Once I learned speedwriting I write x10 more. Usually, it was relatively hard for me to mobilize my energies to write articles and courses. Since the start of the COVID19 crisis, I have been writing like a possessed person. Part of it was checking in action the principles of my new Speedwriting course. Yet, some of it was a real sense of urgency. I will share my reasons. See if you start acting like me.
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The world is changing
Suddenly in less than five years the world as we knew changed.
- People work remotely. With the COVID19 crisis, significantly more people started to work remotely. Once they tried they found it useful. The competition is truly global.
- Artificial intelligence gets smarter. In fact, I feel that unless we also get significantly smarter, we will be downgraded to the status of pets for the robotic lords.
- US is losing its dominance. China is not just the factory of the world. Cheap production is being relocated to southeast Asia. China is becoming an intellectual powerhouse second to none.
- Science cannot be trusted. This sentiment is shared by hillbillies and high brow intellectuals for different reasons. For me, research results are not reproducible, peer review too slow and labs are very political.
- Preppers become the new mainstream. I kind of feel this but did not finish my analysis yet. Possibly if I write more about the subject I will understand it better.
Basically I feel that we as a society need to learn FAST, and that traditional education does not provide the means. There is an internal drive to step in and share the resources that I have acquired for the common toolset.
My kids are growing
So far my children have been small, but this is slowly changing. My eldest, Leeron, is acquiring my habits. He is 13 years old. He reads and 500wpm, knows two programming languages, loves music and photography, and watches the same stuff that I do on TV. Leeron is already asking all the right questions.
Rather than answer each question several times, I prefer to scale my presence using recorded video lectures. So I simply try to answer my boy’s questions in the format of a course.
My second son is only 11 years old. He already has all the right questions, but he is not yet ready to understand my answers.
When my children will grow up they will need all the knowledge and guidance I can provide. They will also need to learn faster and apply their knowledge more effectively than any generation before them.
Because now I can
Finally, I became productive enough to generate articles and other media as fast as I want to. I had to build a long processing pipe and optimize each step of the way and this took years, but now I am finally ready.
During COVID 19 were in lockdown for two months and I wrote and filmed two full courses (8 hours of video) in addition to daily articles (1500 words each). This is x10 faster than I was 5 years ago,
A also feel that I have many subjects to write about. I have been reading a lot for years, and now I think I have enough understanding to write about the subjects I read.
The more we know, the less we understand
By now I kind of need this writing as a part of my personal processing pipeline. I acquire knowledge, then I analyze what I know, and next, I need to create. If I do not create, I cannot be sure in the quality of my own understanding. This is very much like academic studies: at some point, you need to write a project paper, build a model, write an article, and then later summarize the process in a thesis paper. Otherwise, knowledge and understanding are latent.
I believe in the concept of scientific thinking. It worked just fine for centuries. With time, only large laboratories and institutions with formidable funding can generate a flow of scientific results. Certain pivotal individuals can still challenge and change the establishment, but this is extremely hard. If there is an issue with oligarchs in the scientific community, we can try to democratize the scientific process.
Being competitive
There is a very valid question regarding our ability to face the competition.
- If the game has fixed rules, AI with less than a year of training will outplay the best human champion with a lifetime experience.
- When the task is simple, it can be outsourced into countries where facilities and human lives are cheap.
- If a task can be sufficiently separated into multiple smaller subtasks, there is a clear advantage to a large team from a country that cultivates teamwork and proficiency.
Basically we are left with complex tasks in a constantly changing environment, where solving the task requires formidable creative and analytical skills. Let us call our small group “highly trained professionals and experts”.
For each of us, there will be a small army of caregivers: people who maintain our cars and houses, delivers goods, and takes care of our needs. The caregivers are competitive because they work with us and know what we need even better than we do.
And then there are huge facilities, like mines, farms and factories, national parks and museums, and very few people who take care of them.
Everybody else is anxious for a very good reason. They need great preachers and coaches to help them in this turbulent time.
In my own way, I try to help all those people: scientists and engineers, doctors and teachers, artists and preachers. And this makes me want to write…
Religion and evolution
I firmly believe that religion and evolution are not mutually exclusive. If there is a god, evolution is his plan in action. If there is an evolution, religion provides us with a certain evolutionary advantage, otherwise, we would denounce it.
As creative and productive individuals we can use the beneficial thinking patterns from all human activities, ignoring the belives that do not benefit us. Philosophy, the love of wisdom, is the very basic schooling upon which we build our civilization. Math (like Grothendick’s algebra), physics (like quantum physics and black holes), and biology (like epigenetics) are so complex that they evade intuition of regular people. These subjects are so ridiculously complex, that the Big Bang was proposed and proved by a catholic priest.
A large part of my writing is a meditative process, a sort of meditation in action or devotion through intellectual practice. I simply cannot grasp the immensity of the unknown, and so I write. Karl Marx claimed that an ape transitioned to a man through labor. As ridiculous as this claim sounds for us, I believe that through a focused effort we can ascend to the next level of our personal evolution.
Manifesto…
This article is not planned. I do not have an outline or other articles to refer to. It is inspired by recent events and the changes I undergo as a result. Somehow it is forming into a sort of manifesto, an “I believe” statement.
Going from existential anxiety to affirmative actions is very natural for me. This is an acquired defense mechanism anyone can use. I think I acquired it when I was 14 years old, dealing with the hardships of my own immigration while learning about the holocaust survivors and things that kept their sanity.
With all the threats and adversity we face, we tend to be very privileged and entitled when compared with our ancestors. A 100 years ago, a manifesto could easily generate a revolution and massive suffering, but now I think it is a call for a very quiet personal revolution within our own mind… I definitely hope that a well-placed spark of realization can generate immense progress with joyful exploration.
