bryanized

Why? Because most people are not socialized well and they are taught to believe they deserve things they don’t without effort.

I could not agree more. There is this weird mentally, especially on circlejerking places like Reddit, that somehow you deserve to have all the things you want. That you deserve that awesome woman or man that you only dare to stare at from a distance. That you deserve the great body, healthy skin, perfect job, high pay, amazing holidays, the new computer or your dream fulfilled.

Well, guess what: You don’t. There is no one in the universe that looks at you and says “well, you deserve to have all these things, I am going to give them to you”. You don’t deserve anything. If you can read this you probably already had many great things thrown at you for which you didn’t do a thing. A good education, loving parents, food, shelter, a computer, maybe even a good spot in university or a good job.

If you want to be the person that you want to be - do something for it. You don’t know people? How could you if you waste your time on Reddit or with porn? Go and get a hobby, join a club, do something that you haven’t done before.

You can’t dance? Learn it. You can’t tell jokes? Train it. You don’t like your job? Find a new one. You don’t have the skills? Find out what skills you want - and learn it. You want to find an attractive partner? Become an attractive partner first.

I am annoyed by Reddit, or, to say it more precise: By the attitude of a large part of the youth today. By the beliefs that people here hold. My favourite is the “Need work experience to find a job” thing that comes up every now or then. Why do they look for people with work experience? Because any employer knows that those who don’t have work experience are probably at fault themselves. They are the self-entitled ones who believe that food should fly in their mouths, and that their great inner values are enough to become great, no work needed. Sure, there might be one or two who would deserve better luck - but likely, when you are honest with yourself, you are probably not one of them.

Or another: friendzone. Friendzone. The most ridiculous and sexist concept I have ever heard of. Yes, it’s now applied in both directions, but traditionally it is that a woman “puts” a “nice” guy in the friendzone. The poor fellow. She is so hot and he likes her so much. And he does nice things for her. Why doesn’t she love him for the things he does? Why is she so cruel? Well, it’s because he is an idiot. He believes that you can buy attraction. Do you fall in love with a girl just because she occasionally helps you out? Of course not. You fall in love because of looks and character and her behaviour and likely because of a well formed personality. She is an interesting person, that’s why you feel attracted to her, why you want to spend time with her. And, sure, some women might more or less consciously exploit that. But that doesn’t change the matter:

If you believe that somebody else ought to love you because you do something nice for them; if you believe that somebody else needs to feel a certain way because of things you do - then you are an idiot. If you are unhappily in the friendzone - you are an idiot, plain and simple. Deal with it, accept that you have a good friend, and move on. Or try and take the relationship to a new level. But don’t whine how cruel the girl is because she doesn’t let you hump her even when you fix her computer.

Do you deserve anything? HELL NO. Is there a “fair” universe - where fair means biased in your favour - that gives you all the things you want? HELL NO.

If you are on Reddit whining about your lack of friends or partner or your horrible job - then consider for a moment whether you are part of the problem, whether it is not your fault rather than the rest of the world being rude to you.

You chose a bad partner? Your choice.

You think you deserve a better job? Go and get it.

Yes yes, it’s not easy. Oh, you sent 70 applications and still no one took you? Did you ever consider that maybe you are not interesting enough for them to take you? Maybe it’s not your lack of experience, mabye it’s your horrible spelling, your lack of skills, your subtle disrespect for them, or any other of a million things. Maybe you are just unlucky, there are a few of those - but, if you are honest with yourself, the chance that you are one of them is small.

Most people are socialised in this “get it all” society. Instant gratification through TV and fast food and those fake achievements of games that come in exactly that interval that keeps you hooked. Life doesn’t work like that. Clicking a button and doing fun things will rarely make you successful. Hard work, that’s where it’s at. Of course, even hard work doesn’t guarantee anything. You need to invest it wisely. You need to be willing to make sacrifices. You need to stay strong. You want to lose those 200lb? Well, good for you that you exercise 15 minutes a day. Bad for you that you say yes to all those donuts and chips.

People fail because they expect instant rewards. You avoid that donut and in return you wake up in the morning and your trousers fit. You start reading a book on French and the next day you can talk fluently. You can sit in front of your computer, doing your job with average results while you spend time on reddit - and you still think you deserve a raise? You wake up and don’t bother to shower but still expect people to enjoy your company? You spend your nights all at home playing video games and still you expect to be able to have interesting discussions with other people?

You, if you are that person, are an idiot. You don’t deserve good things, you work for them. The whole concept of “deserving” something, punishment or reward, is based on an ancient logic that there is somebody watching over us who can read your mind and rewards you for merely being good and punishes you for merely being bad. Well, guess what, you can get away with stealing when you do it right. And you can suffer for doing good things, if you do it wrong.

Get that in your head: The world is not fair. The World Is Not Fair. There is no fairness, no justice. And you should be happy about that, because else probably you would be starving and not the Indian farmer who works 14 hours a day to feed his family and still half his children die from diarrhea and he himself with 30 from starvation.

The world is not fair. You can be one of the 1% or so lucky ones, those who get things for merely being born in the right family, or with the right looks or the incredible mental skills. But chances are you are not.

But still: You can be the person you want to be. You CAN. If you work for it. Your application keeps getting refused? Ask others why. Ask them for candid feedback, not to be nice. You are alone? Go out and meet people? You are fat? Lose weight. Oh, but your friends want to go to McDonalds? Nice excuse for lack of wilpower. You don’t know how to cook? Learn it. You are bored? Go get a life. You hate your town? Move.

I hear you, I really do. You say “it’s not that easy” or maybe “you just don’t understand my situation” or “I’m trying my best..” blah blah.

My answer is simple: You are an idiot. You don’t understand, you refuse to understand a simple fact: The world is not skewed in your favour. You don’t deserve anything. Life is not supposed to be easy, it is not supposed to be any way. There are no checkpoints along the way, or small boxes with rewards - life is not a video game. Life just is. It is hard, it is sometimes unfair, it is sometimes difficult, even painful. But if you don’t like it the way there is only one option. Only one, and unless you accept that you will fail over and over again, you will be unhappy for all your life:

If you don’t like the way things are - fight with all your power to change it. You can’t find happiness, you have to create it. You don’t deserve breaks. You don’t deserve a pat on the back. You don’t deserve that snickers. You don’t deserve those new shoes. You don’t “deserve” anything.

You need to choose where you want to be, and then you need to work your way towards it. Someday you might succeed. Or maybe you don’t. But you know one thing: If you never try you will always fail, every day, every hour, every second.

You need to work for the things you want. Of course you can’t achieve everything. Of course not everybody can be president. But for those things that any person dreams of - a good partner, a nice place, a good job and a healthy social life, and for most other dreams that people might hold: You are not magically entitled to have it. You need to work for it. There is no alternative. And if you believe there is, if you believe you are entitled to something, to anything - then you are, plain and simple, an idiot.

Do you act and think as if you are entitled? Do you believe that you deserve things to be better? Then, my friend, you are wrong. Then, my friend, you need to learn that the world is not a good and gentle place. The world is a neutral place. Some start lucky. Some start unlucky. But I haven’t seen a person yet who cannot improve his lot by working hard on improving it.

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from http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/fjwkh/why_exactly_can_nothing_go_…

There are a lot of simple, intuitive explanations of this to be had out there … but I kind of hate them all. You might google around a bit and find discussion of something called “relativistic mass,” and how it requires more force to accelerate an object that’s already moving at a high velocity, stuff like that. That’s a venerable way of interpreting the mathematics of special relativity, but I find it unnecessarily misleading, and confusing to the student who’s just dipping her first toe into the ocean of modern physics. It makes the universe sound like a much different, and much less wonderful, place than it really is, and for that I kind of resent it.

When I talk about this subject, I do it in terms of the geometric interpretation that’s consistent with general relativity. It’s less straightforward, but it doesn’t involve anything fundamentally more difficult than arrows on pieces of paper, and I think it offers a much better understanding of the universe we live in than hiding behind abstractions like “force” and outright falsehoods like “relativistic mass.” Maybe it’ll work for you, maybe it won’t, but here it is in any case.

First, let’s talk about directions, just to get ourselves oriented. “Downward” is a direction. It’s defined as the direction in which things fall when you drop them. “Upward” is also a direction; it’s the opposite of downward. If you have a compass handy, we can define additional directions: northward, southward, eastward and westward. These directions are all defined in terms of something — something that we in the business would call an “orthonormal basis” — but let’s forget that right now. Let’s pretend these six directions are absolute, because for what we’re about to do, they might as well be.

I’m going to ask you now to imagine two more directions: futureward and pastward. You can’t point in those directions, obviously, but it shouldn’t be too hard for you to understand them intuitively. Futureward is the direction in which tomorrow lies; pastward is the direction in which yesterday lies.

These eight directions together — upward, downward, northward, southward, eastward, westward, pastward, futureward — describe the fundamental geometry of the universe. Each pair of directions we can call a “dimension,” so the universe we live in is four-dimensional. Another term for this four-dimensional way of thinking about the universe is “spacetime.” I’ll try to avoid using that word whenever necessary, but if I slip up, just remember that in this context “spacetime” basically means “the universe.”

So that’s the stage. Now let’s consider the players.

You, sitting there right now, are in motion. It doesn’t feel like you’re moving. It feels like you’re at rest. But that’s only because everything around you is also in motion. No, I’m not talking about the fact that the Earth is spinning or that our sun is moving through the galaxy and dragging us along with it. Those things are true, but we’re ignoring that kind of stuff right now. The motion I’m referring to is motion in the futureward direction.

Imagine you’re in a train car, and the shades are pulled over the windows. You can’t see outside, and let’s further imagine (just for sake of argument) that the rails are so flawless and the wheels so perfect that you can’t feel it at all when the train is in motion. So just sitting there, you can’t tell whether you’re moving or not. If you looked out the window you could tell — you’d either see the landscape sitting still, or rolling past you. But with the shades drawn over the windows, that’s not an option, so you really just can’t tell whether or not you’re in motion.

But there is one way to know, conclusively, whether you’re moving. That’s just to sit there patiently and wait. If the train’s sitting at the station, nothing will happen. But if it’s moving, then sooner or later you’re going to arrive at the next station.

In this metaphor, the train car is everything that you can see around you in the universe — your house, your pet hedgehog Jeremy, the most distant stars in the sky, all of it. And the “next station” is tomorrow.

Just sitting there, it doesn’t feel like you’re moving. It feels like you’re sitting still. But if you sit there and do nothing, you will inevitably arrive at tomorrow.

That’s what it means to be in motion in the futureward direction. You, and everything around you, is currently moving in the futureward direction, toward tomorrow. You can’t feel it, but if you just sit and wait for a bit, you’ll know that it’s true.

So far, I think this has all been pretty easy to visualize. A little challenging maybe; it might not be intuitive to think of time as a direction and yourself as moving through it. But I don’t think any of this has been too difficult so far.

Well, that’s about to change. Because I’m going to have to ask you to exercise your imagination a bit from this point on.

Imagine you’re driving in your car when something terrible happens: the brakes fail. By a bizarre coincidence, at the exact same moment your throttle and gearshift lever both get stuck. You can neither speed up nor slow down. The only thing that works is the steering wheel. You can turn, changing your direction, but you can’t change your speed at all.

Of course, the first thing you do is turn toward the softest thing you can see in an effort to stop the car. But let’s ignore that right now. Let’s just focus on the peculiar characteristics of your malfunctioning car. You can change your direction, but you cannot change your speed.

That’s how it is to move through our universe. You’ve got a steering wheel, but no throttle. When you sit there at apparent rest, you’re really careening toward the future at top speed. But when you get up to put the kettle on, you change your direction of motion through spacetime, but not your speed of motion through spacetime. So as you move through space a bit more quickly, you find yourself moving through time a bit more slowly.

You can visualize this by imagining a pair of axes drawn on a sheet of paper. The axis that runs up and down is the time axis, and the upward direction points toward the future. The horizontal axis represents space. We’re only considering one dimension of space, because a piece of paper only has two dimensions total and we’re all out, but just bear in mind that the basic idea applies to all three dimensions of space.

Draw an arrow starting at the origin, where the axes cross, pointing upward along the vertical axis. It doesn’t matter how long the arrow is; just know that it can be only one length. This arrow, which right now points toward the future, represents a quantity physicists call four-velocity. It’s your velocity through spacetime. Right now, it shows you not moving in space at all, so it’s pointing straight in the futureward direction.

If you want to move through space — say, to the right along the horizontal axis — you need to change your four-velocity to include some horizontal component. That is, you need to rotate the arrow. But as you do, notice that the arrow now points less in the futureward direction — upward along the vertical axis — than it did before. You’re now moving through space, as evidenced by the fact that your four-velocity now has a space component, but you have to give up some of your motion toward the future, since the four-velocity arrow can only rotate and never stretch or shrink.

This is the origin of the famous “time dilation” effect everybody talks about when they discuss special relativity. If you’re moving through space, then you’re not moving through time as fast as you would be if you were sitting still. Your clock will tick slower than the clock of a person who isn’t moving.

This also explains why the phrase “faster than light” has no meaning in our universe. See, what happens if you want to move through space as fast as possible? Well, obviously you rotate the arrow — your four-velocity — until it points straight along the horizontal axis. But wait. The arrow cannot stretch, remember. It can only rotate. So you’ve increased your velocity through space as far as it can go. There’s no way to go faster through space. There’s no rotation you can apply to that arrow to make it point more in the horizontal direction. It’s pointing as horizontally as it can. It isn’t even really meaningful to think about something as being “more horizontal than horizontal.” Viewed in this light, the whole idea seems rather silly. Either the arrow points straight to the right or it doesn’t, and once it does, it can’t be made to point any straighter. It’s as straight as it can ever be.

That’s why nothing in our universe can go faster than light. Because the phrase “faster than light,” in our universe, is exactly equivalent to the phrase “straighter than straight,” or “more horizontal than horizontal.” It doesn’t mean anything.

Now, there are some mysteries here. Why can four-velocity vectors only rotate, and never stretch or shrink? There is an answer to that question, and it has to do with the invariance of the speed of light. But I’ve rambled on quite enough here, and so I think we’ll save that for another time. For right now, if you just believe that four-velocities can never stretch or shrink because that’s just the way it is, then you’ll only be slightly less informed on the subject than the most brilliant physicists who’ve ever lived.

EDIT: There’s some discussion below that goes into greater detail about the geometry of spacetime. The simplified model I described here talked of circles and Euclidean rotations. In real life, the geometry of spacetime is Minkowskian, and rotations are hyperbolic. I chose to gloss over that detail so as not to make a challenging concept even harder to visualize, but as others have pointed out, I may have done a disservice by failing to mention what I was simplifying. Please read the follow-ups.

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From http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/ps4wn/youporncom_is_now_a_100_redis_site/c3s3xp4?context=3. Click the link for more questions!

Okay, see this stick? If I swing it, it moves swoosh. If I hit it against something, it stops moving smack. If I let go of it, it falls down clatter. You’re not very surprised by this, right? That’s because everything in the world uses the same rules. About three hundred years ago, a guy named Isaac Newton wrote down all the rules, and we call them the laws of physics.

Scientists still use his versions of the laws for all sorts of stuff, but there are a couple places they found where things are a little bit different. One of them is for things that are very, very small. So if I break this stick in half crack, both halves work just like they did before, right? swoosh, smack, clatter And if I break one of the halves snap it does too. If you had a tiny saw and a microscope, you could keep making smaller and smaller sticks, and they would all work the same way, right? Well it it turns out that when things get small enough, smaller than things that are too small to see, they start to act a little bit weird.

So imagine this stick is just one of those tiny tiny pieces inside the stick. If I throw it to you and you catch it, then someone uses a stick-finding machine, it might turn out to still be in my hand, or it might be in your hand like it would if it was a normal stick. Yeah, it’s weird: scientists were really confused about this when they started seeing it, and a whole lot of them working together took about fifty years to get it right, because it’s so strange. Eventually they figured out that the tiny stick, and everything else that small, is actually always in multiple places at once. So even though we think it’s in my hand, it’s actually also in my other hand, and already on the ground, and still in my hand but just a tiny bit to the side of where we thought it was. Even stranger, the stick is more in some of these places than it is in others: most might be in this one spot in my hand, but less in my other hand, and just a tiny bit on the ground. And it’s all still the same stick. This is all really weird, but one thing about it is still perfectly normal: all of the places the stick is in still follow Newton’s laws. If I drop the stick from my hand onto the stick on the ground, it’ll stop when it hits the ground, and the pieces will add up, so most of the stick will be on the ground.

(I think now would be a good point to mention that yes, a real conversation with a 4 year old wouldn’t go like this. You’d have to stop and answer questions and re-explain pieces of it. I’m just proof-of-concepting this.)

Okay, so remember when I said the stick could be in more than one place? It can also be going more than one speed! So some of the stick could be on the ground and not moving, and some could be in the middle of falling down, and some could be just starting to fall out of my hand so it’s still moving slowly. Another very smart man, this one is named Werner Heisenberg, figured out that the more different places the stick is in, the less speeds it is moving in, and the more speeds it has, the less different places its in.

(PS: grammar Nazis, it’s really “less,” not “fewer.” Can you figure out why?)

So if all the tiny parts of everything are acting this strange, how is everything so normal when you get back to big things like us? Well, there is one more odd thing about tiny tiny things that I haven’t told you yet. Say I have TWO tiny tiny sticks. You know how one can be in a whole bunch of places at once? Well it turns out that sometimes you have to take both sticks together to figure out how much is in any place. So maybe for most of the tiny sticks, stick one is in my hand and stick two is on the ground, and there’s also some where stick two is in my hand, and stick one is on the ground. But, there’s no sticks where both are in my hand at all, even though both sticks by themselves are at least a little in my hand.

(This is where the kid will have the most questions, and also probably where anyone reading this is going to have questions, so ask away. Though tell me whether I’m allowed to use grown-up words like “particle” or I have to keep saying “tiny stick.”)

When how much of one tiny tiny thing is in one spot depends on how much of another tiny tiny thing is in another spot, scientists call those two things “entangled.” That makes it sound like it’s a special, weird case, but it’s really the other way around. Scientists go through lots of trouble to get tiny things that aren’t entangled so they can study them, but just about everything is entangled most of the time. All the tiny tiny pieces of stick in this actual stick are very entangled with eachother. That’s how big things like us and this stick don’t seem like they’re in more than one place at a time. The pieces of stick are all in a few places at once, but every different group of tiny sticks adds up to the big stick in my hand, even if the tiny pieces could be swapped around a little.

(As a final note, I’ve always heard the phrase as “if you can’t explain it to a particularly bright 4 year old, you don’t understand it yourself.” I think we lost the dim one in the second paragraph.)

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There are two demons: public schools (state funded) and private schools.

Private schools are always higher than public schools mostly because they can. So let’s just focus on the public schools for now, and apply as much as you can to private institutions.

Public schools go up for various reasons:

1) state funding cuts will raise the cost of tuition required per student

2) added programs (like a BA in Interior Design to a tech school :boggle:) basically watering down where the money leftover can go to… drives up cost

3) sports

4) larger population of people than just 10 years ago. In 2000, America had 15 million college students. In 2010, America had 20 million college students. That’s a 33% increase. Tuition costs reflect the demand.

5) the trend in America is actually lending to a decline in overall intelligence  I don’t like the word “intelligence” here, but for a lack of better…). I have no source for this, but trust me when I say that American institutions have lower quality students overall than in 1980. I’m using anecdotal evidence from 10-15 colleges that I work with. Small sample size, but whatever, it’s my opinion. Example of this: increase in enrollments overall, but decline in the science/tech field enrollment overall. But, this lends to the raise in cost: college has been changed since 1990 in that it is now accessible by the masses. No longer does it matter if you have a Bachelor’s degree in the workplace, right? You need at least a Master’s to work your way up. So, colleges raise their prices to, again, accommodate for demand.

6) inflation

7) the cost for a gallon of gas in 1990 was $1.16. Now?

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From http://static.thepiratebay.org/legal/sopa.txt

INTERNETS, 18th of January 2012. PRESS RELEASE, FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE.

Over a century ago Thomas Edison got the patent for a device which would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear”. He called it the Kinetoscope. He was not only amongst the first to record video, he was also the first person to own the copyright to a motion picture.

Because of Edisons patents for the motion pictures it was close to financially impossible to create motion pictures in the North american east coast. The movie studios therefor relocated to California, and founded what we today call Hollywood. The reason was mostly because there was no patent. There was also no copyright to speak of, so the studios could copy old stories and make movies out of them - like Fantasia, one of Disneys biggest hits ever.

So, the whole basis of this industry, that today is screaming about losing control over immaterial rights, is that they circumvented immaterial rights. They copied (or put in their terminology: “stole”) other peoples creative works, without paying for it. They did it in order to make a huge profit. Today, they’re all successful and most of the studios are on the Fortune 500 list of the richest companies in the world. Congratulations - it’s all based on being able to re-use other peoples creative works. And today they hold the rights to what other people create. If you want to get something released, you have to abide to their rules. The ones they created after circumventing other peoples rules.

The reason they are always complainting about “pirates” today is simple. We’ve done what they did. We circumvented the rules they created and created our own. We crushed their monopoly by giving people something more efficient. We allow people to have direct communication between eachother, circumventing the profitable middle man, that in some cases take over 107% of the profits (yes, you pay to work for them). It’s all based on the fact that we’re competition. We’ve proven that their existance in their current form is no longer needed. We’re just better than they are.

And the funny part is that our rules are very similar to the founding ideas of the USA. We fight for freedom of speech. We see all people as equal. We believe that the public, not the elite, should rule the nation. We believe that laws should be created to serve the public, not the rich corporations.

The Pirate Bay is truly an international community. The team is spread all over the globe - but we’ve stayed out of the USA. We have Swedish roots and a swedish friend said this: The word SOPA means “trash” in Swedish. The word PIPA means “a pipe” in Swedish. This is of course not a coincidence. They want to make the internet inte a one way pipe, with them at the top, shoving trash through the pipe down to the rest of us obedient consumers. The public opinion on this matter is clear. Ask anyone on the street and you’ll learn that noone wants to be fed with trash. Why the US government want the american people to be fed with trash is beyond our imagination but we hope that you will stop them, before we all drown.

SOPA can’t do anything to stop TPB. Worst case we’ll change top level domain from our current .org to one of the hundreds of other names that we already also use. In countries where TPB is blocked, China and Saudi Arabia springs to mind, they block hundreds of our domain names. And did it work? Not really. To fix the “problem of piracy” one should go to the source of the problem. The entertainment industry say they’re creating “culture” but what they really do is stuff like selling overpriced plushy dolls and making 11 year old girls become anorexic. Either from working in the factories that creates the dolls for basically no salary or by watching movies and tv shows that make them think that they’re fat.

In the great Sid Meiers computer game Civilization you can build Wonders of the world. One of the most powerful ones is Hollywood. With that you control all culture and media in the world. Rupert Murdoch was happy with MySpace and had no problems with their own piracy until it failed. Now he’s complainting that Google is the biggest source of piracy in the world - because he’s jealous. He wants to retain his mind control over people and clearly you’d get a more honest view of things on Wikipedia and Google than on Fox News.

Some facts (years, dates) are probably wrong in this press release. The reason is that we can’t access this information when Wikipedia is blacked out. Because of pressure from our failing competitors. We’re sorry for that.

THE PIRATE BAY, (K)2012

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You know what they say — when someone else says it better than you can…

Here is an excellent story about studying, motivation, and intelligence (originally posted here)

Alright, sorry about the delay. I was too busy celebrating the New Year. ;) I hope you’re still checking in on this account.

Anyway, I think I have a bit of a unique perspective. I’ve seen MIT admissions from the perspective of the applicant, a student, a teacher, and now as an alumnus conducting interviews of prospective students. The fact that you mentioned MIT specifically really made me feel like I should take the time to produce a good response!

I wanted to start by writing out standard admissions advice (e.g. no one thing like SAT scores will keep you from being admitted, etc.). While all that is true, the problem you’re dealing with is so much bigger than that. The problem you’re coming up against is one I’ve seen so many of my fellow students encounter. If I could set up a wavy-fade flashback, I’d show you my freshman year.

I moved into one of the dorms at MIT thinking I was hot shit. I had, after all, just gotten into MIT. And beyond that, I had tested out of the freshman calculus and physics classes, meaning that I was able to start math “a year” ahead in differential equations and start with the advanced version of the physics 2 class we have. Registration went by easy enough and I was pleased with my decisions.

Term rolled in and I was getting crushed. I wasn’t the greatest student in high school, and whenever I got poor grades I would explain them away by saying I just didn’t care or I was too busy or too unmotivated or (more often than not) just cared about something else. It didn’t help that I had good test performance which fed my ego and let me think I was smarter than everyone else, just relatively unmotivated. I had grossly underestimated MIT, and was left feeling so dumb.

I had the fortune of living next to a bright guy, R. R. was an advanced student, to say the least. He was a sophomore, but was already taking the most advanced graduate math classes. He came into MIT and tested out of calculus, multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, real analysis (notoriously the most difficult math class at MIT), and a slew of other math courses. And to top it all off, he was attractive, engaging, sociable, and generally had no faults that would make him mortal.

I suffered through half a semester of differential equations before my pride let me go to R. for help. And sure enough, he took my textbook for a night to review the material (he couldn’t remember it all from third grade), and then he walked me through my difficulties and coached me. I ended up pulling a B+ at the end of a semester and avoiding that train wreck. The thing is, nothing he taught me involved raw brainpower. The more I learned the more I realized that the bulk of his intelligence and his performance just came from study and practice, and that the had amassed a large artillery of intellectual and mathematical tools that he had learned and trained to call upon. He showed me some of those tools, but what I really ended up learning was how to go about finding, building, and refining my own set of cognitive tools. I admired R., and I looked up to him, and while I doubt I will ever compete with his genius, I recognize that it’s because of a relative lack of my conviction and an excess of his, not some accident of genetics.

It’s easy to trick ourselves into thinking that “being smart” is what determines our performance. In so many ways, it’s the easiest possible explanation because it demands so little of us and immediately explains away our failings. You are facing this tension without recognizing it. You are blaming your intelligence in the first two paragraphs but you undermine yourself by saying you received good grades you didn’t deserve. You recognize your lack of motivation as a factor in your lack of extracurricular activities but not in your SAT scores (fun fact: the variable that correlates most strongly to SAT performance is hours of studying for the SATs). Your very last statement could just as well apply to your entire post:

But none of this has to do with my intelligence; I’m just rambling.

You got A’s because you studied or because the classes were easy. You got a B probably because you were so used to understanding things that you didn’t know how to deal with something that didn’t come so easily. I’m guessing that early on you built the cognitive and intellectual tools to rapidly acquire and process new information, but that you’ve relied on those tools so much you never really developed a good set of tools for what to do when those failed. This is what happened to me, but I didn’t figure it out until after I got crushed by my first semester of college. I need to ask you, has anyone ever taken the time to teach you how to study? And separately, have you learned how to study on your own in the absence of a teacher or curriculum? These are the most valuable tools you can acquire because they are the tools you will use to develop more powerful and more insightful tools. It only snowballs from there until you become like R.

MIT has an almost 97% graduation rate. That means that most of the people who get in, get through. Do you know what separates the 3% that didn’t from the rest that do? I do. I’ve seen it so many times, and it almost happened to me. Very few people get through four years of MIT with such piss-poor performance that they don’t graduate. In fact, I can’t think of a single one off the top of my head. People fail to graduate from MIT because they come in, encounter problems that are harder than anything they’ve had to do before, and not knowing how to look for help or how to go about wrestling those problems, burn out. The students that are successful look at that challenge, wrestle with feelings of inadequacy and stupidity, and begin to take steps hiking that mountain, knowing that bruised pride is a small price to pay for getting to see the view from the top. They ask for help, they acknowledge their inadequacies. They don’t blame their lack of intelligence, they blame their lack of motivation. I was lucky that I had someone to show me how to look for that motivation, and I’m hoping that I can be that person for you in some small capacity over the Internet. I was able to recover from my freshman year and go on to be very successful in my studies, even serving as a TA for my fellow students. When I was a senior, I would sit down with the freshmen in my dorm and show them the same things that had been shown to me, and I would watch them struggle with the same feelings, and overcome them. By the time I graduated MIT, I had become the person I looked up to when I first got in.

You’re so young, way too young to be worried about not being smart enough. Until you’re so old you start going senile, you have the opportunity to make yourself “smarter.” And I put that in quotes because “smart” is really just a way of saying “has invested so much time and sweat that you make it look effortless.” You feel like you are burnt out or that you are on the verge of burning out, but in reality you are on the verge of deciding whether or not you will burn out. It’s scary to acknowledge that it’s a decision because it puts the onus on you to to do something about it, but it’s empowering because it means there is something you can do about it.

So do it.

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Original post here. This post was made in reference to American anti-intellectuallism throughout society. While I don’t agree with everyone’s sentiment in the thread, this was my favorite comment:

I’m going to throw one thing out there that will probably get buried. The world continues to become increasingly more complex to the point where fewer and fewer people can understand the basic mechanical underpinnings of the things around them. Essentially, it is a triumph of aggregate social, technological, and scientific advancement creating a world where less and less people can grasp the knowledge out there. Instead of accepting the this notion and admitting our relative helplessness and ignorance, people reject the very foundations of what has created their lifestyle to begin with. While people may be more educated, that doesn’t mean they are smarter. They just simply have more standardized education. At one point, we probably had an intelligence surplus with people capable of doing much more technically complex things working manual labor. Today, that is not the case. We have the reverse problem, not enough intelligence and skill to fill the demand for highly technical professionals. Not everyone can be doctors, lawyers, and engineers. However, there simply aren’t the number of blue collar jobs or even low level white collar jobs that can support the lifestyles we have been indoctrinated to believe we deserve.

When I speak to people about the true nature of public policy most people glaze over. It’s extremely complex and people just can’t seem to grasp many of the intricacies without training and even then some after that. Yet, this is topic that can have a big impact on their lives. So, to feel involved, they follow the McNews on the TV, designed to sway their opinion without having to explain anything. Pick any sufficiently advanced subject and speak to them about it. It might be difficult for you to grasp what they are talking about. For some people, no matter how hard you try, they will not understand the mathematical principles behind quantum mechanics. I think many people inherently understand their ignorance, but to the natural rah rah, Americans are the best, ethnocentric propaganda we are fed starting at infancy, this admission creates severe cognitive dissonance and eventually rejection. Instead of admitting we don’t understand and are powerless, we reject those who we think know more than us and instead mirror our own personal values. For an example of this in action, just watch any GOP debate. While some of the candidates are true idiots (the eventual outcome of the trend I outlined), many are actually very intelligent people. So intelligent, they realize how stupid their base is and know what to say to win them over.

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Based on http://www.salon.com/2011/12/16/three_myths_about_the_detention_bill/singleton/

1) It expressly empowers the President — with regard to anyone accused of the acts in section (b) – to detain them “without trial until the end of the hostilities.”

2) It allows the President to target not only those who helped perpetrate the 9/11 attacks or those who harbored them, but also: anyone who “substantially supports” such groups and/or “associated forces.”

3) The only provision from which U.S. citizens are exempted here is the “requirement” of military detention. For foreign nationals accused of being members of Al Qaeda, military detention is mandatory; for U.S. citizens, it is optional. This section does not exempt U.S citizens from the presidential power of military detention: only from the requirement of military detention.

Basically, as a protestor, you can be considered a terrorist because of this law’s vague wording. And as a terrorist, even as a US citizen, you can be indefinitely detained.

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I don’t understand the logic behind wanting a group of people who don’t specialize in economics or government policies to come up with a cohesive stand alone message for what they want changed.

It’s clear the biggest idea they all seem to share is

• A.) The majority of the country’s wealth lay in the hands of too few people.

• B.) Those people are using that money to buy politicians, and there needs to be new laws and policies to stop it from happening.

• C.) More and more people are in debt, and unemployed every single day, and they need a better exit strategy than “You shouldn’t have done this, or that, and you should have done this. I do this, and I’m fine.”

It’s not up to people who don’t specialize in creating laws to write one. The demands are there, politicians need to stop screwing around talking about how they don’t know what’s going on, and start formulating plans. If you’re a congressmen, or anything with very good knowledge about politics don’t wait around until these people start throwing trashcans in windows out of frustration so you can just discredit the entire thing. Come up with an idea, give it to the public, and keep doing that until a compromise is met.

That’s how a government is supposed to work. Not fucking around looking for sound bites of the people who don’t know what they’re talking about, so you can continue to not care about how you’re ruining the country.

Edit: You know, if there is so much general dissatisfaction in the country that nobody can get behind one single message, maybe there is a far bigger underlying problem. I don’t think so many people being outraged at so many different things is a bad thing for a movement, it’s a wake up call for the entire system.

Another edit: I think the whole 99% vs. 1% slogan (while catchy) is detrimental to the cause. It’s not the doctor that is making 450k a year who is the bad guy in this situation. The entire 1% isn’t a problem, the problem is the fact that these people are in the 1%. When you think 1% of the population you think billionaires, but that’s not who makes up the 1% anymore. That’s how uneven the wealth distribution is now. The .1% are the people who are corrupting politics, not the lawyers, and doctors, and the guy who owns 7 burger kings.

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