| Oct. 25th, 2007 @ 02:47 am Work, Intelligence, and God |
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Although it may have seemed that I abandoned my journal altogether, more accurately it just lost its purpose. I was in regular contact with practically all the people who read it, and unlike some people, I use this more as a channel of communication than just a place to record my thoughts. People are now in Morgantown while I happen not to be, so perhaps I'll once again attempt keeping up with the journal.
I wouldn't expect too much, but I didn't expect much to come of it the first time around, and in the end I had pages of rants and a girlfriend from it all, so perhaps I should start again.
Well, as I restart, I'm going to be mimicking my first beginning, except combining my first two entries into this one. My very first entry was about how Josh convinced me to start a journal, and how I'd probably ignore it. I've covered that. My second entry was about how I hated my job.
Well, I don't have a job, but I did just find this article on digg which I enjoyed and agree with entirely. For those of you too lazy too either click on that link or read the article, then the following is a summary:
The guy's generally irritated about how everyone he worked with in his first few jobs preferred doing nothing to working and even seemed proud of how they got paid to "sit in air conditioned offices" or "play solitaire" all day, and thus he dubbed them the "Working Dead." He goes on to suggest that it's not so much about work ethic (which he doesn't explicitly state), but just the fact that doing nothing forty hours a week is incredibly, painfully boring (which he does say, more or less). He would rather be working so long as the work is mentally stimulating than doing nothing.
And although I said I agree with everything that was in the article, I must also say that there were some things that the article didn't mention that it should have. Firstly, he says nothing about the quality of the people who choose to do nothing all day. So, either he was just being polite and avoiding insulting people, or he really doesn't have anything against the people but is just incredibly bored. However, considering the complaints about the government employee who he worked with who napped in a truck most of the day while he sat there bored, and considering the connotation of the title "Working Dead," I'd have to say that the more likely scenario is that he was just trying to be polite. I, however, cannot.
The point I already made is that they obviously lack work ethic, which is, in my opinion, wrong. Moreover, though, these "Working Dead" are simply idiots; they avoid mental stimulation, and aren't necessarily mentally less capable, but are instead less intelligent by choice, which in my opinion is far worse. However, this is just another of the many symptoms of the sad state our society is in.
I must digress briefly, having just now drawn together two ideas I failed to connect before. This past spring, when I went to Washington, D.C. with the WPHS Japanese Club, I spent most of the time talking to Mr. Mattis. As tends to be the case with my conversations, often we'd end up discussing the flaws of society. Mr. Mattis is particularly irritated by the No Child Left Behind legislation and the state of schools in general, and I agree entirely, but I digress, and digressing from a digression would lose my original point. Anyway, when I commented about the decline of America, he rebutted. He said that the American people have always been idiots, and that every generation has believed theirs to be the worst. Although he in many ways is right, I couldn't agree with him on this point, but at the time I failed to formulate a proper argument. Last week, however, I read an article I read in Scientific American about the Flynn Effect, which is the phenomenon witnessed in over thirty countries (all the countries where they had data, in fact) where every generation shows a noticible increase in IQ scores over the previous. And although at first this seems to disagree entirely and in fact disprove my opinion that society is declining, with further understanding of the concept it actually supports my belief.
The first thing I must say about the Flynn effect is the obvious lack of evidence in everyday life (or even, as I see it, the contrary evidence where the population is degrading). Moreover, in places where they have data spanning back towards the early 1900's or further, the effect continued, suggesting that the average IQ back then was 50-70, while today's average IQ is approximately 100. This finding would suggest that all our forefathers were by our standards mentally retarded, which obviously isn't the case. The article gave two reasons for the Flynn effect.
Firstly, is the type of intelligence people had. It gave the example question of "What do a dog and a rabbit have in common?" People of a hundred or more years ago were necessarily utilitarian. They saw things practically, and how they should be used to survive. When presented with such a question, their likely response was that a dog is used to hunt rabbits. Today, however, with modern technology simplifying our survival and with widespread teaching of scientific concepts (although not necessarily effectively, which was the topic of a special edition of Scientific American, but again I mustn't digress any further into the faults of our education system while already digressing, yet there are points on this particular subject I would like to make in this digression itself) the most likely answer is that dogs and rabbits are both mammals. Yet the older generation in this example existed before the general populace were presented with any ideas of general science such as classifications of animals or abstract problem solving. However, on an IQ test, the utilitarian answer would receive no points, while the less-practical classification would give full points. So, the first explanation of the Flynn effect is simply advances in science and curriculum (even though teaching methods haven't exactly kept up with the material taught).
The second point that must be made in the Flynn effect is that the differences in IQ observed from generation to generation appear primarily between the results of tests taken at earlier ages, almost disappearing in many of the catagories tested by the time each generation reaches adulthood. So, although there is a suggestion here that the children do get a boost in intelligence over their parents, it's either completely circumstantial given an increase in exposure to slightly more abstract concepts at younger ages, or failure to exploit any increase in intelligence diminishes it's effects. Possibly both explanations are true to a certain extent, for it's highly improbable that huge leaps are made in evolution of the brain between generation, but even Mr. Mattis had to admit that our education system does not take advantage of the capabilities of our youth. Either way, though, it does further suggest that the increase in IQ is largely superficial, at least as an argument that our population is in any way improving.
How this does in fact support my argument that our population is declining despite demonstrating increases in IQ is that I must simply redefine the idea of how society is declining. We're not getting capable of intelligence by any means. However, we are using less of our capacity, and the larger part of the population is contributing essentially nothing to society, save occasional trivial labor when they're not playing solitaire.
A hundred years ago and more, people made full use of the resources given to them. Admittedly, then it was out of necessity; there was no room for the lazy, mindless "Working Dead" that pervade our modern society (digressing to the original topic within the digression... is that allowed?). Everyone had to work to keep the community alive. Today, however, most of us are more free than ever to explore the limits of human knowledge and subsequently expand upon them, yet so few of us do. The understanding and advancement of science hasn't been of particular interest to the hoi polloi probably since the Cold War era. Instead, people's lives are made easier with technological advances, and to survive or even be comfortable less effort is required of people. So we are declining because as our individual potentials increase, most people do even less than members of previous generations, neither required to work to survive nor inspired to work to improve.
There is, of course, no easy solution, or else things would hopefully not be this way. There is however a solution. The first thing that needs to be done is reformation of education.
I won't go into detail, but I will here elaborate on my previous statement that our schools' teaching methods haven't evolved along with the subjects they're used to teach. I have discussed at length the failures of education and possible alternatives with several people, especially Mary. One thing I have decided is that our curricula are generally assembled backwards, progressing in what seems to be a more chronological order of when the ideas were developed than the more logical order of beginning with the fundamentals, defining systems and constructing increasingly larger and more complicated systems each grade. It may have made sense to teach arithmetic first before the days of abstract math, or to teach spelling and grammar before we understood the mechanics of linguistics, but now we have a better understanding of how things work. Arithmetic should not be memorized, but instead be demonstrations of fundamental algebra, just as spelling should be a function of etymology. I used to doubt that children could comprehend such concepts, but after reading this article about using the Socratic method to teach binary arithmetic to third graders, and after watching the National Spelling Bee on ESPN one late night and witnessing the kids actually asking the language of origin and deffinition to essentially calculate the spelling of the words they were given, I changed my mind. The children are capable, the question is whether or not we are capable of teaching them. Indeed, when I was young enough to still find the Jetsons amusing, it always struck me as interesting that the writers of the show assumed that Elroy, at whatever young age he was (6? 8?) would be taking calculus (or now I suppose they could have been suggesting that we aged at a much slower rate in order to live longer, the earlier seemed simpler for my young mind to grasp, and even now living longer would only make sense as an expansion of the adult life, as an increase in any part of the lifespan before the end of puberty would only unnecessarily delay development and would add little of real value to our lives). Yet whenever I'd see a child--as I was--studying calculus, I knew there had to be a flaw somewhere in the logic: either the writers were mistaken in assuming that a child of the future was significantly more intelligent than modern children, or, the idea--which I was inclined towards at the time because of my immature egotism but more recently have found greater reason to prefer--that someone really ought to be teaching me calculus.
Yet education is only the necessary beginning. I noticed in my Sociology 101 text when I was taking the class in its listing of the values of American society that intelligence, knowledge, wisdom, or any similar mental acuity was conspicuously absent. So, we as a people need to value intelligence. Although my earlier example of a motivator towards making science important was the Cold War, Americans have since become proud, maintaining unfounded feelings of superiority without the desire to demonstrate their capabilities on the world stage or otherwise compete with other countries, and as such we've already lost our claim to being the best. So, not only would threatening other countries simply to start another Cold War as a tool to improve our social values be frowned upon by most of the world, it would probably be inaffective anyway. Yet there are other ways to encourage intelligence. A shift in popular entertainment making smart the new cool would be a great boost for much of the population if executed expertly enough (which, in my opinion, would largely involve Bill Nye). Additionally, an increase in economic biases towards intelligence (such as high pay for professors, engineers, teachers (especially ones using the Socratic Method), etc.) and a shift away from high paid corporate executives, lawyers, and athletes (not to say being successful in business and law doesn't require intelligence so much as to say that firstly, neither are known for strong ethics, although moral advancement of our society is a topic for another day, and secondly, bureaucracy is a component of the ignorance of the hoi polloi, which, although very relevant to my discussions both of declining society and the "Working Dead", may push this rant past critical mass and destroy our galaxy, and by that I mean it's getting too late for me).
To bring my ramblings full circle from my digression to my original topic, one of the primary things that would be necessary for a shift in wages for intelligent workers and a tool to combat lazy workers would be the engineering of a new meter to measure productivity, since the hour is the same for the guy playing solitaire as it is for the guy actually working. Although I've yet to come up with a proper alternative just yet, it is a problem I've only recently begun considering. The obvious challenge is how to measure and thus evaluate the intangible; measuring how many gadgets someone builds in a day is easy, but measuring ideas is not. However, as I've been writing for probably three hours (note that my introduction was meant to promise infrequent entries, not short ones), I must simply ask that anyone who has read this far (or even just this paragraph) consider ideas for alternative metrics for wages and thusly comment.
I only have two things left to say. First, is a (hopefully) brief explanation of the problems of bureaucracy, just to tie up that lose end (and threaten the integrity of the space-time continuum). The largest problem with bureaucracy is that it is used as a tool to bypass thought. For instance, instead of people understanding and deciding what's right or wrong, we have a complicated tangle of legislation that requires years of study to being to understand, as an attempt to prevent any misguided intelligence from erring and favoring wrong. Yet, there are two results. The first is that people no longer think for themselves about morality, but instead are forced to follow the excessive numbers of laws set before them like zombies (much like the "Working Dead"). The second result is that the more complicated the system, the more opportunities there are for holes (Gödels Incompleteness Theorem demonstrates that any system sufficiently developed--that is, complete--eventually creates inevitable possibilities for paradoxes--incompleteness, and any system that's not sufficiently complex is obviously incomplete in being insufficiently developed to demonstrate such ideas, so a complete formal system is impossible, and this is without considering that our legal system does not even manage to conform to the rules necessary of a formal system to begin with), and thus eventually something so designed as our legal system becomes simply a manipulation of legislation as opposed to the ethical foundation it was intended to be.
My final point is the idea of work ethic, which in all honesty I'm mostly using as a segway into another lengthy rant that I wrote a few weeks ago and, as an experiment, posted on Facebook instead of here, and thus went largely unnoticed only to be read by Mary. Within the rant, I explain my opinion of what good and evil truely are, and, following the idea of a quote of mine that has been on Mary's Facebook profile for a while, taken from a conversation we had online, and I tend to recycle it a lot myself, where I define evil as the absence of good, and not any actual opposing force, and thus inaction is as bad as actively doing wrong, which can easily be projected into a work environment (assuming the job is not itself immoral by deffinition):
Actions alone cannot make a person good; a person is good also because of what motivates him to act. Anyone can follow all the laws or never violate the Ten Commandments and still be neither good nor wise, but instead be an ignorant fool who in the absence of such laws could not make the right choice... and were they ever to face a situation where the right thing to do was to break a law, their blind obedience would be as evil as anything else. Evil, as I see it, is the disregard of what is good, not the active will to combat it. The men most think of as truly evil do not sit there choosing their actions to "avoid good" and "seek bad". They care not of what is good or bad, but will choose their actions for greed, lust, personal gratification. Likewise, the man who does not come to understand good and evil but instead blindly follows the rules shares the same apathy towards right and wrong. He who does not actively seek good is as a result evil. Even if he would not harm another man, if neither would he help him when he could then there is no good in him.
And now, with these final words and a copy and paste of my other rant, (which, although related in several ways to my previous rant, was written completely independent of this one, and therein begins with a focus on religion instead of on working or society as this one does; note also that it is purely a copy and paste, as it's far too late for me to bother editing my disclaimer about how it's on Facebook and not on LJ) I must retire for the night. I hope some actually read this, and I hope that it gives you something to think about. Just as much, I hope that you in turn comment and give me something to think about.
c. m. edge
( My other rant ) |
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