House of Eratosthenes

There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people. For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.

Such people have been told all their lives how brilliant they are, until finally they feel forced to admit it, with all due modesty. But they not only tend to over-estimate their own brilliance, more fundamentally they tend to over-estimate how important brilliance itself is when dealing with real world problems.

Recognize any professional acquaintances from present or past in those two paragraphs? I certainly do.

David Harsanyi writing in Reason probably did as well (hat tip to Maggie’s Farm)…

[I] have two imaginary friends named Mr. Hoover and Jim.

Mr. Hoover knows everything. He attended a highbrow graduate school and worked as a Senate aide before becoming a policy expert. He is a man who craves acceptance from the other smart people who surround him.

Jim is pretty smart, too, but hasn’t squandered his talent working in Washington. Rather than theorize about economics, Jim takes an authentic risk by starting a business.
:
If you told [Mr. Hoover] to solve an intricate problem, such as global warming, he’d assemble a group of similarly dazzling thinkers to centralize the entire energy economy for the next 40 years through taxation, subsidies, mandates, and corporate giveaways. He does this because he knows precisely what the weather will be like in 2050. That’s how smart he is.

Now, Jim, I’m afraid, would be far less impressive. If you asked him to “solve” global warming, he’d question the costs and benefits of federally controlled energy production. He understands, from his own life experiences, that you can’t decree an economic outcome.

The Bastidge doesn’t like the way I bastardize the classic ancient Asian notions of “yin and yang,” claiming I am confusing and muddling the terms. He’s right. And he’s welcome to suggest other names I could use. Until he does, though, Yin and Yang are the best words available.

Some of us do stuff…which necessarily means drawing a perimeter around the things we do, then focusing our energy inward on that contained work area. As we do work.

Others among us radiate outward, spending the bulk of their energy trying to impress others. They are not concerned with results…for they cannot be. They live in the here and now, creating the best possible impression on the community. Today. Just for today. Planning ahead would depend on acknowledging that events lead to other events — and you can’t bother yourself with such mundane things when you’re laboring so hard to be fun for other people to watch.

It’s strictly a one-or-the-other proposition.

And once again I say, Men are about results. Women are about process.

Every bit of insanity we’ve watched since the ’60s can be attributed to the exaltation of Process over Results, and the accompanying feminisation of the culture. An oft-unremarked phenomenon is that primary education is a zero sum game – every hour spent on “Let’s all get along” is an hour not spent on hard knowledge.

There are only so many hours in the day, as a result of which virtually no one under the age of 40 can spell or write, and of course reading comprehension is confined to those of an earlier era. As a firm believer in Natural Law I believe that humans are born with the ability to comprehend and adapt, and feel a profound dislocation when those instincts are quashed in favor of gaining Mommie’s attention – Mommie in this case symbolized by Teacher. This is the source of the Lie you can sense when dealing with young Lefties.

Their immediate rage when confronted with basic concepts like “Up” is a projection of their despair at having surrendered their own humanness to the “adults” by whom they were controlled starting in nursery school. This necessary insight is of course denied to creatures who can only be concerned with others’ impression of them, as opposed to learning how they really feel and react to stimuli themselves.

Nonetheless, Aristotle, Aquinas, Epictetus etcetcetc made it apparent that humans are made in the image of God, which means they are born with awareness of themselves and the difference between truth and falsehood. The contemporary philosopher J. Budziszewski expresses this concept as “What we can’t not know.”

Or as Stephen Gaskin put it, “You do too know what I mean.”
- rob | 10/09/2009 @ 07:41
Somewhere in there would be a good point to mention Sowell’s constrained/unconstrained vision, which goes far beyond male/female dichotomies.

Not sure I agree with you about the lack of a bell curve in the middle. I think the bell curve is where the quiter people of both persuasions dwell. They’re just not very influential, except as inertia. But inerta can have a profound effect, even though it is not always obvious.

The problem you and I have, is that long years of subtle and increasingly obvious forces have had an uncontested match for decades, pushing the masses toward their unconstrained vision of utopia. So even if they stop today, we have massive inertia to overcome to bring it back around where rational, constrained, realism can begin to take over and push us in the direction of the individualist empowerment that is the only true route to real progress. Slow, sloppy, plodding progress made through individuals deciding for themselves, making mistakes, correcting, and pressing on with their lives.
- thebastidge | 10/09/2009 @ 20:47
I was just thinking this afternoon heading home about the point I had left unmade…

I think as you get older, if you’re an introvert you are tempted to dabble with being an extrovert — and vice-versa. I think after a lifetime spent rejuvenating your energies in the company of others, at around age 35 you’ll start to think to yourself “you know, I think I’d like to learn how to be alone and happy at the same time…just to complete myself.”

I think if you’re an iNtuition type you’ll be tempted to develop your aptitudes of Sensing. I think if you’re a Perceiver you’ll be tempted to become a Judge. I think if you’re a Feeler you’ll want to become a Thinker. And vice-versa on all of those.

I even think if you’ve lived your first three decades being feminine you’ll want to be masculine now and then. And vice-versa. And if you’re a classic-Yang, like the Yang you’re talking about, you’ll want to be a Yin just temporarily. And vice-versa on those as well. Some “extremely” hetero people become bi-curious. And some gay people want to act out straight tendencies.

This is what’s unique about what I’m talking about though. As you become more experienced in dealing with the world, you become more ensconced into your chosen half. This is the only axis that works this way. And the reason is — as you identify with whatever half you have chosen, you are grappling with a task that is sufficiently challenging to you that you don’t have surplus resources to direct elsewhere. This is what I meant by “when you have a shiny hammer everything looks like a nail.”

I do think you’re tempted toward the center at sometime in your life…but only in very early childhood, before you’ve found your “way.” But because what I’m describing with these words, is defined during times of challenge and stress, as the envelope of your mental acumen is being pushed — you/I/we will just keep evaluating and responding to the world around us, in the manner to which we have become accustomed. This is what I meant by the center of the bell curve being ripped out. It happens with experience. We become further cemented into our chosen corner.

Hope you’re not challenging that today of all days, Bastidge. +++snicker+++ What more evidence do you need that there’s a huge portion of humanity, living out their entire lives, feeling instead of thinking. If you’re even slightly inclined to tackle mentally challenging tasks in a logical way…how does it make any sense whatsoever to award the Peace Prize in the way it was just awarded? This is something that makes sense only to those who go through life deciding things by “emotional vibe.” Those who are absolutely, positively dedicated to this. It doesn’t make any sense at all, not even enough sense to be considered for an instant, in any other forum.
- mkfreeberg | 10/09/2009 @ 21:13
The thing is, “the center” is no such thing. Left/right/center is simply a perspective depending on where you start from. To me, I am the center- there are people on both the right and left of me, and it’s difficult to really see past those on either side to determine where I stand on some theoretical continuum; I don’t know beyond a vague sense whether 50 or 500 people are further right than I am, or if the lefties to my other side stretch to infinity.

So that “tendency toward the center in youth” thing doesn’t seem to fit well, to me.

I think youth are actually drawn towards extremes (from their point of view) because they don’t have enough experience to judge well, and shiny is exciting.

I do agree that we’ve been pushed toward a feeling/emotional mindset in modern America. The thing I realize that puts that into context, is the primitive thinking I’ve been exposed to in other countries. This emotional culture is nothing new. It’s the majority of ten thousand years of vaguely recorded history. It’s the default. It’s the burning barn we run back into, over and over again.

We do become more cemented into our thinking as we get older. But that doesn’t mean we get stuck into left/right. The people who started out in the (vaguely defined) center and don’t have a complete emotional mugging by some circumstance or another, tend to grind their center-of-the-road groove same as those of use who might identify more right or left. There is no absolute center, in an objective sense.

There’s objective truth, observable, repeatable, testable, and falsifiable. Most people have a slippery grip on this at the best of times, and during stress or danger, they use their heuristics, developed over their life, rather than logic. Logic is expensive, and time-consuming. Heuristics are “good enough” until they are not, and much cheaper, faster, and more efficient, until the conditions change.

Regarding a tendency to branch out in one’s personlity type with age… I think that experience does force some of us beyond our comfort levels at some point in life, unless one is really dysfunctional. So yes, a introverted feeling type may find some circumstances where they break into hard thought and become certain enough about their judgement to make a public case for it. I think that with hard work and a desire to change, most people can develop the lesser aspects of their character to become a more integrated person. I think that some of this can come about by accident, and some of it can be deliberate (disclaimer, I have had to do a bunch of coursework on personality types and developing leadership, and am going through this right now in a leadership course for my MBA right now, so it’s fresh on my mind.) I consider myself, and receive enough feedback to feel confident in saying, that I am one such fairly well-integrated personality, in that I use the various aspects of personality, not in an exactly balanced way (whiich would probably paralyze a person anyway, perfect balance implies static immobility and no impetus to move) but in a well-integrated way which allows me to communicate fairly well with people and with myself.

That’s one reason why I have been interested in and motivated to reply to your discussions of yin/yang and eprsonality types lately. It’s a topic worth exploring.
- thebastidge | 10/16/2009 @ 13:12

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Thursday, October 8th, 2009