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alexiuss β PERSONAL CATASTROPHE AND PROBABLE SOLUTIONS
Published: 2013-04-10 15:27:25 +0000 UTC; Views: 36336; Favourites: 690; Downloads: 277
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Your life is headed for a disastrous end.Everyone will die.
That is a fact.
Especially you.
You will die.
Your friends will die.
Everyone you know will die.
These are indisputable facts.
Your body will break down and crash in one way or another.
Your heart will stop.
Your brain synapses will cease firing.
100% guaranteed termination.
You and everyone you know has less than 122 years left.
The oldest person alive was 122.
Oldest person alive now is 115.
Death should be your number one enemy.
Do not accept it.
Do not welcome it.
The question is - are you willing to extend, improve your life and the lives of those you love?
Why haven't you done it yet? Do you think it's impossible?
Flying for us was impossible until airplanes were built.
Now, the question is- how do we stop the personal catastrophe of death?
The logical answer is - science!
We can slow death down using modern medicine, and we can stop and reverse some accidental causes of death.
Aging is one cause that we cannot currently stop.
Should we simply focus all our efforts on stopping aging?
No.
Humanity as a whole is not ready for immortality.
If immortality was invented tomorrow, only the richest would attain it and use it as a tool to gain more control over others.
Control that equals to war and misery. Are the richest countries, companies and people solving problems?
They are not- a lot of them support wars and fund unsustainable developments.
If immortality was given to everyone tomorrow, overpopulation would quickly destroy civilization.
Before we can stop aging we MUST shift the pattern of human thought itself.
Of your thinking and my thinking.
Can it be done? Yes.
Will you do it? Probably not.
Not unless you take my words seriously and read this article every morning when you wake up.
Not unless you and I shift, or at least learn to shift our modes of thinking entirely into logical, rational and problem solving.
Basically, become amazing at life and solve all your problems.
Once all of your personal problems are solved, you can focus on solving problems of humanity as a whole.
-How does an individual become a problem solver?
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Step 1:
Become a rationalist.
Understand the principle of "Occam's razor" to manage your life.
"Simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones.
Among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be selected."
Occam's razor is used in medicine when there are many explanations for symptoms and the simplest diagnosis is usually is the correct one.
If a child has a runny nose, they probably have the common cold instead of a rare birth defect.
If a tree suddenly feel down in a forest - wind was responsible, not a wizard.
When faced with two or more answers, you can use Occam's razor to trim away improbable ones.
Any statement or answer made without proof or scientific evidence backing it, can be trimmed.
Learn to apply skepticism when faced with new information, especially information that has no logic or scientific proof behind it.
If you enjoy reading sci-fi books, a fun way to become a rationalist is to read "Harry potter and the methods of rationality".
Google it and read it.
If you know of more articles that explain rationalism and help learn it, link in your comments.
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Step 2:
Understand statistics and probability.
Embrace the scientific method.
Statistics rule the world. Probability defines it.
If you understand statistics you can master the art of understanding and interpreting reality most correctly.
If you know which decision leads to statistical win, you can make great decisions in life and solve problems very easily.
There is a pattern to all things in life. If you can figure out this pattern you will accomplish anything.
Yes, you need to know math, especially % math, to do it!
Real life example:
In 2007 I used probability to figure out a statistical pattern that would (at that time) get my artworks seen by millions all over the net.
Seasonscape now has 1.8 million views just on deviantart and I'm a successful freelance illustrator.
Others:
Joan R. Ginther, a former statistics professor, had won four different multi-million dollar jackpots in Texasβthree of which came from purchasing scratch-off lottery tickets. It was speculated that there was actually a pattern to where and when the winning tickets were sold, and that Professor Ginther had figured out this pattern.
If you know of great articles that explain how to learn statistics and help apply them, link in your comments.
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Step 3:
Become a problem solver.
Google is a collective knowledge of all of humanity. It has countless answers to questions(including incorrect ones).
A rational googler can differentiate between incorrect answers and correct ones.
A statistics-knowledgeable googler can calculate the probability of the most correct answer, discarding incorrect ones,
(by calculating amount of proof that applies to each answer and by statistically estimating how likely is each thing to happen)
Thus such a googler can answer ANY question as correct and as detailed as possible.
A talented googler can solve almost any problem in their personal life and help others solve their problems.
When faced with buying a new product- Google about it and read some reviews.
Some products are 50% cheaper online, obsolete, have better versions, or do more harm than good.
When faced with any problem in life from small to impossibly large- learn to immediately google for existing solutions or at least google and find tools that can help arrive at a solution faster.
If you know tutorials on improving googling skills, post them in comments.
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Step 4:
Change the world.
Embrace and promote scientific literacy.
-How do we create a "problem-solving" society?
We must raise a generation that is masterful at problem solving.
We must raise a generation that actively uses the internet to learn.
Education itself must be changed from "fact-memorizing" to "problem solving".
As soon as kids are old enough to understand logic, rationality and probability,
they must be taught how to utilize the full potential of google (or any other search engine).
Schools must first teach logical thinking and scientific literacy, and then they must teach the "art of googling for answers".
Once these two steps are achieved, a student has the skills to move forward on their own, solving all basic problems in their way and finding or creating tools to solve more difficult problems.
Imagine a school with wi-fi where students would be taught to to google answers on their laptops, instead of forever reading facts from books.
Imagine a school where students would be taught how to look at search queries and taught to understand which answer is most likely to be correct out of all the answers google provides.
Imagine a school where logic, skepticism, and critical thinking (information evaluation) are taught.
Imagine a school where students and teachers would be allowed to argue among each other to figure out which answer from google is most probable and most logical and which are answers can be disproved and how.
What if kids learned how to get their questions answered, instead of being provided answers by teachers to memorize?
What if kids were actively encouraged to google all the things in school?
What if right away kids would learn how to google topics that they are actively interested in learning about?
If all knowledge is immediately accessible, there is potential to destroy embarrassment and ignorance.
If a student is talented at something, they could immediately learn specific skills that would move their talents forward.
What if we figure out a way to raise kids who would actually get ALL of their questions answered from the beginning of their life?
A generation of kids who wouldn't be too afraid/embarrassed to ask the internet for help and would always know how to ask the right questions to get the right answers.
The world can be a much better place for everyone, if we change our mode of thinking from:
"oh god why"
to
"lets google it and solve this problem".
Related content
Comments: 290
I'm sorry to say I couldn't agree less. Firstly, it is unnecessary to teach these skills. I'm certain the vast majority of young people is intimately familiar with Google, looking things up and filtering out the right answer. It's not that difficult, and it's not an especially valuable skill. I do agree that stimulating children by letting them look up their favourite subjects is a good idea though.
Secondly, ratio is somewhat the opposite of mystery, and thus the imagination, the 'not knowing', the filling in of the blanks with you own mind. Always having answers directly available hampers deep discussion, because that discussion of will be bases on answers instead of questions.
Actually I'm pretty surprised to find a plead for rationalism on dA. Art has never been about ratio. Concepts and structures could be, yes, but art's not a means to an end. Becoming popular is also not the end-goal of creating something (although peer recognition is always great).
I love wading through the web, soaking up knowledge and stories, but in the end, it doesn't help me. It is entertainment more than progress.
'What if we figure out a way to raise kids who would actually get ALL of their questions answered from the beginning of their life?'
Dystopia. Wouldn't their life would be extremely boring? As always, the question is more important than the answer.
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At least the term "fractional reserve banking" sounds like common sense.
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Read that ? Advent of Google means we must rethink our approach to education
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according to the statistics 70% of all statistics are wrong...
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you is my solution. I Google my problem and lead it to you. care to here it?
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this is a joke right? you cannot simply make everyone into rational problem solvers. the other half will start to bow to google and recognize it as a new god, or the like.
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ALL HAIL GOOGLE! PRAISE BE TO ITS ALL KNOWING, ALL SEARCHING BROWSER. GOOGLE THE BROWSER, THE SEARCH BAR AND THE HOLY SOFTWARE. DON'T WORSHIP GOOGLE? HOW ABOUT YOU ACCEPT THE LOVE AND KNOWLEDGE OF GOOGLE INTO YOUR LIFE?
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I think I would like a school like that very much
I already google things I'm interested in. But the whole scenario seems very improbable. It's a wonderous idea but it doesn't seem very feasable. Especialy when I look around my classroom. Most of the kids there aren't interested in learning new things. They are barely interested in anything past rhe rat race for some level of social recognition. I know I sound fairly jaded in making this statement but it's something I feel certain of. I would still absolutely love it if a school like that was actually created though. Welp, good luck with the art stuff. Always love your art stuffs :3
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STUDIES AT BRITISH SCHOOLS HAVE SHOWN THAT CHILDREN ARE MORE LIKELY TO LEARN WHEN SCHOOL ISN'T MANDATORY.
YOUR FELLOW STUDENTS MAY WANT TO LEARN BUT THEY EITHER
- CAN'T LEARN IN A CLASSROOM ENVIROMENT
- AREN'T INTERESTED IN THE TOPIC
- DON'T HAVE A LEARNING STYLE THAT MATCHES YOUR TEACHER'S TEACHING STYLE.
THEREFORE THEY MIGHT BECOME BORED WITH SCHOOL AND GIVE IN THE MUCH MORE ENTICING AND QUICK REWARDING SOCIAL LADDER.
PLEASE WALK IN OTHER PEOPLE'S SHOES BEFORE YOU MAKE JADED COMMENTS. IT'LL MAKE YOU A MORE OPEN-MINDED AND BETTER PERSON.
- ZE INTERN (~Strawbery-Cheesecake )
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So...
Where in this model of thinking does original research get a look in?
I read this and all I see is another example of 'a majority of people will be right a majority of the time' thinking.
Bull.
Completely rational and logical people scare me; anyone who lets some concept of technical logic or honour code come before the gut instinct of 'right' scares the hell out of me.
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I was going into medical science and trying my best to change the world for the better. I did this at great personal sacrifice for others. Than the community and people turned on me like the dogs they are and sent me to prison for crimes I did not commit.
A witch hunt and I was set on fire, but they didn't manage to kill me entirely.
Now I see the light and know humanity is not worth saving. I would rather see this world burn. I'd make some super plague and spread it across the earth before finding a cure now.
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.β
β Martin Luther King Jr
This is all I feel now: [link]
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Death is the only thing that makes life valuable. It's short, so we have to make the most of it. Immortality would be horribly boring. =/
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It's not that easy. Not everyone has the same resources available and can buy a phone to google for answers. This may work in the developed countries but what about the others? The people who don't have access to information through the internet will have even less changes to get out of poverty. And the world as a whole isn't developed enough yet to make sure that everyone has the same resources, let's say a phone to google in this case. And I don't think it will ever be.
And what about a techological breakdown? What if anything happened and the internet would be down for days/weeks/months? Also, if you don't have reception or battery then you don't have any access to information and this wouldn't work out very good.
If people depended that much on the internet they would be completely useless without the access.
I do agree with the statement that rational thinking and using probability are very useful and I also think that googling a solution is a good idea since I do that all the time too. But I also think that students in school have to get to a certain level of knowledge through learning the stuff and not by googling. Because they will have to be able to do that later in life as well, in their job and career. I don't know if I'd go to a doctor that googled my symptomes to tell me what's the problem.
So this is an interesting idea you thought about but I don't think it will work that easily.
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We are not ready.
We never will be.
We are the masters of our own demise,
denying ourselves paradise in exchange for trifling pleasures and comforting lies.
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yes but religion is also one of the great problems humanity must overcome
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This is so bad, I can only assume it is a joke.
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I think you're letter is quite interesting, but I do not necessarily support your view on google because it's certainly not the be all and end all of knowledge (or the source thereof). I am a teacher and we (my colleagues and me) do not encourage our students to use google for their essays, homeworks, reports etc but books. Books are more reliable, always have been, always will!
I found your point on probblem-solving and 'change the world' very interesting because as a teacher I notice that we don't teach our students to solve problems anymore. Instead we (adults, authorities and the likes) try to remove and abolish every possible obstacle that youngsters might come across which is wrong in my opinion because they'll never learn to cope with their own personal struggles and problems.
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WAIT A SECOND.
YOU SAY YOU'RE A TEACHER, BUT "i think YOUR letter" and "my colleagues and I"
"homework" is singular and plural
"etc." ends with a period.
I SUSPECT THAT YOU AREN'T REALLY A TEACHER.
- ZE INTERN (~Strawbery-Cheesecake )
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I think you're letter is quite interesting, but I do not necessarily support your view on google because it's certainly not the be all and end all of knowledge (or the source thereof). I am a teacher and we (my colleagues and me) do not encourage our students to use google for their essays, homeworks, reports etc but books. Books are more reliable, always have been, always will!
I found your point on probblem-solving and 'change the world' very interesting because as a teacher I notice that we don't teach our students to solve problems anymore. Instead we (adults, authorities and the likes) try to remove and abolish every possible obstacle that youngsters might come across which is wrong in my opinion because they'll never learn to cope with their own personal struggles and problems.
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"you're letter"?
"my colleagues and me"?
I HAVE A SNEAKING SUSPICION THAT YOU ARE NOT REALLY A TEACHER.
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my only regret is that I did not get to read this until I actually read it - congratulations sir!
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I was going to say something against this but apparently its a joke anyway.
On related note I would HATE being immortal, the idea is terrifying.
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actually, there are several pharm. drugs that are on the market today that apparently help to stop/slow aging (cosmetically speaking, ex: no wrinkles and healthy skin cells for longer periods). I forgot the name but the basic premises of one of the drugs was that it literally works at the chromosome ends (the area that codes for skin, etc) and prevents it from breaking down like it normally does in regular people.
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I don't think humanity would ever be ready for immortality. It's not natural for us to live forever - think about Tuck Everlasting. And even if we did live forever, does that mean that the poor keep on suffering and the rich keep on living happily? What about kids? The next generation? Will they cease to exist?
Science is not always the answer (though we'd like to think it is)
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Is this how the Romantically Apocalyptic world started? Sounds like it's part of it.
Why do so many in the comments believe he was being serious? You know who wrote the text. Nvm, maybe we needed the discussion.
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I'll just leave these two here, they are from Mark Twain.
"Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world."
"The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved."
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You're glancing on interesting points, but how you approach this and the solutions you suggest seem to miss those points completely. From an overly dramatic entry about inevitable death, you continue about humanity striving for immortality and having to being 'problem solvers' to achieve this. Your steps are about Rationalism, Statistics and Googling and your conclusion is that everything could be solved by teaching children to Google.
While a useful skill, knowing how to find facts doesn't substitute understanding them. The approach you suggest would actually be catastrophic to science and even human development. Science is valuable and knowing how to Google can help with finding solutions, but people also need to learn how to differentiate between the results they find. Furthermore immortality would likely create a lot of problems, rather than solve problems. It would likely strain resources, lead to few children and stagnate development.
Rather than striving for immortality, I think humanity would benefit more from learning to understand each other and learning to find happiness within. I'll refrain from going into depth on this here as it would take me a lot of time and effort to put that in the right words, but knowing how to avoid stress and making the best of what you have seems like a much worthwhile endevour than increasing the lenght of your life. With death being inevitable, it's useless to fear it. Why worry about something that you cannot change? I use this approach to many things in life and it helps me avoid a lot of worrying that only hurts myself.
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A more detailed review of the individual steps:
Step 1: You ignore that people are often not logical and need guidelines, be it from law or belief. I personally have not interest in religion and not much with ideologies, but they can provide comfort to those would need them. They are also abused, but that is because of the power associated with them which is a different issue.
Step 2: Statistics are good for impressions, but you're cutting things very short. Not to mention often making the 'right' choice involves carefully weighing short and long term profits, even if it's done for the best of all. Statistics can help with decisions, but do not make them for you. Not to mention statistics are very easy to manipulate and their descriptions often subjective.
Step 3: Googling isn't done based on statistics. The first step in this is to define how you would yourself formulate a question and use the keywords to search for this. If no sensible results show up, try related keywords or ask others to help you with it if you're bad at it.
Google is nice when you want to buy things and compare and review. If you have practical problems then it also is useful. But many problems are emotional or you can't even put them in words. And even if you could, the solutions given, even if you can find the correct ones (which could take ages for a hard to define problem or if you can't describe it) may not be written in such a way that you can understand it.
From personal experience I've found that how to change my own view on life to make the best of things didn't require learning something new, but understanding something I had seen and read before, but which wasn't described in a way I could understand it. Like proverbs containing wisdom, they're useless if you don't understand the idea behind it.
Step 4: That the educational system relies too much on blunt fact memorizing is true, but replacing it with merely knowing how to find information would be a poor trade-off. The concept of a school isn't to provide answers (if they do that, they're doing it wrong), but to have children learn who to solve one problem so that they may know how to solve similar other problems.
It seems you make Googling synonymous to 'problem solving' and at this point it's almost like you're preaching a system of belief.
This also ignores the mostly unknown influences that new generations are already subjected to, namely getting information overflow. Not to mention the effects of being behind a screen day and night (including phones), the emotional influence/strain of always having to be available, being exposed to things they shouldn't have access to and mass individualization (not knowing your neighbors and ignoring those around you in favor of communicating via phone).
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Hopefully this was a useful to give an alternative view on things and people can use this to their advantage.
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whoever didn't know the first bit is a fucking idiot
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Interesting text 
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I think we have to learn important concepts like autolearning but no only from google. We must learn about search in books, or in the words of a teacher or a mother and even in our own mind. We have a lot of incorrect information that we asume as true but is only some words that you heard from some people that you like and you never verify them becouse a "celebrity" has told them.
Is very interesting:
"Education itself must be changed from "fact-memorizing" to "problem solving"."
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Whoa. I stopped reading and just scanned after I read "Death should be your number one enemy". o_o (Coincidentally, at Church today we were reminded that sin/Satan is your number one enemy XD) I'm not scared of death - and I personally wouldn't find immortality at all fun. A longer life doesn't necessarily be a better one. >.> However, this is an interesting concept - but not one I personally am interested in. C;
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I'm not really one to check out written deviations and it was pure coincidence that I did so now. I'm glad I did. This article enforced my current views about education and started forming me to be a way more efficient and better human. Thanks.
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Read on Wikipedia that the universe will start repeating itself once it gets 10-to-the-power-of-10-to-the-power-of-76.6. If you believe that after it's heat death it collapses or forms an new universe out of nothing/itself, it's reasonable to think that this will go on for a damn long time. So bam, instant unlimited re-incarnation. Or perhaps not, in which case then it's all nothing forever. Although of course, if that's the case you wouldn't be around to care about being dead once you were gone. Or I guess one of the religions, so you get paradise. Anyways, I wouldn't worry about it. Just don't be an ass and you're all set to go.
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I think the entirety of this article could be summed up.
Think Global, Act Local.
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Telling everyone to drop whatever school of thought they have for rationalism is not a good thing. I prefer Stoicism.
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I was very interested at first but when i got to the 4th step i was a bit skeptical. If the world worked in such a way, there would be practically no need for teachers at all, and similar to the human mind, the internet is unreliable in many ways. By all means, show children that they can get answers from the internet, heck, most kids grow up knowing that anyway and would choose that over a dictionary any day. The world you describe seems almost like the world we see now, just a bit more...chaotic i thought at first, but on second thought, boring. I don't know why, i guess a person like me shouldn't really give their opinion on things like this but there you have it.
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On a more general matter, it's not just about googling stuff instead of reading about it (for instance), but about teaching people to think, learn and live by themselves. People shouldn't trust what they're told unless they research more on that subject and make up their own mind from what they've seen. Ideas are easy to spread, that doesn't mean all of them are right.
As for probability... eh, that's one way to do it. I, personally, don't want to be the most successful I can be, the fastest it can be achieved. If everyone learns to understand satistics and use them, wouldn't everyone's life become similar? Humans naturally want to stand apart from the people around them, I'm not sure people would be willing to all follow the exact same tactic to being successful, or to adopt the same way of seeing the world.
Regarding Google, we are encouraged in my school to keep researching on subjects we want to know more/better about, if that counts, and the majority of what we're taught is backed up by documents/demonstrations. I wouldn't mind Google being used to spread knowledge better than right now, but that shouldn't become the only source in the world.
Similarly, I don't think a world where only facts backed up by science can even exist. Some people need to dream, some people believe in things that aren't backed up by science (and are fine with it, since it works for them), some people NEED to believe in something stronger than what they can control. Sure, society would grow better and faster if everyone would believe 100% confirmed facts only, but even then, what IS a "fact" if it's only something someone told you ? Not that I'm saying everything's a lie until we prove it by ourselves, but not everyone wants to just believe that the world is what we know and nothing more (especially when we discover more about it little by little).
Yes, knowledge needs to be even more spread, and people must be taught to seek knowledge.
And education must be only about teaching, not about saying "remember this and accept it as the truth". That's closer to brainwashing.
But after everyone learn to be in control of their life, they shouldn't all have to follow the same path to solving their problems.
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you missed one: don't be a troublemaker...
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