Because of human nature.”

“Human nature?”

“Oh yeah, kid. Let me ask you a question. Do you respect your mother?”

“You bet I do.”

“Why?”

“Uh, because she’s my mom, duh.”

“Exactly. Now, I know your mother is a good woman, but you’d respect her no matter what because that’s what you’re supposed to do, right?”

“Yeah. Well, wait…”

“Nope. No backtracking. Then you’re just kidding yourself. The truth is that it’s in our instincts to respect our elders. It’s not usually right, because most of our elders are douche bags, but that’s the way it is. We grow up all of our lives hearing that this person or that person is the cat’s pajamas and we take it to be true. Then when anyone questions that person we assume the dissenter is stupid or crazy.

That’s what happened with the old philosphers’ ideas. They gained a social status of authority, and all of a sudden everyone assumed the ideas had actual authority. Plus, the people regurgitating these theories prided themselves with being open minded, logical and superior to nonthinkers so much that their arrogance blinded them to their ignorance.”

“So you’re saying they’re all stupid?”

“Hey, all I’m saying is this. The fact of the matter is that if any of the celebrities of modern philosophy found out how idolized, analyzed and defended they are today they’d shit a brick. Pardon my French. There’s no doubt in my mind that if they would have known what was going to happen to their work they would have throw naway everything they ever wrote and forced future generations to reinvent the wheel because that would be better than everyone spending several hundred years spinning their wheels.”

“…well…gosh. But if there’s still wheels to spin then they didn’t have it all figured out. If those guys didn’t have it all figured out and they were so smart then I’ll never have a chance of getting anything figured out.”

“Well, I guess you may as well just shit in your hand and give up, huh?”

“…”

“Kid, don’t sell yourself short. Can you ask a question?”

“…yeah.”

“Then you can be a philosopher. The key to becoming a real philosopher is the same as it was 10,000 years ago. All you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What is the biggest problem you’re facing today?’.”

“The biggest problem I’m facing today is my grades in school.”

“Then focus on that. If Galileo hadn’t focused on his school he might never have figured out that the earth isn’t the center of the universe.”

“But aren’t we supposed to ask the highest questions?”

“Never mind the obvious fact that we don’t know what the highest level questions are. If Galileo had got stuck on asking metaphysical questions once he finished school then he might never have figured out that the earth isn’t the center of the universe. Then we’d all still be worshiping mythology and locking our neighbors in giant metal masks for gossiping.”

“But…”

“No buts. Forget about the questions or answers your elders settled on.  Forget about what people think is smart. Try to answer the most immediately important questions. Once you’ve answered those you can move on to answering the next most immediately important questions. Build on truth after truth. That’s the only way you’ll ever be able to understand the highest truths. If you try to jump straight to the end you’re going to end up just as misguided as the fools who invented the mythological concept of sin.

Don’t let your search for truth get boxed in and suffocated by the canon of religious or academic dogmatists. Don’t be afraid to reinvent the wheel ,because it’s human nature to get stuck using broken wheels passed down from more primitive, ignorant and authoritarian generations. But no matter what you do, just remember this one thing…”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t tell your mother I told you any of this.”

the thing about reincarnation and karma

The idea behind reincarnation and karma is that we have lessons to learn in this life, and after we die we’ll be reincarnated into a new life form where we’ll be punished/rewarded accordingly for the deeds we’ve done in this lifetime. And each lifetime brings us closer to attaining enlightenment wherein we transcend the confines of our temporal bodies and become one with everything. Of course, everything is and always has been one; we’ve just been separating ourselves from the unity of all things…for whatever reason.

The thing about reincarnation and karma is that if everything is one then every person is one. We’re just different perspectives of the same eternal One. So reincarnation is redundant. Every time anyone is born they’re the reincarnation of everyone (even those currently alive or yet to be born).

Furthermore, it’s redundant to reward/punish someone for the virtues/vices of someone else’s past life because the One has already been rewarded/punished when the One experienced the benefit/cost of those actions in the life/perspective of the person who was helped/hurt.

Of course, bear in mind that neither reincarnation or karma have any solid scientific evidence to back them up. They’re not even theories. They’re mythology. So theorizing how they should actually work is comparable to theorizing how unicorns work.

new atheists’ battle against agnosticism

A lot of atheist on the internet have been condemning agnostics lately by saying that agnostics don’t understand the definitions of the terms “atheist” and “agnostic.” The argument goes that the term “atheist” isn’t an either/or term. Rather, it refers to how strongly you believe that God doesn’t exist. So no matter how wishy-washy you are, if you don’t expressly believe that God exists then you are an atheist to some degree. It goes on to say that gnosticism refers to the degree to which you know something is true. So anyone who doesn’t know for a fact that God exists is technically an agnostic…except for those who claim to know for a fact that God doesn’t exist. In that case they’re a strong atheist. For a more detailed explanation of this theory you can go to  http://www.update.uu.se/~fbendz/atheism/definitions.html or just do an internet search for “atheist agnostic” and find plenty of sites explaining this position.

This theory is flawed for two reasons. The first reason has to do with the idea that the only true meaning of words is their original meaning. Up until a few years ago it was commonly accepted that if you believed in God you were a theist. If you didn’t believe in God you were an atheist, and if you refused to take a stance then you were an agnostic. Then somebody dug into the linguistic origins of the words and told everybody the original definitions are the only right ones and the commonly accepted definitions are wrong.

There are good, academic intentions behind this movement, but if we made it a moral imperative that we only use the original (maybe even archaic) definitions of words then we would have to change how we use thousands of words. One single example is that homosexuals could no longer call themselves gay because “gay” originally meant “happy.” Would you really condemn homosexuals as ignorant for calling themselves gay?

The second problem with rolling back the definition of the word “agnostic” is that nobody can know whether or not God exists. We can claim to know one way or the other, but ultimately we can’t know for sure. That means everyone is either agnostic or delusional.

We might be able to accept that on it’s own, but the situation gets more confusing if we continue to stick by the original academic definition of “atheist.” Remember, the original definition states that every agnostic is actually a closet atheist. Now, since nobody can know if God exists then every atheist is also an agnostic. You see the confusion this creates?

Everyone is either an agnostic-atheist or a theist. This forces people who absolutely refuse to concede that there may be a God and people who absolutely refuse to concede either way to fall under the same labels. This is inefficient, and that’s why the original definitions got buried by linguistic-Darwinism. The original terms are too cumbersome to be useful to anyone but a small number of technical scholars.

It’s not stupid to say that if you believed in God you were a theist. If you don’t believe in God you’re an atheist, and if you refuse to take a stance then you’re an agnostic.  Distinguishing between ideologies that way is more efficient and more useful. This evolution in language should not only be acknowledged but respected.

deconstructing the celestial teapot

Spend enough time with atheists, and you’re going to hear the argument known as Russell’s Teapot (because it was written by Bertrand Russel) or The Celestial Teapot, which states:

“If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.” – Bertrand Russell

I want to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of this argument. We’ll start with the strengths.

It correctly suggests that if someone says something exists then the burden of proof lies with them to prove that it exists. Nobody else has to disprove its existence in order to prove that that thing does not exist. This is a wise categorical imperative that researchers follow in every field of science. We can’t assume everything anyone says is true until disproven. Our court system doesn’t work that way. The medical profession doesn’t work that way. Physics doesn’t work that way. Nothing empirically reputable does. Ideas are considered baseless theories until proven to be true…or at least true enough to be useful. If science worked the other way around we’d end up believing in preposterous falsities, and we’d never get anything done because we’d be too busy debunking preposterous claims.

Bertrand Russell also correctly points out evidence of human fallibility. When an idea becomes popular enough people tend to accept it as truth. Once an idea has been accepted as true people tend to reaffirm their beliefs to themselves and defend their beliefs against opposition. Psychologists call this cognitive bias. Furthermore, once people latch onto a belief and define their reality by that belief they’ll tend to hold onto that belief even after they’ve been shown evidence disproving their belief. They make mind bending excuses and shut themselves off to reason to protect their reality even though doing this only twists their reality further. Psychologists call this cognitive dissonance. Probably the best example of cognitive dissonance in human history is organized religion. Countless lives have been wasted, destroyed and ended as a result of organized religion pushing preposterous falsities on society and refusing to amend their ways even after their position has been disproven by reasonable evidence.

Bertrand Russell was correct in these observations. However, his celestial teapot is often used as a closed-case argument against the existence of God. When his observation is used for that purpose it becomes a weak analogy argument at best and a straw man argument at worst.

It would be one thing if I were to propose to you that a celestial teapot, leprechauns, mermaids or unicorns existed and dared you to disprove my claim. I couldn’t do it. However, the fact that I can’t disprove their existence isn’t proof that they don’t exist. In fact, scientific thought demands that I leave open the possibility that they exist until proven otherwise. Anything less would be close minded. Does that mean then that I go about my life searching for and worrying about leprechauns and unicorns? No. That would be preposterous. I’m going to go about my life as normal, dealing with the realities of my life while keeping an open mind to the fact that new evidence may one day be presented to me which will change my perception of reality.

At any rate, the analogy to celestial teapots, leprechauns and unicorns don’t even compare to the question of the existence of God. I’ll address this with an analogy of my own.

Suppose two men are standing in front of a fence. We’ll call them Mr. A and Mr. T. The fence is infinitely tall and stretches infinitely to their left. It ends just to their right so that they can’t see behind it. As they’re standing there a ball rolls out from behind the fence.

Mr. A turns to Mr. T and says, “What do you suppose set that ball in motion?”

Mr. T replies, “I don’t know. Maybe a person pushed it.”

Mr. A replies, “Can you prove that there’s an invisible teapot in the sky or leprechauns or unicorns?”

Mr. T replies, “No.”

Mr. A Replies, “Then a person couldn’t possibly have set that ball in motion. Therefore, the only logical solution is that some force of nature such as the wind pushed the ball.”

Now, an inanimate force of nature may indeed have set the ball in motion, but the existence of an invisible teapot has nothing to do with determining the cause of an observable phenomenon. The only way to understand an observable phenomenon is by reverse engineering the cause and effect chain of events that led up to the event in question.

The universe exists. Something set it in motion. Intelligent life forms materialized out of the inanimate matter the universe is made out of. If you can believe that inanimate life arose from inanimate matter, is it really any more of a stretch to suggest that inanimate matter arose from a living source that predated it? No. It really isn’t. And even if it were, orbital teapots, leprechauns and unicorns would still have nothing to do with reverse engineering the cause of abiogenesis any more than they have to do with explaining why water freezes. So comparing the issue to orbital teapots, leprechauns and unicorns would be using a weak analogy at best or a straw man argument at worst because those things are stand-alone theoretical situations and the issue of God (from an objective agnostic’s point of view) refers to an explanation of a known phenomenon that is equally as plausible as the improvable explanation presented by atheists.