One of the perennial double edged questions is;
“Why didn’t my dad tell me more?”
“Why don’t I tell my sons more?”
double edged because it isn’t two questions, it is just the one question, but seen from two different perspectives.
Back when I was a boy I was agonizing over which of three Japanese motorcycles to buy, I’d drawn up a checklist of relative merits, one of them had the then absolutely brand new self cancelling indicators, so this became a factor in the choice… my dad saw this and called me a fucking idiot.. he was right.. I never did buy any of those three new bikes.
It’s a thing I get asked a lot, because apparently I make a lot of good decisions, though they never look like that at the time, and for fair measure I make plenty of bad ones too, but the good ones interest people enough they often ask how I do it.
The answer is boringly simple, think, think, think again, think some more, think again, then repeat 10 times, all the while making very very very sure that all this thinking only ever leads to projected likely outcomes, you must never ever every let the projected outcome be tainted by how you would like things to turn out… castles in the sky and all that.
That’s it.
But there has to be more, they say, because we can all do that, and we have all done that, and it doesn’t work out… and my answer is always the same, it didn’t work out because you did NOT do that, you left your own goal seeking in there, willfully blind to it, you clearly did not think enough about yourself and your role in this.
Exit stage left in a huff, add another one to the list who thinks I am an arrogant bastard.
Here is what I am.
I was born with a brain, and I have used it ever since, and while that brain may work a bit better in some areas than other people’s, it works a bit less well in other areas, I’m more engineer / autistic than empathic etc.
So I may well have a 120 bhp brain whereas other have a 100 bhp brain, but that is never what set me apart, what set me apart was I’d run mine at 25% throttle most of the time, peaking at 30 bhp, whereas the would only periodically get a spike up to 10% throttle, 10 bhp.
That doesn’t make me 3x as smart as them, but it does EFFECTIVELY make me 3x as smart as them.
Add in 50 plus years of watching and observing and thinking, now you have 50 years of data for 30 bhp to chew on, so that’s 1,500 brain bhp years.
10 brain bhp x 10 years is 100 brain bhp years
I’ve met guys with 200 bhp brains who run at 50% throttle, it takes them 15 years to get where I am, problem is many of them seem to burn out after around 15 years and go crazy.
It’s a bit like that video going around of the one legged jarhead who just dead lifted 275 lbs, fucker is running pedal to the metal, the reason I can’t do it with two legs is I ain’t running pedal to the metal, I’m a middle aged lazy fart…lol
He isn’t anything special, biologically, he is just using all he got, and that’s the trick.
Now that I have elevated myself to this intellectual throne, which is really based on nothing more than 50 years of experience and data feeding a brain that is at least partially used every day, what do I see from up here?
What I see is that most of the *best* of those sections of society who are supposed to be far more intelligent than average, are actually about as dumb as a box of rocks.
When you see forms submitted to a fucking court of law from “top 5% in the country” lawyers and barristers and I can’t get past the second page of a quad spaced legal document before finding grammatical and spelling errors that were clearly autocorrected wrong, eg “way” and “weigh” you gotta wonder, it’s like a supposed fucking IT expert talking about megabites or an engineer talking about kilowatts when he should be talking about kilowatt-hours… it’s fucking unforgivable… this is supposed to be the thing you can make all mere mortals look like dribbling fucking idiots at, because of your specialist knowledge and experience.
It’s like Linus Torvalds not knowing the difference between a process and a processor, and if Linus were to drop such a huge bollock, the whole world 9who had a functioning brain themselves) would know he was not a genius, just a huge bullshitter.
Musk is a bullshitter, Ive is a bullshitter, our own dear prime minister May is a bullshitter, Trump is a bullshitter, Putin isn’t, Sagan wasn’t, Linus isn’t, the beat goes on.
Old school cops would tell you that crooks, by and large, were stupid, and in my opinion 99% of everyone involved in politics or lawyers or civil servants or those living on the state tit are stupid.
By Stupid I do not mean they were born with 30 bhp brains, I mean they were born with pretty much the same brains as the rest of us, but they were only infrequently used to satisfy their own goal seeking, and the experience data they pick up along the way is simply discarded unless it matches up with the goal of the day.
You can call this corruption and collusion and conspiracy and treason and anything else you like, in my opinion it is none of these, it is just stupid and greedy people goal seeking, in an age where that has not been fatal for far too long.
These people have power, make no mistake, for example my own corrupt secret family court episode with the psycho skank ho ex, corruption alone is not sufficient to explain what went down, nor is mere incompetence, the only thing that adequately explains it is both corruption and stupidity wrapped up in a nice big blanket of personal goal seeking, whether that goal was as many billable hours as possible at 250 bucks an hour, or fucking up as many men as possible, or just riding an ego trip power train of imagined superiority or respect.
I regularly meet so called intelligent and successful people who act like fucking spineless sheep when confronted by some other so called intelligent and successful person in a state job that somehow affects the first person.
Now and again I met supposedly less intelligent people who revved their motors and learned their shit, butt up against the same state job asshole in the same circumstance, and instead of folding like wet toilet paper they just dig in and say fuck you, because they know they are right and have confidence in their own knowledge.
I’ve had this argument so often with lawyers who like to produce pages of hereof whereunder thereto’s devoid of all punctuation or sensible meaning, who insist until they are blue in the face that this is all necessary normal legal language, and they get very upset with me when I get in their face and explain quite clearly that not only (this blog aside…lol) was English my native tongue, but I also benefited from an exceptionally good and unusually broad education, and in the decades since then and the many countries I have visited and languages I have dealt with, and legal authorities in those lands, and the result of this is I know bullshit when I see and hear it, and I know bullshit fluff pesudo legal drivel created for the sole purpose of giving lawyers more room to argue billable hours over the precise meanings of words and sentences in contracts and law when I see it, in fact the only problem with English or any other language is not that it is impossible to state any desired thing precisely and unequivocally and without any room for doubt, misunderstanding or confusion, the problem for shitty lawyers like you is that it is both possible and simple to do so, and that would cut your bullshit billable hours by around 95%, and your bullshit billable rate by around 90%.
About ten years ago I said this to a lawyer at a party full of lawyers, one of the old men, a long since retired senior founding partner of the very prestigious firm remarked to me afterwards why my utterances made an excellent argument why people like me should never be allowed to be judges, instead they should all be ex lawyers… he said it with a grin, while rubbing his fingers and thumb together.
You know, I made someone watch an episode of the original series of Dad’s Army a few years back, because they wanted an answer to a question… (click the link if you’re not familiar with it)
After the episode I asked if they noticed anything significant?
They guessed about a dozen time but didn’t see the point I was hoping they might, the captain was a puffed up local bank manager, his assistant in the bank was his 2ic in uniform, and the bank clerk Pike was the twat of the platoon.
Other platoon members were the grocer, butcher, undertaker etc, and they pretty much treated the “clerks” with contempt, despite the fact the “clerks” were allegedly superior to them both in civvy life and in uniform.
We never used to give a fuck about offending clerks and lawyers and civil servants, if they over stepped their position.
Nowadays everyone is running scared of everyone else, and compensating for it by running their own little power trips wherever they can.
This modern society them is the best possible example that I could ever hope to give anyone of how to do a decision tree wrong, time after time after time, and keep making bad choices, because on the one hand they are all too stupid to see their own hand on the scales, and on the other they are mainly interested in their own goal seeking.
Today I read at least 500 comments in a tech rag supposedly populated by some of the smartest people in the room, about the UK’s skills / education problem, most of them have their own kids, not one person in all 500 comments thought that the best way to educate their kids might just involve a little DIY, you know, YOUR fucking kid, YOU fucking teach it to think…. every single one involved outsourcing the whole fucking job to an institution or a state or something else.
And the double edged question that began this post… because the father has both the intelligence and experience to know that the son must undergo his own trials, and either learn and adapt and grow, or not… and the fact is that most will fail that trial, and that is nature’s way.