Who Me? Yes.

See "How To Live Like A Cynic" by Ansgar Allen, December 6, 2023 at psyche.co ( https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms OR https://web.archive.org/web/20231207101328/https://psyche.co/guides/how-to-live-like-a-cynic-and-challenge-social-norms )

For a while I thought this was it. Not quite, but it's close. It's inspiration.

I keep thinking that if I had my life to do over again, everything would be different. True. True of me an everyone else, but how? Definitely more along these lines:

• Improvise your life.
• Live shamelessly.
• Push against all boundaries.
• Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
• Give up everything you can live without.

I also recommend "Mornings on Horseback" by David McCullough, an amazing and thorough book-length biography of Theodore Roosevelt. He lived somewhat along the lines of the principles listed above, better than I have, though much more conventionally than Diogenes. Everyone has lived much more conventionally than Diogenes, but it's the core ideas. Very similar in both cases. Both fearless beings.

Particularly, in my case, I come from people who try to fade into the background, and had almost no education in how to get through life from my parents. They were both clueless, both the youngest of large families, my mother being a good little girl and my father being a spoiled brat who never worked. Both incapable of actually dealing with what life threw at them.

Being shy, and bookish, and having no clue about anything, and seeing my relatives wander aimlessly through their own lives, I grew up making lots of mistakes. Mostly mistakes. All the way through. My whole life so far has been one continuous mistake.

I have missed nearly every opportunity, played by the rules, deferred to authority, hoped for the best, and continued getting it all wrong.

Now I'm revamping myself, reinventing, reforming, redoing. Though I no longer have to work for money, I am working, working at making myself the person I should have been all the way through. My one practical talent is that I know how to live within my means and with that have always been good at saving money, so I've got enough of that anyway, and its freedom.

I read Allen's "How To Live Like A Cynic" piece, and then got his book and a couple others on cynic philosophy and started reading them. And quickly gave up on all. Three academic works, going into endless detail about everything except the subject that I was interested in. The bullet points above do a better job, and Allen's piece is stellar. He hits the relevant points and covers them in enough detail to get the core ideas across. That's enough right there. You don't need more.

I'm thinking a lot here of software development, but I'm actually more interested in process than in programming, though in my so-called "professional" life, producing software was supposedly the goal. In line with this, I'm also working my way through Andy Hunt's "Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware", which is all about thinking. Also great. Ground-breaking, earth-shaking. More than reformative. Revolutionary.

For me it's all about the principles. I'm abstract, more interested in "what" and "why" than in "how". Cynicism and pragmatic thinking have been key parts of me since the beginning, and I'm only now, late in life, realizing that, and identifying who I could have been and what I could have done. I'm an inventor, a designer, a creative, iconoclastic dirty-fingernail philosopher. For me, what works is what works, and I keep trying to figure that out, no matter how anyone else does it. ("If it ain't broke, don't fix it," and "We've never done it that way" have always enraged me, and will forever.)

OK-fine and too bad. My life has been a waste, but here we are.

At least I do recognize the truth of things and am working on it. I like clarity and direction, unencumbered by the clutter of life, so once again:

• Improvise your life.
• Live shamelessly.
• Push against all boundaries.
• Act with courage, refuse to respect the powerful.
• Give up everything you can live without.

These are things that I've been doing all along, but accidentally, too quietly, in private, internally, without a real plan.

I'm not now headed for the street to run up and down, howling, and knocking the hats off people to get my point across. No. I plan on asserting myself when necessary, standing my intellectual ground, never being intimidated, living bullshit-free, and just getting on with it. Anyone else wants to do it a different way, fine, go ahead. Not me. I won't get in your face unless you force it.

It's December, the Xmas season, again. When I was five years old I badgered my parents until they finally gave in and admitted that Santa Claus was a fake, didn't exist. That's me. I'm proud.

And that was about five years before we had television. Before we had television, so I wasn't seeing programs every night with plots about guys dressing up in funny red suits to lie to children. How I figured it out I don't remember, but I did. Santa Claus is the first deep societal evil perpetrated on children.

I got past that and want to live the remainder of my life getting past the rest. End of story.

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? As above.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals

Butt Found, Head Inserted, Court Self-Congratulates

So, I haven't read last week's Supreme Court decision, the one that abolished race-based affirmative action in college admissions, but I don't need to. I have a few thoughts on the subject that don't involve knowledge of any arcane technical issues. The general overview is enough.

In short, the Court made the right decision for the wrong reasons. Race-based affirmative action is bogus because race does not exist. Race is one of those "I know it when I see it" things, but has never been defined. And anything that cannot be defined is not real. The idea of race came about long before anyone ever tried to precisely and coherently define it, and all attempts to do that have been a posteriori.

The a posteriori process is a major failing of rationality: First someone has an idea, then they decide that the idea is correct, and then they hunt for proof that they are right, while ignoring evidence to the contrary.

The scientific method is the opposite. It starts with facts that need explaining, not an explanation that needs facts. As Richard Feynman said, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool."

So "race", whatever imaginary quantity that race might be, was never a valid basis for college admission.

That's one part.

The other brain-dead aspect of this Court decision is that there should be college admissions.

They missed the key issue.

This was a real WTF moment.

C'mon folks, knowledge is not scarce. One piece of knowledge can be shared among an infinite number of minds, and is never diminished by that sharing. The real problem here is not "race" but that there should be college admissions. In fact, the whole idea of college is stupid, from the ground up.

College, university, whatever, is a medieval institution that has been kept on life support out of habit, up to and including the present day. It arose out of equal parts desire and scarcity and continues with that mindset. Tell most people that what we can generically call "higher education" should be a free, tax-supported resource, and they will complain that they don't think that they should pay for anyone else's education.

In other words, the reaction is "why should I pay so that person can get something that I don't have?", which relates to that idea of scarcity, but it ain't scarce. You get educated, I benefit too. I get educated, you benefit. Education is good all-around.

Sure, get medieval once if you want. Just try it.

Live in a time when fast communication was measured in months. When maybe 2% of the population could read and write, when any subject field had maybe 10 experts if that many, if you could even find them. In those times a few earnest students would band together, pool what money they could scrape up, and hire an expert to lecture them, because that was the most efficient and effective way to transmit knowledge. Once that was all done, you were among the elite of the elite.

No books, no libraries. Buying a book might have been equivalent to buying a house today. Books were all hand-copied, one at a time, and were hoarded by priests and the super-rich, not circulated. The best way to get information was to listen to an expert talk and to scribble your own private notes.

As we still do today, for some reason. Stupid, right?

Here's how higher education should work.

• You want to learn something, you sign up for a course. Any course at all, at any time. No restrictions.
• You receive information on how and where to find the resources you need.
• The only prerequisite is the desire to learn a subject — if one subject is too deep for you, it's on you to fill in the gaps.
• You spend your time reading, thinking, doing exercises, watching videos, sharing questions and answers, participating in online discussions.
• There are no grades.
• You choose to be evaluated in any of several different ways whenever and however you feel like it — so for example take as many different tests as often as you want, and use them to measure your competence.
• When you are done with a course, you are done. No one cares what you did. No one keeps track of you.
• You do this in as many different ways as you want, for as many subjects as you want — whatever interests you.
• There are fees but they are moderate, because hundreds of millions of others are doing the same as you, and you all contribute a little, and it adds up.

At such time as you feel that you want to earn a living in a field, and feel that you are ready, you take a battery of exams. If you pass, you are then a certified professional. Examples: certified public accountant exams, bar examinations.

You do not have to leave home, travel to another city or state or country, live in a cell with someone you have never met before while paying an anonymous corporation to feed and care for you. No monopolies. You live wherever you want, with or without anyone you want, in any way you want.

No schedules. You do not have to go to certain rooms in certain buildings at certain times on certain days for a certain period of time and watch someone talk at you, and make a recording on paper (or these days, via keyboard). You read, watch videos, take sample tests, video-conference with your peers, submit and receive questions, answers, and critiques while at your own home base as you have the time and the inclination. Almost all communication is asynchronous.

And as I said, no grades. You are graded if and when you ask to be certified in some way to reach a particular goal.

For those courses requiring lab work it would be trickier but not impossible.

Every city has a school system. All elementary/secondary school systems have buildings. Existing high schools have labs. Most cities have hospitals and veterinary clinics which have some sort of lab, and many cities have various other labs (water treatment, sewage treatment, testing of paving and building materials and so on, depending on the city).

Overall, high school chemistry, biology, and physics labs could provide most of what's needed for in-person, hands-on, college-level lab work, which isn't that fancy anyway. This lab aspect would need a little more thought, but basically I think that even it could work "remotely", especially since it would be all on the student to learn whatever was needed, however they could, and no one could just skate through, letting someone else do the work, and expect to get through a later professional certification process by faking it.

And hey: I recently learned that there is a thing called the "Western Governors University". Surprising. It's about a quarter of the way there already. Western Governors University

How about that then?

 

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Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@nullabigmail.com
Me? Recently discovered to be the world expert on everything.

 

Etc...

so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals