by Chris Carter
In 2016 a report by Stanford University education researchers showed that most students are woefully unprepared to assess content they find on the web. For instance, the scientists found that 80 percent of students at U.S. universities are not able to determine if a given web site contains credible information. And it is not just students; many adults share these difficulties. ~
It seems that truth and facts are somehow going away? No. It's really the opposite. We are not taught that Reality is a relatively new concept for humans. "Education" is an extremely new concept for humans. We came from cluelessness. That's where we started. Don't you wonder why in school we learn that Socrates, Aristole, Newton, Galileo, all these super smart folks KNEW such brilliant incredible things KNOWLEDGE and Wisdom, yet here in 2020 so many people all over the world are dumb as a box of rocks? Some places in the world the folks are litrally like cavemen. That is not to say cavemen are necessarily dumb. Is the dumbest human smarter than the smartest computer? Maybe. Maybe not.
Justin E.H. Smith, a philosopher at the University of Paris, pokes holes in the story humans in the Western world have been telling themselves for centuries: that we were once blinkered by myth and superstition, but then the ancient Greeks discovered reason and, later, the Enlightenment cemented rationality as the highest value in human life.
Smith argues that this is a flattering but false story. Humans, he says, are hardly rational, and in fact, irrationality has defined much of human life and history. And the point is not merely academic. “The desire to impose rationality, to make people or society more rational,” he writes, “mutates ... into spectacular outbursts of irrationality.”
(1.) It is assumed that we humans are a coherent unity of our self. (2.) That we know our wants and needs. And our Self can even predict what it will do. (3.) It’s common wisdom that our body tells us what we need from our five senses about health, danger, hunger, thirst, pain and pleasure. (4.) Armed with this information we make rational decisions about optimizing our value and work.
Actually none of those are true. In fact it’s the exact opposite. We are not calm calculators of our self interest who occasionally make mistakes, we are multiple selves using conflicting information to sometimes be rational. For socio political economic religious cultural reasons we are not taught health psychology, bio-feedback, critical thinking and financial Literacy. Why? Because truth and reality for EVERYONE is a relatively new invention. The Webster definition of Reality is: the world or the state of things as they actually exist, as opposed to an idealistic or notional idea of them. Before 1900 you pretty much believed anything anybody told you. Food, drugs and medicine were all one and the same. There was really no way to verify anything. Yet it is true that way back in ancient Greece philosophers knew almost all the basic issues we have today. So where is the disconnect? Why does it appear that every generation more people than not basically re-invent the wheel?
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell
To see a thing uncolored by one's own personal preferences and desire is to see it in it's own pristine simplicity.
- Bruce Lee
To live a simple life and "get out of your own way" is very difficult. Keeping out of your own way is hard because it's difficult to "do nothing" and preserve pristine "reality," but if you can do it the universe will favor your circumstance. For as what will be, will then BE, uncontaminated, by you or me. What IS is meant to be.
- Chris Carter
Today, all these eons later, we are finally starting to really get OUT of our past that we strategically hide. It seems like truth-facts are going away because they were never here in the first place! The comfort zone is what's going away. We are seeing a head-on collision as "reality" is starting to dominate and overtake the airwaves. In 2020 we found one third of America has a hard time telling the difference between BBC, Reuter’s, AP, CSPAN, and Alex Jones, Fox News, QAnon. Back in 1976 nobody paid attention to the National Enquierer becoming the largest circulating paper in America. Before we even talk about cognitive biases let us realize we are surrounded by more readily available information today than ever before. And a huge percentage of it is inaccurate. Some of the bad info is well-meaning but ignorant. Some of it is deliberately deceptive. All of it is pernicious. I say 1/3 is well meaning but very deceptive, 1/3 is inaccurate, a little under 1/4 is outright scammy fraud garbage. Not knowing information used to not matter. It does now and worse than that, witholding information has become the new business model. Social media colludes with info brokers to suck your digital footprint dry, not only do they keep your cut of the profits they don't even tell you anything about it or what they're even doing!
Search engines sometimes seem to give the illusion that you can ask anything about anything and get the right answer. Most folks overestimate the accuracy of search engines and their own searching skills. If you stick to just Goolge you already been done boondoggled. When Americans were asked to self-rate their searching ability by the Pew Research Center, 62 percent rated themselves as very confident in their ability to use a search engine to answer a question. This is self delusion. ~ WE SUCK at evalutaing our own abilities, our image, even our weight, we are programmed to lie to our selves. It's called, "built-in optimism" and it really works too. When it's broken is when you meet that person who goes out of his way to emphasize the negative, those type folks drag you down with them, they poison your own default sense of optimism.
DOES GOD BELONG IN CYBER SECURITY?
The 2,500 year old Chinese board game “Go” has more possible positions than the number of atoms in the universe. Good luck verifying that fact never-mind, hey being 5 trillion off it doesn’t matter the game is complex. Google AlphaGO team told it’s artificial intelligence (AI) to beat a Human at the game of Go. This was thought impossible but they did it. The victory celebration was hardly over when a clever engineer said he had an idea. He reasoned that telling the AI to beat a human meant that is all it was going to do, and so that’s all it did. He thought this time, let’s just tell it to win. Instead of feeding it millions of human games to study, we shall give it -none. They created a second AI to play against the first one.
The new AI dubbed, “AlphaGoZero” was told to forget about “humans” JUST WIN. They gave it the Manual and told it to play itself and learn it on your pal. In only 40 hours of playing itself it AlphaGoZero was able to beat AlphaGo 100 - 0. Gave it a good ass whopping. What does this mean? To me it demonstrates the power of a power beyond humans. Compared to conditions in outer space Humans live in very very very narrow confines of temperature, pressure, water, oxygen, radioactivity, etc. etc. Humans are lovely creatures they are, but everything humans touch can’t really be trusted! No offense. It’s not bad, it just can’t be trusted. I mean that in the most loving way. The Turing Test was obsolete soon after it was declared. Today any cheap Walmart Laptop can fool half the population. This begs the question, are folks dumb or are things getting super smart? I think it is neither. Defining dumb is the problem. 300 years ago all your "smarts" of today wouldn't save you? And vice versa?
None of this matters if you look at things from the other end. How many people have ever lived ever in all of history? Give or take 20 billion who cares. We got 8 billion today. The number of humans that have ever lived ever was somewhere between 60 and 108 billion. What is it that bumped them off? The Black Plaque of 1350, the newly discovered volcano hell of 536? So what did I do, I went back in time, and I interviewed everyone who ever lived ever. All 85++ billion and I asked each one of them, “Hey excuse me my friend, what got you, what did you in can you tell me”? What I found in my survey is that more people than not were done in by something they did or something human connected. HUMAN. This doesn’t mean they did it on purpose it just means it was something related or connected to human actions and decisions. The lesser half they were doomed and done in by none human related circumstance like earthquakes, Ligthning, Sink Holes, Tsunami's, Tornados, Shark attacks, etc. Does this tell me that WE are mostly the cause of our own demise? Not necessarily intensionally. My Mum told me I’m blaming the victims. I’m not. You can’t. It don't. It won't. It isn't. It even ain't. It doesn't. Because usually there’s just too many connections to keep track of to figure out what has, or what is going to, kill you. I know what you’re thinking, what difference does it make if it’s an earthquake or if it’s a multitude of so many “human” things nobody can tell what happened? Either way if you are toast from no fault of your own? Does that mean many of us are just born at in wrong time and place? I think it’s safe to say it’s impossible to tell. Only God knows something like that. The controversial book, "Germs, Guns, and Steel" attempts to argue that it is your LOCATION that determines your fate. Obviosuly that guy never saw Eddie Murphy about to break a very expensive Vase in the movie Trading Places. Nature vs Nurture is very interesting but at the end of the day I'm with Bruce Lee, "Your worst enemy is the element of surprise. To Defeat that enemy, don't be surprised." End of Story. The only problem is that Bruce Lee lived in the obsolete analog world. I think he was trying to tell us something! He didn't live long enough to finish.
The one thing we know for sure is, an earthquake is not your fault. Every earthquake is your fault. So how can you avoid that? Bruce Lee said, “Your worst enemy is the element of surprise. To defeat that enemy don’t be surprised.” Thanks Bruce for that impossible advice. You can’t defeat surprise because to know it is too late, it already happened. That’s my favorite Bruce Lee algorithm because it’s so airtight. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s saying everything without saying anything. What I’m saying is, “Get out of your own way and life will favor you.” Bruce Lee never said it like that but he says a whole bunch of stuff that sounds just like it. He also says a lot of things about clearing your mind and body that sound to me like “get the human” stuff out and let life happen as it is supposed to happen. I’m paraphrasing but if you go back and read his material with that context it seems to fit. I’d like to talk to Dan Inosanto he would know.
AlphaGoZero “got the human out” and unleashed immense power. Where does that power come from? One thing for sure, it’s not human. This would mean being human is a limitation, comparatively speaking. Bruce Lee talked about Limitation. Did we come all this way from primitive cavemen to super modernity only to find out it’s all a huge roadblock? You can’t know how dumb you are until you got smart and can looked back. Since AlphaGoZero was created by humans it still has the human connection? Perhaps since it is AI and not human it has the ability to cut the cord and cut the tie to “human-ness”? Maybe Bruce Lee was suggesting if you can cut the cord to human-ness you will tap into power that favors you?
One of the fears of AI is that it inherits the human bias of its creators. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this. Although when AI creates AI and that AI creates AI doesn’t “human-ness” get bred out to negligible status at some point? And it could be quickly, after all this is AI not Legos. I know how to tap into this power. You have to talk to God. How do you do that? I can’t guarantee your results at home that you will make it all the way to God but I can promise to get you OUT OF THE HUMAN DOMAIN. First thing to do is define our terms. As we go through thousands of years of history humans are not getting smarter. They are getting less dumb. Each generation peels away another layer to reveal how the motor works. Our human body is buried deep beneath the unconscious, the subconscious, the non-conscious, the pre-conscious, leaving a measly 5% for the conscious to see and understand.
After 2,000 years we are only just now beginning to understand the 5%. With that much discrepancy there’s too many combinations to make academic across the board pronouncements about behavioral psychology. I’m talking about evidence based behavioral psychology. That’s what we have today. We are only just now starting to look at biological based behavioral psychology. Actually I am. I’m the only one. It’s psychology based on each individual person. Like Biological based medicine vs Evidenced based medicine. Dr. Eric Topol from SCRIPPS told me that. Look him up! The expected utility theory, developed by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 assumed we are all the same halfway rational creatures. In 1979 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky challenged the expected utility theory's assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory by developing their prospect theory. They correctly discovered that humans are mainly not very rational or logical but they incorrectly relied on some sort of evidence based behavioral psychology. In other words they stated we are all different in the same way. This is good but it’s only close banana.
I fear not the Man who knows 10,000 different psychologies, I fear the Man who knows one practiced 10,000 times. So I developed the one psychology that covers them all. I called it Health Defense. Think about it, who has the time and money to diagnose all the multitude of disorders we All have? As I’ve said so many times, there are very few crazy people and there are very few normal people, the vast majority of us are scattered about in-between. Every year now we are finding this out.
Okay back to Jesus. Here’s the deal, you are born into a unseen super complicated tangle of hidden multi layered consciousnesses and you are getting a continuous flow of conflicting contradictory advice your whole life. It’s no bloody wonder we are all half crazy. Okay here’s the other half, only the past 100 years have we gotten more of a clue than all the other thousands (or millions) of years combined. Every year we become more dependent on some sort of network. EVERYTHING is heading toward a network. In other words the “networks” are coming. We are in a Arms Race with AI. We have to crack the “cognitive algorithm” before AI does. Bruce Lee liked Fencing. Because it about Whoever gets there first WINS. In other words AI doesn’t have to be smarter than us. No need. All it has to do is wait. Until we are dependent on networks. Coming to a town near you! All Networks have “permissions” based on CIA which stands for confidentiality-integrity-availability. The digitization of Authorization and Authentication has weaponized the process of verification. Cyber War has begun. Information is the new battlefield. There is no Front Line anymore. We have been told from movies like Terminator that SkyNet is our doom. No. That is not our doom. We are in trouble way before SkyNet or the Singularity gets here.
For God only knows how long we humans have been floundering about in that measly 5% of cognitive awareness. Heres the problem, we need to get our shit together BEFORE everyone in the world is on a network. We need to hack into that 95% and get a handle on things. We need to decipher the Cognitive Algorithm or the network will start kicking people off. Every country will have the same issue whether they are FireWalled off the global grid or not. As I’ve said we need to hack into that 95% of ourselves before somebody or something else does. You need to hack into YOU before somebody or something else does.
