Categories
philosophy Problem Solving Societies

Sorting out the Castes: Testing for Delayed Gratification

Delayed gratification is one of the most important principles in dividing lower castes from higher.
The need for instant gratification is the eternal and unmistakable mark of low class, poverty, and despair.
If we want to know what kind of people live in a neighborhood, all we have to do is take one quick glance down and see if people are throwing their trash on the ground or in trash cans.  If we walk into a store is the liquor and baby formula out in the open or is it kept behind glass?  It shouldn’t be that difficult to evaluate individuals as we evaluate a neighborhood.

In general, as people get more intelligent the more they can understand the abstract concept that if everyone chooses to cooperate by passing up littering or shoplifting now everyone gets the greater reward of a pleasant community to live in and stores full of easily accessible goods later.
Even smart people with low character tend to pay for their groceries because they prefer to expend their energy on much more valuable prizes with lower risk over a much longer time. They don’t let small prizes distract them when they could be gutting people’s 401k accounts instead.
Stupid people with low character on the other hand distinguish themselves by taking huge risks for small, uncertain, temporary gains. Their inability to understand probability and calculate risk/reward always gives them away.
Some ability for delayed gratification and long term planning is an absolute prerequisite to move up into the middling to upper middling castes.

To move into the highest castes though, the ability to inhibit desires has to be extended to another degree of abstraction.
The highest people need to have the ability to care about a good beyond themselves, to consider the good of an entire people or even the species. They must care about events beyond their own lifetimes.
The ultimate act of delayed gratification and the mark of a high human is planting trees that will never give shade in our lifetimes.
Clever people of the middle castes, on the other hand, busily hoard away for college, a house, or retirement but have little thought beyond the narrow scope of their own parochial circumstances. Their inability to understand a bigger picture always gives them away.
I have met many clever upper middle class SWPLs who wallow in aimless hedonism but don’t have the moral intelligence to care what happens after they die nor the wisdom to understand why their poverty of purpose has left them cynical and jaded.  Perhaps even more upper middles indulge in saccharine feel-good idealism that helps break the ice and gives cheap social proof at cocktail parties.  They know well in the back of their minds they’ll never have to test their beliefs against the real world.  In fact, having to care about the real world is an indicator of boorishness in their insulated universe.  Being insulated in itself, of course, is the defining mark of petty nobility.
Our present system is heavily influenced by these characteristic upper middle attitudes. These are the people who thrive in the meritocracy of credentials, “networking”, “extracurriculars”, “fellowships”, and standardized tests. Ironically, those with greater vision and imagination are pretty effectively weeded out by their criteria.  This is why we need a formalized caste system, to cut through the bullshit of those people far enough above to dazzle the lower ranks, but not so high as to be completely unrelatable.
The rightful rulers, of course, should be unrelatable to the average person.

Categories
Intelligence

Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber

When the intelligence business works, it helps create organizational cultures where empirical evidence and concern for the long-range strategic impact of a decision trump internal politics and short-term expediency. And in the past, many such cultures have thrived in businesses and government agencies alike. But three trends are making this harder, or even leading these intelligence providers to have the opposite effect.

Categories
Intelligence Warfare

3 Snitch Stories & How To Spot Snitches

Brandon Darby:

Brandon wasn’t a master of manipulation, he was volatile and unstable, exactly the kind of guy you would want to plant in an organization to fuck it up.

Anna:

Anna, aka the friendzoner, who managed to stop pot heads who can’t even pay for their own airfare

Jonathan Pollard:

Defeating US security through stupidity

Snitch Spotting 101:

1. Watch people who use drugs or engage in other illegal behavior, if they get charged with anything the police will use that as leverage against them. If they drink or use drugs in a social environment then they will just as likely spill whatever secrets they have anyway.

2. People with large debts generally shouldn’t be trusted, your opponent can offer to help make those debts disappear for the price of turning.

3. If someone is encouraging you to organize for violent actions, they may not be a snitch. But they are unstable enough to get you caught anyway.

4. Watch for people who go around accusing others of being snitches. Accusing others is usually a way for snitches to cover their own tracks.

5. Look for people who magically show up with the critical skills your organization needs at just the right time. Don’t be afraid of subjecting your best friends and best assets to scrutiny.

Categories
Intelligence

Top Secret Government Files – One Of The Most Complex Information Management Problems Ever

“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that – not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense – is a challenge,” Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials – called Super Users – have the ability to even know about all the department’s activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation’s most sensitive work.

“I’m not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn’t take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ”Stop!” in frustration.

“I wasn’t remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department’s most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

I’m not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system defies description.Link h/t Justin Boland

Categories
tDCS technology

Electric Brain Stimulation: Links

For the most part, drugs only make you think stupid things faster. In my experience they make normal to smart people actually perform worse overall. Nootropics are the only exception, but even the cocktails I’ve tried were only so-so versus vanilla meditation. It never ceases to amaze me how many simple solutions are just laying around.

But now we have another option, electric brain stimulation:

Good article from Nature with this handy picture:

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110413/full/472156a.html

Forum filled with links and DIY instructions:

http://brainmeta.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18814

Another one:

http://forums.makezine.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=533

Video from JOVE on it:

http://www.jove.com/video/2744/electrode-positioning-and-montage-in-transcranial-direct-current-stimulation

This is a promising start for the creation of a truely intelligent society.

Credit To Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal Credit SMBC