House of Eratosthenes

#5 doesn’t impress me much. Whatever’s plentiful as sand in the Sahara will be as precious, and ditto for whatever is like an albino moose. #3 is scary as hell…and ya know what…not just for the men.

These days, major breakthroughs, at least in the realm of science, require many years of specialized knowledge and schooling in the fundamentals of your particular field. Which, if you’ll recall, is what the women have over us…many years of specialized knowledge and schooling.

You know what men are great at? Any single thing. Since we’re often more focused and goal-oriented, men are just stellar at hunting a lion, or climbing a mountain, or writing a column, or killing the guy who killed our brother, or putting a thousand little widgets on a car part better and faster than the lady next to us on the assembly line…

You know what computers and machines are good at? The same stuff.

Well, that last part is a bit more complicated. To whatever extent that factor really does apply, it’s been applying since the early 1800’s and maybe even before that.

But, the “major breakthroughs” thing. That’s a real problem. If you could plot the entrepreneur’s cost involved in achieving a genuine major-breakthrough, across time year by year, this curve would be extremely scary. Today, for a solid-state computer component you’re talking something approaching a billion dollars. Contrast that with five hundred bucks a mere third of a century ago and no, that wasn’t just because Jimmy Carter screwed up the economy.

Regulation represents a hidden cost in this, less overt than the exponentially complicating technology, but no less significant. After all, the technology was already getting complicated in the eighties. By the close of that decade it was turning into a real mess, with processor models and memory models being torn apart and glued back together again. So the platform was not merely increasing in complexity, it was shifting. The ground rules were changing insofar as how one accessed memory, executed instructions, et al…but the stuff got built, on shoestring budgets. And companies got started. And gobbled up, and destroyed, and started again.

Anyway, enough about that since it’s just one item on the list. My point is that women are not going to realize a genuine advantage here. This is an Idiocracy situation in which every piece of technology worth using, “was invented by some really smart guy who lived a long time ago and nobody knows how to maintain it” as the well-worn litany goes…and our cumulative experience has taught us something here. It appears to indicate that technology being carted around in all these different heads, each specializing in only a piece of it, the knowledge of which is then gelled with that person’s unique background and conceptual understanding — has an illusory property to it. It isn’t entirely fictional, but it is certainly fraught with problems. It lacks mobility. No one person can answer a question about an existing system “So if this thing over here changes in such-and-such-a-way…how can we expect the system to behave in that situation, over there?” So…we don’t really have revolutions, and what revolutions we do have are not in bedrooms or garages. And nothing on the scale of Hey look, a spreadsheet…or Hey look, a new sort algorithm…or Hey look, a voice-activated recipe database file.

Item #1 is worrisome too. “Women seem to love funny men, and another study showed that they like men with prideful, brooding expressions and a strong sense of shame.” Ah, just like that ditzy airhead was saying in that advice column, “Everything that needs inventing has already been invented boys, learn to rap and do your crunches.”

I’d be less worried about an emerging matriarchy, frankly. Some chicks can be pretty smart. This is more like a long, slow, society-wide self-destruction: No thinking is worth anything, save for the thinking that makes it possible for us to be good neighbors for each other.

I foresee — or, at least, I portend with some concern and alarm — a wave of destruction. Because people cannot be static; if they reject creativity, they must ultimately embrace destruction. We can’t stand still. We must lose.

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“Five Reasons Women Will Rule the Future”Thursday, August 30th, 2012

“Five Reasons Women Will Rule the Future”
Thursday, August 30th, 2012