Tools and Terror
Sir Keir Ladycock Starmer has been trying to make political capital out of his father’s occupation. Despite living and operating in circles that have next to nothing to do with the ‘common man’, he’s trying to say (or at least infer) that because his dad was a (presumably lowly) toolmaker, he’s in touch with the man on the street1.
I don’t know whether this is true or not, but at least we do know that Starmer’s dad did, at least once in his life, make a tool.
Tools are wonderful things - and I’m not trying to be vulgar here - they’re the reason why the human species is bloody amazing. I love technology, despite not at all loving some of the uses it gets put to.
A couple of years ago I had to get my cataracts fixed. As I was lying there whilst a highly trained and skilled surgeon was faffing about with my eyes I thought about all of the amazing things that we had to have invented, all of the systems and supply chains that needed to be in place, so that I was able to avoid a not-so-old age of blindness. How many ‘near miracles’ needed to have happened so that I could see properly again?
You can do this kind of thing with almost anything you find useful in your life. Think about all the things that needed to be in place so that you, right here and now, can enjoy the benefits of whatever that useful object is. It could be something mundane like your toaster, or it could be something like your hearing aid.
If you do this, you’ll realize that human progress, particularly with respect to technology, has been a truly wonderful thing, and truly complex. Not only have we invented lots of stuff, but we’ve also put in place all the complicated manufacturing processes, delivery systems, and economic systems that make it all possible for so many to enjoy the benefits2.
The flip side, of course, is that some of these things come with a cost (not just in financial terms). The benefits have also not always been fairly distributed amongst the world’s population, and we’ve also developed technologies that have the potential to wipe out all human life on the planet.
Despite these dangers and imperfections, I am profoundly, profoundly, grateful for the contributions of all those dead white men upon whose magnificent shoulders we stand3.
I wish there was some remote island somewhere, let’s call it Decolonia, where all the “de-colonize” retards could set up camp and live their blissful lives free from the influence of the things they hate so much.
I will always remain so very, very, grateful for all the wonderful things we humans have managed to achieve.
It extends into the artistic and “philosophical” spheres, too. I do not consider myself to be a Christian, for example, but I am profoundly grateful that some Jewish dude named Joshua did what he did and inspired a faith based on a set of stellar moral principles4. Whilst these principles have not always been properly applied in history they underpin much of our modern sense of morality. This is something that even some ardent atheists are beginning to acknowledge as they struggle with our current collapse of traditional values that centre things like home and family and community and loving one’s neighbour as oneself.
That’s the bit “above the paywall”, in a manner of speaking, because what I really want to talk about is that despite these wonderful, wonderful, technological things, we also shouldn’t lose sight of our own human capabilities; in short, we need to use tools, not let tools use us.
I first noticed this trend whilst trying to get my students to think. I entered academia after 20 years working at an industrial research lab. One of the things that stunned me was how dependent the students were on their calculators.
The most egregious example I witnessed was whilst invigilating (US : proctoring) an exam. A Master’s level exam. Advanced engineering mathematics. As I was walking round I noticed one student had actually typed the following into their calculator
7 x 1 =
I had to stop and watch more closely, because I couldn’t process what I was seeing.
There were many, many, similar examples I witnessed. Basically, the vast majority of students would reach for their calculator whenever they had to do any calculation, even the most trivial.
I tried to figure out what the heck had gone wrong. Part of the problem may be to do with the more ‘modern’ approach which tends to view rote repetition of things like the times table as being ‘wrong’. I think at an early stage this kind of rote repetition, as boring as it is, is essential. It also shouldn’t be the entire basis upon which maths is learned, either.
Part of the problem, I also felt, was that the students lacked confidence in their own abilities. I began to view calculators as a kind of double-edged sword - and I jokingly told my students that I wanted to wire their calculators into the mains to deliver a small electric shock every time they were used, so that they’d only reach for them when it was absolutely essential to do so.
Their overuse of calculators had robbed them of almost any ‘gut feel’ for numbers and how they work.
Another part of the problem is, I speculate, that mathphobia also plays a role. This is the almost visceral response most people get when they see any math-related stuff. I get it, too, but because I’ve used maths for many years it kicks in at a later stage for me. I’m not phased by high-school level maths at all, for example, but some research papers densely packed with squiggles, tend to cause the odd cold sweat and palpitation.
It’s a kind of weird thing, because we all use maths, often without realizing that’s what we’re doing.
Let’s suppose you’re planning your kid’s birthday party. You’ve invited 9 friends and you know that your precious poppet likes a certain kind of cake from a particular store. So that’s 10 people (you’ve already done a bit of maths there) and you realize that one cake is going to mean that everyone gets a tiny slice, because it’s not big enough (next piece of maths). You decide to buy 2 cakes (another piece of maths).
Now, keep that example above firmly fixed in your mind, and consider the following
What the bloody hell? might be what you’re thinking right now.
But what this quantity is telling us is that if you have a cake (c here which we take to be a constant - the store sells cakes of a given size) and you have x kids coming to the party (giving a total of x kids plus 1 precious poppet) then the more kids you invite (the bigger you make x), the smaller their piece of cake is going to be.
If you invite an infinite number of kids then you’ve ‘taken the limit’ which is what is meant by that ‘lim’ thing with the stuff underneath it and each kid gets nothing.
Try it and see what happens.
1 kid plus poppet each get half of the cake
9 kids plus poppet each get a tenth of the cake
99 kids plus poppet each get a hundredth of the cake
and so on . . .
You can’t, of course, invite an infinite number of kids, but you can readily see that the more kids you invite the smaller and smaller slice of cake they get. The slice of cake tends towards zero as the number of kids you invite gets big.
What you’ve done here is maths. You’ve intuitively grasped a property of division. It sort of ‘flips’ things. The bigger you make the thing on the bottom, the smaller the result is going to be. Conversely, the smaller you make the thing on the bottom, the bigger the result is going to be.
There can’t be too many people who wouldn’t be able to figure out the cake thing for their kid’s party, but as soon as you put it all into squiggles many people lose the ability to even process it at all. It’s a calculation you can do - but as soon as the dreaded squiggles get involved it, all of a sudden, becomes impossible.
It’s like a kind of terror gets induced.
The kind of terror that makes you desperately seek the solace of that comfort blanket known as a calculator.
If you do this too often, get too used to it, you end up damaging your ability to think, which is one of the greatest gifts we have.
A similar kind of thing happens when we get too attached to any particular ideology. We let that ideology do the ‘thinking’ for us. We reach for the ‘comfort blanket’ of our allegiance to a particular political party, for example. Or, as we witnessed far too often during the covoodoo era, we let The Experts™, do our thinking for us.
Despite having these amazing things we call minds which, for all we know, may be unique in the entire universe, we also have a regrettable tendency to be a bit afraid of using them at times.
Some of that may be fear at being seen to be wrong, or thought of as an idiot, and so we fall back on the safety of numbers5 (97% consensus - things like that).
When it comes to the Great Cough of Catastrophe™, the WuFlu, some of us may still be alive today because we trusted our own intuitions and thoughts and refused to get some weird shit injected into us, despite it clearly being the most safe and effective thing ever invented by mankind.
Use your tools, by all means, but don’t forget you have an amazing thing sitting inside your bonce. It might be the most amazing thing in the entire universe. If aliens do exist somewhere they might not agree, but at the moment we don’t know that.
And who wants to listen to beings who kidnap you and seem inordinately fond of sticking things up your rectum anyway?
Given the progressive mindset, that anyone can declare themselves to be whatever sex they want to be, use of gendered language like ‘man on the street’ can no longer be considered to be sexist.
It’s far from perfect. Of course it is. But try figuring out how to make it all ‘work’ another way. Comrade Marx was a fucking idiot.
I am similarly grateful to everyone who made these wonderful things possible. We should be celebrating them all - whatever their physical characteristics. I object, very much, to the whole obviously anti-white program that seems to be in vogue today. We shouldn’t be anti anyone on the basis of their flesh tones.
Which were themselves almost wholly lifted from Judaism.
Also known as the “Eat shit - 10 trillion flies can’t be wrong” principle.
Times tables is one of those things where rote learning is the way to go.
"The history of Spain from 12th century to 17th century" isn't.
The problem in schools/schooling stems from trying to force both math and history to use the same pedagogy/didactics.
It is perplexing to me that two things seem to be occurring simultaneously:
1. The idea that human brains are completely interchangeable, and thus the accomplishments of Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, etc are a result of “privilege” alone. Thus, the most important quality in candidate is their physical appearance; anybody can learn anything as long as they’re in the right place at the right time.
(And)
2. The idea that human brains are so wildly and uniformly incapable of learning and reasoning (with the exception of those with the right credentials) that much more energy has been devoted to psychologically manipulating us than to persuading us. In the field of public health, I first became aware of it when I tried to have a conversation with my children’s physician about vaccines. She was using the strategies advertisers use, not talking like a scientist.
Can’t we meet somewhere in the middle? I wish I’d told my child’s doctor: I’m not denying that you have far more expertise than I in the field of medicine. Moving forward, I hope you won’t deny that my natural intellect is far greater than yours. Now maybe we can have an interesting conversation.