Category: Miscellaneous

In a world without money,

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There would be no banks. There’s no reason for them.

There would be no insurance. With no money, how would we insure things?

There would be no jobs, as we know them. Of course, you’d have plenty to do. But most of your life, you wouldn’t be behind a desk making money for someone else. Your job would be to provide for your family. If you weren’t a hunter, you’d use your trade to barter for food to provide for your family.

You would be forced to maximize your gifts, utilize your own value. There’s no reason not to see what you’re best at and develop skills that you never thought you’d need.

Gifts are more equal. Society still must move forward. We’d still need doctors, lawyers, cooks, and everything else. But there is no incentive to do anything other than what you are good at. The path of least resistance becomes the path that suits your strengths.

People are more equal. Social status becomes almost non-existent. Wealth does not transfer generation to generation to generation. We respect people because of what they have done, not what their parents did.

There would be no businesses. If the world was not money-centric, what would the point of businesses be?

There would be no stock market. You can’t buy shares of something that doesn’t exist with something that doesn’t exist.

God did not make money. He made paradise.

Caffeine, a symptom?

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I think we’re getting closer to an answer here. You always hear about all the health benefits of coffee. Drink coffee and live longer. Drink coffee and stay sane. Coffee wards off Alzheimer’s. I can’t ignore these studies. They’re out there. We’ve written before about how it forces us to be present by increasing the stress of the current moment.

So let’s flip the script. Caffeine is a stimulant, but our choice to use it is a symptom. Of what? Lower brain entropy. So essentially, you being able to stomach four cups of coffee says much more about your ability to endure stress than you think.

If we assume that we all have different energy states, the lowest energy states can operate with more stimulation, or stress. So your ability to consume caffeine is more a symptom of your brain state than anything else.

It would explain why ‘Black people don’t drink coffee.’ Because remember, they have the smallest skulls of all.

So if we assume that the brain is system that strives for equilibrium. The further you are from your brain’s highest energy state, the more stress you can endure [without complications]. And the more room you have for entropy in your brain, the more coffee you can drink.

 

 

Untangling Facial Hair

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How does facial hair fit into the theory? With our brain entropy theory, facial hair would be a way to heat up a brain that has gotten too cool.

Women rarely have it. Women have smaller heads.

Men’s doesn’t start until puberty. And It doesn’t grow on the nose, cheeks, or forehead.

Men have bigger noses. This would allow for greater airflow, and more brain cooling.

So if women have smaller heads and noses, pressure may not have the capacity to get as low as it could in men. Low pressure would need heat. And one way the body can add heat is to add facial hair.

So what else happens of note during male puberty? The voice deepens. This is significant, because if high entropy meant fast, low entropy would be slow. And slow when it comes to sound is deep.

If men are designed to endure more stress. To endure stress, you must have room in your brain. We would call that a low entropy state. A low entropy state would cause a deeper voice and facial hair. 

Sources:

  1. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/study-finds-some-significant-differences-brains-men-and-women
  2. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131119-science-noses-sex-males-females-neanderthals/

Vaccinate Your Kids

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This has been written about plenty, so I’ll be brief.

I agree that Autism is not something I want my kid to have. Let’s just say for a moment that the vaccine does cause Autism. It’s doesn’t, but let’s just say that.

Because we know that the vaccine works, and prevents potential death, it’s a positive thing. There is not much mystery left surrounding the measles. We solved it.

From there, it becomes whether or not you’d rather have a kid with Autism, or no kid at all. I think all parents would agree that they’d rather have a kid with Autism.

But the vaccine doesn’t cause Autism. It saves lives. I’m all about thinking critically about Autism, but bringing back diseases we’ve solved is not the way.

Digging a little deeper, let’s say that one in a hundred kids actually get Autism from this vaccine (still not true). We know that if kids are exposed to the measles, they’ll probably die. And they have a chance of killing other people. So you’re opting for a low-possibility condition that’s less harmful as opposed to a high-probability condition, that’s very dangerous. It’s a no brainer. Vaccinate your kids.

Defining Half-Truths

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An exaggeration is mostly true, but has a portion that is not true. That’s fastest car ever. Well, probably not. It’s a really fast car. It may be the fastest car that you’ve ever ridden in. But it’s unlikely the fastest car ever. False information is added. And with it, truth gets lost.

Gossip may or may not be true, but we spread it without verifying with the subject. So we may be spreading truth or lies, we can’t possibly know.

A white lie is something outside the truth told to make someone feel good about themselves. You look great. While the intent is good, the repercussions could be negative for you and the person you lied to. I’d opt for the actually true rather than the positive lie. Not you look bad, but maybe I like your shoes.

While these may seem harmless, if the purpose of life is to find the truth, then we are keeping ourselves and others from doing just that.

My First Negative Review

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I got my first negative review yesterday on my book If I Can See. The reader makes some pretty good points. Here it is:

Any number of these claims can be fact-checked and easily critiqued within minutes. Many (read: most) are just out right false. Buuuuut I’m guessing most everyone looking at these reviews already knows that. I think you should re-release it as a parody book meant to warn of the dangers of correlational research. Market it to burnt out folks in academia and maybe you could make more than 3 bucks off it. 🙂 Good luck on whatever journey it is that you are on.

To whom it may concern,

First off, thank you for reading my book. I tried to address this in the book introduction: the scientific model can’t create athletes, cure ADHD, dyslexia, PTSD, Autism, Tourette’s, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or basically anything else that has to do with the nature of the mind. We can’t explain why some people run the 100-meters so fast, or why some great athletes miss so many free throws. We can’t explain home field advantage, or why we sneeze, cry, or yawn.  And psychiatry admits that they do not know what they are doing.

And while I don’t have all the answers, what I do have is a fresh new perspective. I’m not tethered to a model that clearly has so many gaps. I’m just looking for truth. 

Transforming Fear into Hope

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1 John 4:18 “Perfect Love Casts Out All Fear”

Fear is focusing on one negative possible reality. Fear is when we perceive a threat in our reality. It is the opposite of hope. Hope is focusing on one positive possible reality. Every fear has an equivalent counter of hope. I fear death but hope for eternal life.

Absolute fear is catastrophic: this is going to kill me. Mitigating fear is diminishing: this probably won’t kill me. There’s hope in it. You acknowledge that there is a chance that it doesn’t kill you. Anxiety is an addiction to fear.

There are always infinite possible hopes and fears in any moment, so the key is to properly mitigate. When you think I’ll definitely die today, you have to remember that the future is uncertain. If the future is uncertain, there are always good and bad possible outcomes. If there are possible good outcomes, thinking of those could transform your previous thought to maybe I won’t die to today. But remember, you have a very, very slim chance of dying today. So the good really outweighs the bad. I probably won’t die today.

That’s as far as I can get you without religion. But if you accept the thoughts of the afterlife, even death is not the end. Even the scariest I’ll definitely die today becomes something much different: I’ll definitely die today, but I’ll go somewhere much better.

So you see, with the addition of the afterlife, there is always hope. Even in our darkest days, because there’s always infinite potential positive outcomes. More than that, all outcomes are eventually positive.

[Please don’t misconstrue this as some strange way to say that if you kill yourself you’ll go to heaven. Because religious scholars really just aren’t sure about that. Don’t gamble with your soul.]

 

Turning Grief into Love

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Preliminary Reading: Defining Love and Applying Love to Forever

Grief is when you lose something you love. If love is defined as imagining all future realities with someone, grief would be losing something that you never imagined being apart from. Not because you expected your mother to always live for example, but because the positive parts of her will never be there again for you. So something that you had imagine all future realities including, is now gone. You have a void that will never be filled, depending on what you believe.

If you believe in the afterlife, you could hope to see them again. There would be at least one potential realty where you got to see them again. If you believe that they were going to the same afterlife as you, all potential outcomes involved the two of you together again, so grief becomes hope, becomes faith. And if you have faith that you will spend eternity with this person, you can still love them.