Notes for the Book: A Hierarchy of Understanding

Posted on Thursday 28 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Next, a hierarchy of stages about the extent to any of us understands the universe. (Which is distinct from simply being aware of it, though it overlaps it somewhat.)

  1. At the base level is the understanding of primitive tribes about the world and its extent, especially those in isolated valleys (e.g. Borneo) or isolated island (e.g. North Sentinel Island, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island). They know only what they explore on foot or can see from the highest mountain. (The language in the Old Testament reflects such a view of the world.) These tribes engage in story-telling to explain where things came from and how things work, applying instinctive attitudes of human nature to “explain” their existence, the weather, and so on, revealing the innate need for narrative, i.e. cause and effect, to everything in sight.
  1. Next, learning the world is bigger than just your local tribe. There are worlds beyond the hill, other tribes with different languages and customs. Broadly, then, learning that the things in your experience aren’t the best just because they’re yours. Understanding that followers of all religions think theirs is true and all the others false. Being cosmopolitan. Being, to an extent, savvy. (But: the preference for narrative explanation still prevails here.)
  1. Third, possible only in the past century or so, becoming aware of the age extent of the universe, how vast it really is, how tiny our Earth is within it, and given this, how naïve and parochial it is to think that our world or our tribe is somehow special in the eyes of that agency-detected creator. Analogies of the extent of time—fitting 14 billion years into a single day, in which humanity appeared on Earth in the last few hours or minutes on December 31st (the Cosmic Calendar, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Calendar)—help to intellectually understand this, but it’s difficult for anyone with a human brain to appreciate these scales emotionally. The lesson is that reality is larger than human intuitions; be humble, be savvy.
  1. Fourth, finally perhaps the intellectual understanding that cause and effect simply don’t apply at cosmic scales. Again, quantum mechanics, or Hawking’s notion that time and space are intertwined in the sense that time began at the big bang, so there was nothing before it; it doesn’t make sense to ask what “caused” the big bang, or what happened before it, than it does to ask what’s north of the North Pole. Here is where the intellect is needed in place of actual understanding. And somewhere here is the recognition of certain human geniuses, like Feynman, like Ramanujan, seem able to perceive (perhaps understanding isn’t the right word) things as impenetrable and counter-intuitive to ordinary humans, as human understanding of mathematics would be to dogs.

So science fiction informs this hierarchy at every level, though it’s most effective in evoking the third and suggesting the fourth. (The first level is reflected in a certain set of SF stories about primitive or enclosed societies that discover they are, for example, actually on a generation starship, and have forgotten their origins.) The third, the discovery of the vastness of time and space, is what the hoary phrase “sense of wonder” is about. And the fourth is suggested by those few science fiction tales that suggest realms of time and space that are incomprehensible to humans (if perhaps not to aliens).

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Links and Comments: Wars on Science; Epistemology; Conspiracy Theories

Posted on Wednesday 27 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

A facebook friend comments:

“Research” isn’t just googling to find someone saying what you want to hear. That’s confirmation bias, and cherry picking.

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My own thought, a week ago: The big political conflicts aren’t about asking the same questions and reaching different conclusions; it’s about thinking some questions and their answers are more important than others.

Comment now: the central one of these is the conflict between freedom and equality. Both may be enshrined in the US founding documents. But they’re not consistent. Conservatives are more concerned about freedom (to discriminate if it pleases them), liberals more about equality and justice, even if those require regulations to entail freedoms.

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Vox, Sean Illing: Inside corporations’ war on science: A new book explains how corporations create a climate of doubt around science and expertise.

Keyed off the recent decision by Johnson & Johnson, looking back at the history of Big Tobacco and the fossil fuel industry. It’s not the *scientists* who are trying to fool you, it’s the industries and their cherry-picked “scientists” to support corporate profits. This is why there are industry regulations (which Republicans are always trying to undermine).

“The Republican base,” Michaels told me, “has been acclimatized to be skeptical of mainstream science, and easily believe accusations that they are being manipulated by the deep state, the liberal media, and pointy-headed scientists.”

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In its broadest sense one of my key interests is epistemology, how we know what we know, how we know what we think is true, more loosely about how people in general think they know what is true, which is why I keep emphasizing contingency and circumstance, why I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason, and why I’m fascinated by the attraction of conspiracy theories, virtually all of which are self-serving fantasies.

In NYT, long-time technology writer Farhad Manjoo writes, The Worst Is Yet to Come, subtitled, The coronavirus and our disastrous national response to it has smashed optimists like me in the head.

Key comment:

In a book published more than a decade ago, I argued that the internet might lead to a choose-your-own-facts world in which different segments of society believe in different versions of reality. The Trump era, and now the coronavirus, has confirmed this grim prediction.

As I said in a recent blog post, we seem to be living in different alternate realities, with different opinions about the facts of reality, simultaneously.

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Another strong essay:

Religion News, Tara Isabella Burton: How Americans’ ‘tell it like it is’ attitude renders us vulnerable to conspiracy theories

The mythos of American self-making — that with the right amount of grit and cunning, the individual can determine his own truth and fate — lends itself to the view that civil bureaucracies and establishments, by contrast, are inherently sclerotic and corrupt: the information they provide automatically suspect.

This tendency can be glimpsed in the contrarian programs of investor and PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who founded and funded a Thiel Fellowship designed to coax promising would-be entrepreneurs to drop out of college and go straight into solitary startup life. It is this tendency, too, that underlies our collective obsession with “fake news” — and with alternative news outlets and conspiracy theorists, like Alex Jones, who claim to “tell it like it is” — in coded contrast to the wisdom of the establishment.

Conspiracy theories tie into a wider mistrust of civic life, combined with an optimistic belief that the individual is capable of “discovering” — through a cursory YouTube search or other research in the digital landscape — truths about the world order that the establishment is trying to hide.

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And one more:

The Atlantic: Ellen Cushing: I Was a Teenage Conspiracy Theorist. Subtitle: Want to know why wild conspiracism can be so irresistible? Ask a 14-year-old girl.

Conspiracy thinking is incredibly compelling. It promises an answer to problems as small as expired light bulbs and as big as our radical aloneness in the universe. It is self-sealing in its logic, and self-soothing in its effect: It posits a world where nothing happens by accident, where morality is plain, where every piece of information has divine meaning and every person has agency. It makes a puzzle out of the conspiracy, and a prestige-drama hero out of the conspiracist. “The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms,” the historian Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1964 essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” “He is always manning the barricades of civilization.” What Hofstadter declined to put a finger on is the intoxicating feeling of having insider knowledge about the fate of the world, or at least believing you do.

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Lunacy, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Wars on Science; Epistemology; Conspiracy Theories

Link and Comments: Ezra Klein on the Psychology of Coronavirus Response

Posted on Saturday 23 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Vox:
Why are liberals more afraid of the coronavirus than conservatives?: Covid-19 and the complex politics of fear.

By Ezra Klein, co-founder and editor-at-large of Vox (and whose recent book, WHY WE’RE POLARIZED, I’ve just begun reading).

Good question. You’d think conservatives, being more sensitive to contamination and conscientious about purity, would freak more about a deadly disease. Why don’t they? Before reading the article, my guess is their sense of autonomy overrides personal concerns; they resent authorities, especially experts (whom they mistrust, or simply don’t understand), telling them what to do. Also, the relatively off-stage progression of the virus, where the majority of Americans still don’t know anyone affected (I know only one), helps to diminish its apparent threat.

The article talks about the numerous psychological studies into the psychological foundations of political differences, e.g. Jonathan Haidt’s (cf. THE RIGHTEOUS MIND), that inform the difference between conservatives and liberals. E.g. “Liberalism and conservatism are rooted in stable individual differences in the ways people perceive, interpret, and cope with threat and uncertainty.” How dangerous the world is. Then why do conservatives downplay the coronavirus?

Klein speaks to various political psychologists and summarizes their ideas.

First: Liberals are more caring about others. Conservatives do fear, but of economic devastation.

Or: It’s partisanship, and a Republican is in charge, downplaying the threat. Haidt: “When Obama was president and America was threatened by Ebola, it was conservatives freaking out, demanding a more vigorous government response to protect us, while Obama kept steady on following scientific advice.” Trump was at the forefront of the Ebola panic (because he could criticize Obama).

Or: Trump followers are more afraid of threats from human outsiders (e.g. “welfare cheats, unpatriotic athletes, norm violators, non-English speakers, religious and racial minorities, and certainly people from other countries”), than of disembodied threats like climate change and Covid-19. Thus Trump responds the pandemic by attacking China.

The concluding section is worth quoting at length, with discussion of motivated reasoning and that famous Upton Sinclair quote.

Here’s my view: Political psychology is like the soil in politics. There are differences in the liberal and conservative soil — particularly in how they view threat, change, tradition, outsiders, and diversity — so different kinds of politicians, tactics, and movements take root on the two sides.

Trump is, at his core, a suspicious, threat-oriented, traditionalist figure — he’s nostalgic for the way things were, hostile to outsiders, angry over demographic change (he’s even, in normal times, a germaphobe). There’s a reason he took root in conservative soil.

By contrast, former President Barack Obama is optimistic, cosmopolitan, and temperamentally progressive — he looks at change and sees hope, he looks at other countries and sees allies, he sees diversity as a strength. There’s a reason he took root in liberal soil.

But once a politician captures a party, other dynamics take over. For one thing, partisans trust their leaders and allied institutions. Very few of us have personally run experiments on the coronavirus, or gone around the world gathering surface temperature readings over the course of decades. We have to choose whom to believe, and once we do, we’re inclined to take their word when describing contested or faraway events.

For another, we all fall prey to motivated reasoning, in which we shape evidence, arguments, and values to align with our incentives. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Many Republican officeholders, led by Trump, think the coronavirus threatens their reelection because the lockdown threatens the economy. As such, they’re motivated to believe that reopening the economy sooner is better, and attracted to evidence and arguments that support that position. Sometimes that means downplaying the coronavirus. Sometimes that means accepting its risk but suggesting the costs of reopening are worth it. In both cases, the argument is working backward from the desired conclusion.

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Links and Comments: Loners, Law and Religion, Our Anti-Science Leaders, the Roots of Science Denial

Posted on Saturday 23 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Atlantic: How Loners Are an Evolutionary Insurance Policy

This echoes my comments about how diversity is needed in the human race because different attitudes and skills may be needed in situations that require different ways to survive. Though the article isn’t about humans at all.

There are other contexts in which loner behavior might prove evolutionarily crucial as well. Couzin and others have found, for instance, that some forms of loner behavior can lead to the emergence of leaders in groups. “Are these differences predetermined?” Couzin says. Or are they products of “a decision-making strategy that depends on both the physical and the biotic environment around the animals?”

Finding answers to these questions will be difficult. But in the meantime, the work demonstrates that to truly understand how collective and cooperative behaviors evolved, and how they continue to operate, researchers may need to study the seeming misfits that don’t participate.

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NY Times: Storytelling at the Supreme Court: Two recent cases on religion are about more than the tales they tell.

Why the law, and religion, is about story-telling, not truth or reason.

The court heard two cases dealing with religion during its recent weeks of telephonic argument sessions, and on the surface both display this quality of shared premise. You might call it the “of course” principle: Of course nuns shouldn’t be expected to subsidize birth control for their nonprofit institution’s employees. Of course a religious school should be free to hire and fire teachers whose job it is to impart to young students the core meaning of the faith.

In this column, I want to unpack those “of courses.” …

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Salon, Mario Livio: Our anti-science leaders are the geocentrists of today: Galileo would have seen a familiar impulse in the politicians who reject scientific predictions on the coronavirus

Put bluntly, what Galileo established as separating science from other types of “revealed” truths was this: facts and the ability to make testable predictions mattered. There weren’t anymore your facts and my facts, neither were there facts and “alternative facts”. There weren’t revealed facts or aspirational facts. Facts came in only one flavor — observable. Observations, experiments, and reasoning based on reliable data became the only acceptable methods for discovering facts about the world.

Galileo was punished by the Church, of course.

Given his own experience, Galileo might not be that surprised to hear that political considerations would make grim predictions about the spread of the coronavirus targets for science deniers at high places. He would be far more surprised — in fact probably perplexed — by the anti-vaccine science deniers, because those are putting their own children at risk. He would be besides himself over the science deniers of climate change.

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The Conversation (via Pocket Worthy): The Thinking Error at the Root of Science Denial: Could seeing things in black-and-white terms influence someone’s views on scientific questions?

This reflects my thoughts that religious fundamentalist thought, the need for certainty and “knowing” that God has a plan and everything happens for a reason, is uncomfortable with the perpetually provisional nature of science. (And in turn, when things happen that don’t seem to have a cause or reason, conspiracy theories are invented to explain them.)

This widespread rejection of scientific findings presents a perplexing puzzle to those of us who value an evidence-based approach to knowledge and policy.

Yet many science deniers do cite empirical evidence. The problem is that they do so in invalid, misleading ways. Psychological research illuminates these ways.

….

In my observations, I see science deniers engage in dichotomous thinking about truth claims. In evaluating the evidence for a hypothesis or theory, they divide the spectrum of possibilities into two unequal parts: perfect certainty and inconclusive controversy. Any bit of data that does not support a theory is misunderstood to mean that the formulation is fundamentally in doubt, regardless of the amount of supportive evidence.

There is no “proof” in science.

Proof exists in mathematics and logic but not in science. Research builds knowledge in progressive increments. As empirical evidence accumulates, there are more and more accurate approximations of ultimate truth but no final end point to the process. Deniers exploit the distinction between proof and compelling evidence by categorizing empirically well-supported ideas as “unproven.” Such statements are technically correct but extremely misleading, because there are no proven ideas in science, and evidence-based ideas are the best guides for action we have.

I have observed deniers use a three-step strategy to mislead the scientifically unsophisticated. First, they cite areas of uncertainty or controversy, no matter how minor, within the body of research that invalidates their desired course of action. Second, they categorize the overall scientific status of that body of research as uncertain and controversial. Finally, deniers advocate proceeding as if the research did not exist.

With examples from climate change deniers, creationists, and anti-vaxxers.

Posted in Culture, Evolution, Science | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Loners, Law and Religion, Our Anti-Science Leaders, the Roots of Science Denial

Notes for the Book: a Hierarchy of Awareness

Posted on Friday 22 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Here’s another theme that will inform my book, if I survive to write it.

Our understanding of the universe, our understanding of physics and biology, of deep history, is biased by the way we learn to understand and think about the world from our earliest awareness as an infant. Key books I’ve read over the past decade that inform this theme are by Jesse Bering and Andrew Shutlman, but these ideas are implicit in many others.

  • As an infant and child, we form ‘intuitive’ theories about how the world works, based on genetic proclivity (e.g. the detection of agency that enables the infant to respond to its parents, and later to perceive intent in random events that are the basis for superstition and divinity) and the experience of the world at certain scales. People who grow up and never examine those naïve assumptions consider them ‘common sense.’
  • As an adult, one can learn how the world actually works, even if (as Shtulman indicates) educated adults never entirely overcome those innate proclivities. One can, furthermore, consciously learn science, become aware of humans’ innate psychological biases, and train oneself to detect and avoid rhetorical fallacies. (At the level of human interaction, one indulges in these biases and fallacies because the point is to win, not to be right. Trying to be right is science.)
  • Next perhaps is pursuing science into realms where it’s impossible to develop intuitive understand, e.g. quantum mechanics, which we know works because we have QM equations that make predictions that have proven true over and over, for decades. In effect, we surrender any personal, intuitive, understanding to the algorithms of the equations, because they work, and they indicate a level of reality completely separate from the part we interact with and think we understand.
  • Finally, perhaps, are the deeper issues which may be impossible to understand on any level – why the universe is the way it is, e.g. the fundamental physical constants. They seem arbitrary. If they are not, perhaps we will never understand why. (One answer of course is, if the constants weren’t as they are, we wouldn’t be here to ask the question; thus the multiverse hypothesis.) In this area is the intriguing notion that SF sometimes speculates about: would truly alien aliens think differently than us? Could they be more intelligent than us, as we are to dogs? And perceive things clear to them but incomprehensible to us, as we understand things incomprehensible to dogs? And if they do have some hyperintelligence, how did that intelligence come about? Did it evolve or was it engineered?

The last points are where science fiction explores; and an example is the hyperintelligence that visits the Earth in Fred Hoyle’ 1957 novel the Black Cloud, which I reviewed recently for Black Gate. (https://www.blackgate.com/2020/05/07/a-scientists-science-fiction-novel-fred-hoyles-the-black-cloud/). Not only does the Cloud perceive deep problems of the universe, when it tries to transfer its knowledge to human beings, they die. There is the suggestion of a greater reality beyond anything humans can perceive, or understand. Hoyle’s book was an early exploration of this theme; there are many later.

On the third bullet, I’ve acknowledged in my memoir essays how I “hit a wall” of intuitive understanding, both in physics and in math, at certain points, in my undergraduate education. The geniuses of the world are those who perceive complex truths intuitively, as if they are obvious. This is a general theme in science fiction, too. Most people live their lives by rote, relatively speaking; the geniuses who perceive higher truths are a tiny minority.

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Notes for the Book: Simplex, Complex, Multiplex

Posted on Thursday 21 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Several themes are starting to gel, so perhaps I’ll record some of my current thoughts as they now stand. Just the act of writing a blog post helps me organize and clarify them. I still find myself learning: almost every nonfiction book I read (I’ve read about 10 so far this year, not so many, given pandemic distractions) provides some new perspective, some incidental, some profound.

Briefly, the book I’m gathering my thoughts about will be a consideration of how science fiction informs our understanding of the world, and, moreover, provides insight into potential aspects of the world that we don’t yet understand. I’m developing the notion of various hierarchies of complexity, knowledge, and understanding, and the book will review how these apply to what we already know — how what we know has changed over the decades and millennia — with science fictional examples of stories and novels that illustrate the levels in those hierarchies, and more crucially, how the best science fiction tries to look around the corner, so to speak, from what we know to what we might come to know, or what might exist and be true that we may never comprehend.

Here’s a simple hierarchy, one I don’t think I’ll use directly, but perhaps one that planted the seed in my mind, decades ago, about different ways of looking at things, when I first read the book it’s from.

The idea is from a 1966 novel by Samuel R. Delany, Empire Star. It’s short but complicated, with many incidents that reflect off each other at the end as a kind of time/space vortex sends characters traveling through time, so that we’re able to see causes and effects in many different ways. (Near the end of the book he provides variations of temporal sequences that illustrate how the same events differ in cause and effect from different characters’ perspectives.)

The running metaphor of the book is his distinction of the simplex, and complex, and the multiplex. David Gerrold, on Facebook, recalled these ideas in a long post about a month ago. (Here’s a direct link to his post) I reread Delany’s book a couple weeks ago and Gerrold’s summary of how these ideas are introduced is pretty accurate:

Two characters are standing under a steelwork bridge. One of them tells the other to look up. That’s the simplex view of the bridge.

Then he tells him to move a ways down and look up again. This is a different view of the bridge. Now he has a complex view of the bridge.

Then he has him walk along while looking up and watching the interplay of motion among the steel beams — that’s the multiplex view of the bridge.

Gerrold then goes on align these three ideas with people who live in a rural community, people who live in more than one community, and people who travel internationally; from one to the next, the perspective and understanding of the world increases. However — he goes on to state, that doesn’t mean one of these states is necessarily superior to another. They are all useful in their ways, in their contexts.

This parallels my thoughts in this blog about political divisions, Jonathan Haidt’s ideas of moral foundations theory (which I explored in this post), that differences in psychology among people help understand political differences. But that’s not to say any one perspective is more correct than another; they’re all part of the diversity of the human race, all potentially useful given whatever circumstances might challenge the race’s survival. You never know which strategy will be needed in any given circumstances; you must not therefore force the entire race to conform to some ideologically correct view.

Still, this is giving the benefit of the doubt. Can we be sure some position along a spectrum like this is not superior, depending on how we define that word, to others? Isn’t knowledge better than ignorance, for example? Well, there are people who would disagree, those who value tradition over any knowledge that would challenge it.

But my thought in revisiting Delany’s triad of “exities” is to wonder if there isn’t a fourth level. Here’s where science fiction comes in. The most ambitious science fiction tries to go beyond what we know, everything cosmopolitan and everything extrapolated based on existing knowledge, to consider if there are realms beyond human understanding. What would we call this? Cosmiplex, perhaps? I’ll think about this.

Meanwhile, a cursory Google search of these terms turn up a 2016 blog post by a Finnish post-grad student in philosophy (whose name isn’t evident). He quotes the original Delany at length, and also quotes a book by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen, Figments of Reality, which I have but haven’t read, as well as the same authors’ The Science of Discworld, which I have read and commented about, here, in 2015). And their comments about a proposed fourth type of mind, in a novel by David Zindell, which they reject because “the concept of omniplexity is a simplex thought”.

Hmm. I will think about this.

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Links and Comments: Conspiracies! Conspiracies!

Posted on Wednesday 20 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Over the past several weeks there’s been an outbreak of stories and articles in the various legitimate media (New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, et al) about conspiracy theories related to the coronavirus pandemic. So many articles! Could this be mere concidence? Or perhaps… a conspiracy! By mainstream media to fool people into thinking conspiracy theories are bogus? Or real? Pick and choose whatever you want to believe, and if so-called “experts” dispute want you want to believe, than clearly there’s a conspiracy theory going on.

I’ve linked a bunch of articles recently on Facebook, captured in this post (with more to follow), mainly to challenge a bout of posts by a couple of my Facebook friends, only a couple of them out of 500 or 600.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my life — something I’ve truly changed my mind about, since a couple decades ago — is that you can’t change someone’s mind by patiently showing them evidence and expecting them to reach logical conclusions. That’s not how people work. People are concerned with group identity, and with *winning*, not with identifying truth. This informs much current politics (e.g. the conservative cry of “owning the libs”).

Conspiracy theories, is my provision conclusion, are the extreme, malignant forms of the natural human instinct for narrative. How human perception of the world around them turns everything into a story. This thing happens *because* of that thing. How children think rain happens *in order* to water the plants, and so on; adults, some of them at least, understand that the world is not fraught with agents. Still, the popularity of stories, everywhere, in literature, movies, political analysis, theology. The idea that everything happens for a reason. I’ll develop this theme more in my book, because it is a key idea in epistemology, how we know what is true, why people think they know what is true.

For now: items I’ve posted on Facebook in recent weeks.

The Atlantic: The Coronavirus Conspiracy Boom: Nearly a third of the people we polled believe that the virus was manufactured on purpose. Why?

The piece ends:

And if the one in three Americans who believes that the effects of COVID-19 have been exaggerated choose to forgo crucial health practices, such as social distancing, frequent hand-washing, and wearing a mask, then the disease could spread faster and farther than otherwise, and could cost many thousands of lives.

More generally, this:

New York Times: Why Coronavirus Conspiracy Theories Flourish. And Why It Matters. Subtitle: “Unseen villains. Top-secret cures. In their quest for reassurance during the pandemic, many people are worsening more than just their own anxiety.”

Since this article isn’t free to non-subscribers, I’ll quote a few passages:

The belief that one is privy to forbidden knowledge offers feelings of certainty and control amid a crisis that has turned the world upside down. And sharing that “knowledge” may give people something that is hard to come by after weeks of lockdowns and death: a sense of agency.
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The conspiracy theories all carry a common message: The only protection comes from possessing the secret truths that “they” don’t want you to hear.
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“People are drawn to conspiracies because they promise to satisfy certain psychological motives that are important to people,” Dr. Douglas said. Chief among them: command of the facts, autonomy over one’s well-being and a sense of control.
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The belief that we have access to secret information may help us feel that we have an advantage, that we are somehow safer. “If you believe in conspiracy theories, then you have power through knowledge that other people don’t have,” Dr. Douglas said.
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Italian media buzzed over a video posted by an Italian man from Tokyo in which he claimed that the coronavirus was treatable but that Italian officials were “hiding the truth.”
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In Venezuela, President Nicolás Maduro suggested that the virus was an American bioweapon aimed at China. In Iran, officials called it a plot to suppress the vote there. And outlets that back the Russian government, including branches in Western Europe, have promoted claims that the United States engineered the virus to undermine China’s economy.

One of the crucial things I’ve learned in my life is that you cannot show someone authoritative evidence and expect them to change their minds. There is good evidence, and bad evidence; conspiracy theorists can find evidence online to support any idea, no matter how outlandish. Just as the Flat-Earthers do.

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Forbes: Why It’s Important To Push Back On ‘Plandemic’—And How To Do It

Plandemic is part of a disturbingly successful trend in which deep-pocketed purveyors of pseudoscience produce slick, professional videos as credible-appearing documentaries. The lighting, narrative structure, the pacing, use of imagery, camera angles, editing techniques—these are all common documentary filmmaking conventions that we’ve come to associate with factual information.

The people producing this video know what they’re doing, and they’re very good at it. On a subconscious level, no matter what words are being said, this video feels factual simply because of how it was produced. It’s intentionally manipulative. It’s a textbook example of effective propaganda.”

And:

Conspiracy theories like those in this video are actively, directly harmful and dangerous. They can influence people’s behavior in ways that harm those people and public health—including you personally—in general. We can’t afford to let these ideas run unchecked.

If you don’t push back on them, even to those you love or don’t want to upset, you’re enabling them. You’re allowing people to spew harmful, dangerous nonsense that kills people and demoralizes the millions of health care providers trying to save lives.

The bottom of the article has various debunking resources that address the claims in the film.

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Slate, Dahlia Lithwick: Whose Freedom Counts?. Subtitle: “Anti-lockdown protesters are twisting the idea of liberty.”

My take: those insisting on re-opening are doing so in defiance of, or oblivious of, the inevitability of further spreading of the virus and increasing the number of deaths. It’s like a parable I’ve seen a couple times, once recently, which I’ll paraphrase: a man offers you $3000, on the condition that, if you accept it, someone in the world, somewhere, someone you don’t know, will die. Would you accept it? Now, the $3000 is the personal “liberty” to escape lock-down, to force a re-opening that would oblige many people to go back to work, and inevitably, to spread the infection and increase the number of deaths.

My prediction is that, despite the re-openings of many states underway, most people will continue to stay home (as I certainly will do), and the economies of these states will not magically rebound. Those who insist on going out will spread the infection, because some of them are infected but asymptomatic, and will infect others, some of whom will die.

This is an unprecedented event in all of our lives, and I understand why many people have trouble coming to terms with it.

Here is Dahlia Lithwick, who further down this essay invokes another writer about the difference between “freedom to and freedom from.” Lithwick:

The words freedom and liberty have been invoked breathlessly in recent weeks to bolster the case for “reopening.” Protesters of state public safety measures readily locate in the Bill of Rights the varied and assorted freedom to not be masked, the freedom to have your toenails soaked and buffed, the freedom to open-carry weapons into the state capitol, the freedom to take your children to the polar bear cage, the freedom to worship even if it imperils public safety, and above all, the freedom to shoot the people who attempt to stop you from exercising such unenumerated but essential rights. Beyond a profound misunderstanding of the relationship between broad state police powers and federal constitutional rights in the midst of a deadly pandemic, this definition of freedom is perplexing, chiefly because it seems to assume not simply that other people should die for your individual liberties, but also that you have an affirmative right to harm, threaten, and even kill anyone who stands in the way of your exercising of the freedoms you demand. We tend to forget that even our most prized freedoms have limits, with regard to speech, assembly, or weaponry. Those constraints are not generally something one shoots one’s way out of, even in a pandemic, and simply insisting that your own rights are paramount because you super-duper want them doesn’t usually make it so.

May 9:

Science Magazine: Fact-checking Judy Mikovits, the controversial virologist attacking Anthony Fauci in a viral conspiracy video.

Politifact: Fact-checking ‘Plandemic’: A documentary full of false conspiracy theories about the coronavirus

Daily Beast: Discredited Doctor and Sham ‘Science’ Are the Stars of Viral Coronavirus Documentary ‘Plandemic’: Coronavirus Grifters.

Washington Montly: Do Republicans Have a God-Given Right to Infect You?: The “Open-Up-Now” crowd’s flawed constitutional reasoning.

New York Times, Jamelle Bouie: The Anti-Lockdown Protesters Have a Twisted Conception of Liberty.

It seems many of us are living in alternate worlds, simultaneously.

\\

May 11:

Three more.

The Atlantic: If Someone Shares the ‘Plandemic’ Video, How Should You Respond?

The Week: The making of a coronavirus conspiracy theory

And here’s the New York Times summary, buried in today’s print edition on page B4, because it’s a fringe story. If there were any truth to it, all the reputable news sources would be all over it, because they’re in competition with each other, and would want to be first to expose any actual conspiracy (cf. Watergate).

Virus Conspiracists Elevate a New Champion, subtitled, “A video showcasing baseless arguments by Dr. Judy Mikovits, including attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been viewed more than eight million times in the past week.”

\\

And finally, if anyone hasn’t noticed, disgruntled, fired employee Judy Mikovits is on this tirade because she’s *promoting a book*! Plague of Corruption: Restoring Faith in the Promise of Science, with a foreward by notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And indeed, in the week after “Plandemic” was released, the book was #1 on the Amazon Bestsellers page.

Posted in Lunacy, Meaning, MInd, Psychology | Comments Off on Links and Comments: Conspiracies! Conspiracies!

More Standard SF Furniture: Robert Silverberg’s The 13th Immortal

Posted on Saturday 16 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

As I said in my previous post, I suspended reading for some weeks once the coronavirus lockdown began, in mid-March; things were too unsettled and uncertain to allow for the indulgence of sitting down and turning inward into a book. It was much more important to pay attention to everything going on in the outside world. And so instead I replayed most of the Myst games, over five or six weeks. As I finished those, or stalled on a couple of them, I returned to books. At the end of April, I began reading again: the first Asimov robot novel, then this rather incidental Silverberg novel, and since then a few more. Since I still have a backlog of 1950s “classic era” science fiction novels that I read a year ago to base future Black Gate columns on, I’ve decided to relax my purview for reading and especially reread the great SF novels from all decades since the 1950s. But more about those later.

There are reasons to occasionally read more ordinary novels from past decades, as I did with Robert Silverberg’s COLLISION COURSE (review at Black Gate here: https://www.blackgate.com/2020/04/09/a-fascinating-ordinary-1950s-sf-novel-robert-silverbergs-collision-course/). I’m a long-time Silverberg fan, especially for his mature work that I discovered in the early 1970s, yet my justification for reading his very early novels from the 1950s and 1960s is to identify the “standard SF furniture” of the time – the assumptions about space, and aliens, and ESP, and so on, that informed 1950s SF and which have lingered in popular culture via the franchises Star Trek and Star Wars, yet which have been overcome, derided, dismissed, by advancing scientific understanding, and abandoned or superseded by better ideas in the best SF of subsequent decades.

For this post, instead of copying in my complete summary notes (which sometimes I write as I read, sitting by the computer, and so which are extremely detailed), I will summarize more concisely, as a courtesy to any readers I might have.

So. Robert Silverberg’s THE 13TH IMMORTAL was, as he explained in the introduction to the 2004 Cosmos paperback edition, the first novel he wrote after winning a Hugo Award for “Most Promising New Author” in 1956. After winning that award, he pitched a novel to Donald A. Wollheim, publisher of Ace Books, which in that decade published “Ace Doubles,” in which two books were published, back to back, with a front cover on each side. He sold it, wrote it, and that’s how this novel first appeared.

Setting

The setting is some hundreds of years in the future, after a nuclear war. The entire world has been divided up into Twelve Empires, each ruled by an immortal Duke. Mutant animals, and humans, inhabit the landscape.

Plot

  • Dale Kesley works on a farm in Iowa, without memories of his early life. He’s visited by a man, Dryle van Alen, who is from Antarctica, who says he’s been looking for Dale for a long time. But the key to Dale’s identity is another person, Daveen the Singer, who also needs to be found. Despite his suspicion and confusion, Dale, on the basis of his having no memories of his early life, leaves the farm with Dryle.
  • They travel to Galveston, then via steamer to South America, and in Argentina are pursued by bandits. DvA disappears, and Dale is taken captive.
  • He’s taken the local Duke in Buenos Aires, Don Miguel, who assumes Dale is an assassin, and makes a deal with him to travel north to assassinate the North American duke instead, in exchange for his adopted daughter.
  • Dale travels to Chicago, encounters a mutant human who seems to know the future, and meets Don Miguel, who condemns him to prison. A mutant frees him; he travels south to a Mutie city, then a colony of artists in Kentucky, then to a mechanical city in Texas, then to a hobo camp, to eventually reunite with the mutant…who is actually the missing Daveen, and who has the power to magically transport them both to… Antarctica, a beautiful, high-tech city, in contrast to the squalor of the rest of the world.
  • Where Dale receives various revelations: that Dale is an immortal; that the other Dukes are sterile, and the Duke of Antarctica is… Dryle van Alen.
  • And finally: this has all happened before. Dryle is immortal, but not sterile, and therefore a threat to the other dukes; Dale, years before, wanted Antarctica to reach out to the rest of the world; his father refused, had Dale conditioned and hidden on a farm in Iowa to protect him from the other dukes.
  • But now, Dryle agrees, he will abdicate, and Dale, now a man, will take over, and help rebuild the world.

Comments

  • So, the standard sf furniture: the post-apocalyptic aftermath of a nuclear war; mutants, both human and animal, resulting from that war; the idea that mutant humans would have magical powers (precognition, teleportation); the idea that the world would split into advanced and primitive societies.
  • And immortality. It’s not explained early on why the dukes are immortal; it emerges that immortality was a mutation, and the rare few who acquired it gradually assumed power, dividing up the world between them, leaving the odd 13th one exiled in Antarctica.
  • A running theme is that Dale never understands why all this is happening to him.
  • And the notion that the protagonist doesn’t know his true identity is a standard plot device in SF and fantasy; if I recall correctly, this was also the main revelation of Silverberg’s most popular book, from 1980, Lord Valentine’s Castle.

 

Posted in Book Notes, Robert Silverberg, science fiction | Comments Off on More Standard SF Furniture: Robert Silverberg’s The 13th Immortal

Coronavirus Diary May 2020: Replaying the Myst games

Posted on Friday 15 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

Here we are at the middle of May, some seven or eight weeks in to stay-at-home orders here in the Bay Area – when it started, my partner began working from home, except for the one day a week he would go in to work, his site’s senior staff alternating days to be on site. His first day working from home was March 17. For the next five weeks I suspended reading of books entirely. Things were too unsettled and uncertain to allow for the indulgence of sitting down and turning inward into a book. It was much more important to pay attention to everything going on in the outside world. I’d started Brian Greene’s intriguing UNTIL THE END OF TIME, and left it suspended around page 30. Still there.

Instead, inspired by a New York Times article I linked on Facebook, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/24/arts/coronavirus-myst-nostalgia.html, about the comfort of replaying computer games from years past (the article writer’s childhood; my 40s and 50s), I did in fact, over five or six weeks, replay all the Myst games, including the associated Uru and Obduction. Well, not played; I followed walkthroughs posted on various online sites, to revisit the games’ environments, their beauty, without having to re-solve all their puzzles from scratch. And, well, I played RealMyst not the original Myst. The issue is that the early games in the franchise were what were derisively called “slideshow” games in which the player could move only to certain preordained positions or nodes. In Myst and Riven and Myst III the point of view at each node was fixed. By Myst IV you could at least swivel around from each node to see your surroundings in every direction… That was true of Myst V too. RealMyst, Uru, and later Obduction, were vast improvements: the player, using arrow keys, could move freely in any direction, look around from any spot.

I should set the context that I have never been a “gamer,” and in particular have never had any interest in “first-person shooter” games or racing car games or any games that involve competition with other players. I’m a solitary guy. In fact over the 30 some years since I bought my first computer—a genuine IBM PS/2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2) for some $2000, in 1987—I’ve played various solitaire games in part out of compulsion and in part as a mechanism to distract my conscious attention while my deep mind ponders other things. This is a legitimate thing. In the ‘90s there was Tetris; later things like Minesweeper; more recently Microsoft solitaire card games, and especially, currently, Microsoft’s Wordamant, where I play every month’s map and every day’s Daily Challenge. The Myst games, of course, are another league entirely than the solitaire games that take a few minutes each per round.

The first Myst game came out in 1993 and I was given it as a gift, by my long-time friend Larry Kramer, in 1994, for my birthday. I had to buy a new PC – a Gateway desktop, in a huge tower – to play it. Four years later, in 1997 (as I was launching the initial Locus Online website), I had to buy yet another new computer to play Riven. Trying it on the Gateway caused it to hang whenever I came into a scene with one of those spinning domes. The new one was a HP 8175 PC (Pentium II 233, 48 meg RAM, 56K modem, 17” monitor)—note the modem, this was pre-wifi, and the careful attention to specs about random access memory. The only people who worry about such stat’s now, I gather, are the gamers, whose new adventures require greater and greater computer power and memory and sophisticated graphics cards. Oh, and those collecting large video or music files. (For later games, I once had to purchase new graphics card, or several times install updated graphic drivers.)

Over the following 20 years, I eagerly purchased each new Myst game as it was released. Here’s a photo of all the physical editions I have, from the first releases of all the games through Uru and Myst V (IIRC the Uru expansion packs were downloads), a “10th Anniversary DVD Edition” of the first three games, the three print guidebooks I have, and finally the recent Myst 25th Anniversary Collection, which I helped fund on Kickstarter, with versions of all the games that will run on modern computers, encased in a big box that mimics the “books” used in most of the games.

And since I keep records about everything, I’ll note the following:

  • Myst, 1994, took me 10 days to complete
  • Riven, 1997, two weeks
  • RealMyst, 2001, was straightforward because it was the same puzzles as Myst
  • Myst III, 2001, two weeks
  • Uru, 2003, almost a month
  • Myst IV, 2004, almost a month
  • Uru expansion packs, 2004, 3 or 4 days each
  • Myst V, 2005, four days
  • Uru Live (online, the PC game with additional areas to explore), 2007; intervals over several months as new areas were released at intervals
  • Obduction, 2016, two and a half weeks
  • The Witness, 2016, almost a month

Keep in mind I had a day job in all these years (up to 2012), and since 2001 have had a live-in partner who disapproves of computer games, so I was only able to play them evenings, weekends, or on the sly. Yet, each time a new game was released, I was obsessed about it until finishing—I remember once I drove home from work at lunchtime because I’d had an insight into solving some puzzle, and needed to check it out immediately.

I’ve included The Witness here as the only game I’ve found over all these years that remotely approaches the beauty and complexity of the Myst games. I’ve tried others – e.g. Rhem, Schizm – but they pale in comparison, consisting mostly of convoluted puzzles without the underlying real-world sense of living places where, unfortunately, the power had been turned off (for example).

While all the Myst games involved a solitary player in some strange, bounded environment, having to solve puzzles of various types, they varied in the exact goal of the game-play, and the player’s interaction with other characters. Key points:

  • All of the games involve one or more characters with whom the player interacts, or at least listens to. In the first game, game creators Robyn and Rand Miller played the three roles of Atrus, the man created Myst by writing a “linking book,” and his two crazy sons Sirrus and Achenar. (I’ve always thought it odd that these names are one letter away from names of bright stars in Earth’s sky.) In later games professional actors, some quite good, were brought in to play other characters: John Keston (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keston) plays Gehn in Riven; Brad Dourif (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Dourif) as Saavedro in Myst III; Juliette Gosselin as the girl Yeesha in Myst IV; David Ogden Stiers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ogden_Stiers) as Esher in Myst V.
  • With the except of Uru, I think, all the Myst games offer multiple endings, one a successful or happy ending, the other or others unsuccessful or tragic ones. Which ending you reach depends on your interaction with the characters, usually about who you decide to trust. The ambitious player can save game progress at a key point, and restart it to take different paths each time to see all the endings.
  • The games all have musical scores. As with the actors, in the first and second games one of the creators, Robyn Miller, did the music; after that professional composers, Jack Wall and Tim Larkin. While the music in the later games is slick, Miller’s music in the first remains the most iconic and haunting.

As game technology advanced, the manner of game-play changed from game to game, as mentioned above. Also, while the games all had similar puzzles to solve, there was usually something distinctive about each game.

  • Uru’s game-play advances by finding and touching seven “journey-cloths” in each world, enabling return to the player’s central private island called Relto.
  • Myst V you have a “slate” on which you can draw a shape or icon and then set the slate down on the ground; then when you step away from the slate, creatures called Bahro (as in Uru) approach the slate and interpret your mark and do something useful to solving a puzzle.
  • Myst IV you can “touch” things with your cursor and hear the sound of what tapping each item would be. And certain objects trigger memories of a character’s interaction with that object.
  • Myst III includes elaborate animations at the end of each age that take’s the player’s POV on some on a ride, on a trolley, back of a bird, or rollercoaster.

I will confess that I’ve never completed any of these games without searching out at least one hint. In the ‘90s game guides were published as trade paperback books, and I have them for Myst and Riven; since 2000 or so, when everything went online, there have been any number of sites that offer hints or walkthroughs or even YouTube videos showing how to solve every puzzle. I remember the exact point I got stuck in Myst: in the Mechanical Age there’s a control panel on top of an elevator, and the key to getting there is that you hit the “down” button in the elevator and then *step out* of the elevator in the brief interval before it starts moving. Then the control panel moves down and you can access it.

In contrast to the five Myst games, Uru was open-ended, with two “expansion packs” released a year after the original game to extend play and exploration of the underground city of the D’ni. Then the entire game went online, with additional areas added over a period of months in 2007. I played through some of those, but some of the “garden ages” required interaction between multiple players logged on at the same and able to interact. I found those annoying, as defeating one of the prime attractions of all these games: they were mysterious places one could explore privately. I didn’t want to have to interact with a bunch of strangers over the internet! Yet there were some intriguing differences between the main Uru games as installed on your PC, or accessible in Uru Online, so I did play most of the game online.

*

So do I have any favorite games or parts of games? Or anything I found relatively unpalatable or annoying? I think as I played them over the years, as they were released, I thought each new game was better in some way that the previous ones, if only because each had some new aspect of game play, or ways to interact with the environment. Yet I confess I never paid completely attention to the narratives behind the games—the rivalry between the boys, whey Gehn captured Catherine, and so on; and so the interruptions by Saveedro and Esher, the fragments of remembered conversations in Myst IV, were intrusions to be sat through. (There were two or three novels based on the games in the ‘90s; I never looked at them.) Perhaps that’s one reason I’ve replayed Uru, or parts of it, more often than any of the other games; after the introductory challenge by Yeesha, you’re off on your own, all alone.

I also look back more fondly on those games that were more than a hub world with three or four satellite worlds (or ages). Thus Riven, its ages more interconnected, and Uru, with its potentially indefinite collecting of new ages represented by books on you private home island in the sky Relto. I liked the music especially in the early games, and how the music enhanced the darker, moodier ages: Amateria in Myst III, Kadish Tolesa in Uru, Todelmer in Myst V, Kaptar in Obduction.

Fortunately a year or two ago I helped Crowdstart a 25th anniversary reissue of all the Myst games and Uru in versions suitable for modern computers. There was a long period, in the mid-2000s I think, when you couldn’t replay the original Myst or Riven, because they were incompatible with then-current operating systems.

And next is something called Firmament, https://fulfillment.fangamer.com/kindling/firmament, due some in 2020.

*

So since March 25th, when that NYT article appeared, I’ve played through, following online walk-throughs, all the games, including Obduction, with two exceptions. In Myst III I’m stuck at the same point I was originally, deep in Edanna near the glowing orchids, where you’re supposed to see a path through a rotting log in order to go further down. The game is too dark, the node movements too crude, and I can’t find the path down. And in Myst IV, I’m stuck at the monkey puzzle in Haven, with nothing happening when I spin the horns however slow or fast. Also I find the game-play interface most annoying in Myst IV; it’s nodal, and it’s slow, with a second or two pause after clicking before moving to the next node. So as I write, I’m paused at those points, but have finished the others all the way through.

Now maybe it’s time to get back to reading books.

Posted in Games, Personal history | Comments Off on Coronavirus Diary May 2020: Replaying the Myst games

Academics

Posted on Friday 15 May 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

(This is another essay to become a section of my “memoirs,” to be promoted to a page rather than a post, eventually.)

It’s a truism that once you become an adult and have a career job, no one cares about your GPA (Grade Point Average) in high school or college, or even what college or university you graduated from. (At best the university you graduated from got you interviews with companies who otherwise would have ignored you.)

Still, sometimes a look back at report cards and college grade reports can be interesting, even revealing. (I’ve seen a couple of my Facebook friends quote comments from their earliest report cards, to illuminate or contrast their early performance with their eventual careers.)

And since I’ve saved all my report cards, all the way from kindergarten, I think I’ll show some of them there, and comment about them.

I do have two particular points to make.

  • First, the earliest report card comments were generally correct about my later academic performance. At the same time, I did not always excel in subjects that later became my central interests.
  • Second, my college records from UCLA and later CSUN showed that my academic performance was dramatically different when I was just attending by rote, versus when I had a goal to reach. A B average at UCLA, and an A average at CSUN.

Kindergarten

This was in Apple Valley, 1960-61, at Yuca Loma Elementary School, in the windy Mojave Desert. I have two artifacts from this. First, a “Conference Summary” from November 13, 1960; I had been in school a couple months. There’s a long hand-written comment by my teacher, Elaine Kutrosky.

She wrote:

Social Studies—

Mark certainly seems to work hard during our work period. He is usually found working with the blocks constructing something practical, or crayoning or even in the playhouse working hard at being someone. He talks quite well for a five yr. old.

Work Habits—

Mark does concentrate fairly well and usually finishes all projects he starts out. He does need to be reminded to go back and clean up a little better.

I can almost say Mark had some adjustment problems but not quite. He seemed a bit mystified when school started but took our class situation in his stride and is doing fine. Sometimes it is hard for him to realize that sharing is a necessity but after talking with him he understands.

Also at times he need reminding to do his responsibilities. I feel that we should help him assume his responsibilities at school. I think if we both gave him some responsibilities at school and at home would help him realize that responsibilities are important.

And it’s signed by my mother, Helen E. Kelly. (I’m not sure what “responsibilities” referred to exactly. Cleaning up better?)

And I have my report card, or “Kindergarten Growth Report.” The scores are S, for satisfactory, S+, S-, or N, for needs improvement. I got one N, for “I accept responsibility.” I can’t imagine now what that meant. I got S+ scores for being able to relax (i.e. when we took naps on towels laid out on the floor), following directions, speaking well, being polite, and working well alone. (I’m still very good at this last item.)

The one comment from Elaine Kutrosky was “Mark seems to have potential for being a good student.” Note that this time my mother signed it as Mrs. Robert Kelly.

Grade School

I don’t have a report card from the few months I attended Grant Elementary in Santa Monica, finishing first grade. The next card I have is from the end of second grade (A2 meant advanced 2nd grade, while B2 meant beginning 2nd grade). Throughout elementary school we were graded on “knowledge and skills,” on the one side, and “school adjustment” on the other. The former group included Reading, English, Mathematics, Civics, Science, and other subjects; the latter group covered Effort, Work Habits, and Citizenship.

The possible scores are Outstanding, Very Good, Satisfactory, Needs to Improve, and Unsatisfactory. If these correspond to grades A to F, then in the second period I got As only for reading and spelling. Otherwise I got Bs and Cs, the latter mostly in School Development.

This time my father signed the card.

In grades 3 through 6 we got report cards that looked like this. Again, in 3rd grade, I got high marks for reading and spelling, otherwise Bs, except a C in physical education. (As I’ve said elsewhere, I hated the enforced games, like dodgeball.) Yet in contrast to 2nd grade, I improved and got As in Effort, Work Habits, and Citizenship. In 4th grade I got similar marks, mostly As, Cs only in handwriting, music, and P.E. Slight variations in 5th grade.

At the end of the 6th grade – the ultimate judgement of elementary school – I finished with 12 As and 4 Bs. In those last two or three years, I’d always been recognized as one of the top students in each class. (As I recall, given the size of the school, each year’s class occupied two classrooms, about 30 students in each classroom.) But, as I walked out of Vanalden Elementary School for the last time, I understood that one or two other students had higher percentages of As than I did. Oh well; I would never see most of the other students there again.

It’s curious that a couple of those Bs were in science, and music, which later became core interests of mine. What did science consist of in 5th or 6th grade? I don’t recall. And in 5th grade, when I got a C in music, that was the year we got “tonettes,” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonette), a basic wind instrument in plastic, like a simple recorder (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recorder_(musical_instrument)), which I recall being pretty good at, or at least enjoyed. I suppose I wasn’t that good. (Later, I my 20s, I bought a plastic recorder from a music store at the Northridge Mall and played around with it for years, playing simple tunes from folk music or movie scores. I still have it, but haven’t played it in years.)

Junior High and High School

As explained on my Personal History page for these early years, the key fact about the six grades, from 7th through 12th grades, is that I attended five different schools over those six years. That was a consequence of family moves to Illinois and back, and of course the transition from Junior High to High School.

I began at Sequoia Junior High for the 7th grade. I have “Progress Reports” with no grades, just comments. “Tops in class” my math teacher wrote. My English teacher wrote “good student—very perceptive”; my Geography teacher wrote “outstanding”; my homeroom teacher Mrs. Lamberto wrote in October “Use guidance room time wisely—read—study” but by December wrote “a ‘joy’ to have in H.R.—real gentleman of a student.” I also have a separate “Complementary Report to Parents” from my Geography teacher, dated 11/17/68, saying “Mark does very fine work.”

I have two report cards, one with four As (English, Geography, Math, Winds [music, beginning clarinet], one B (in wood shop), and one C (Phys. Ed.). The second with the same subjects, my grade in English fallen to a B, my grade in shop, now drafting, an A, and my grade in P.E. a D(!) – this was when we had to throw softballs, and I was ‘uncoordinated.’

And then a mid-school-year transfer to small town Illinois, to Cambridge Community Schools. I have one report card. Mostly As, but a B in arithmetic, and in vocal music (I don’t remember that class at all), and in Phys Ed, yet an A in instrumental music, even though, as I’ve written elsewhere, the move promoted me into a class of students with more practice learning instruments than I’d had, and I felt I never caught up, was always a minor 3rd rate performer.

And then Glen Crest Junior High School, in Glen Ellyn IL, for one year. A school that used numbers rather than letters. I got 5s in Social Studies, Science, and Math; 4s in other subjects except (of course) a 3 in Physical Educ. My conduct was Satisfactory in all cases.

And then to Glenbard Township High Schools, for two years. I attended Glenbard East (https://www.glenbardeasths.org/). At the end of these two years, I got 5s in geometry, geography, freshman science, and chemistry. 4s in most other subjects including English, algebra, health (this was sex education), concert band, and driver’s ed. (We had driving simulators, in class, and then drove real cars out on the icy-slippery local streets.) And P.E.

And then back to California for the last two years of high school, and James Monroe High School in what was then known as Sepulveda, now North Hills (either way, a 91343 postal zone district of the city of Los Angeles). I was doing really well in high school in Illinois, but the high school in California didn’t quite trust those grades, and so didn’t enroll me in as many advanced placement classes that I might otherwise have been enrolled in. Thus, for example, I had no science course in the 11th grade, when ordinarily I would have taken biology; so I never had a biology course in high school. In my first semester I had Advanced algebra/trigonometry, US History (which as I’ve described wasn’t a comprehensive course, but rather a series of 10-week studies on particular topics), German, and typing. And P.E. I’ve discussed the significance of the typing class, even though I got a B; As in the first three, a C in P.E.

My final high school marks, in June 1973, were better. I got As in physics, AP math, AP English (that memorable course with Mr. Eugene Friedman, who in addition to having us read classic novels and plays gave us weekly quizzes on current events via Newsweek Magazine, who had a monthly soiree at his house, on Louise Ave., for his students), and a credit for P.E. because Mr. Friedman had worked with the P.E. teacher to have me work as Friedman’s assistant instead of attending P.E. class.

I graduated 40th in a class of 1000.

And so my high school marks were high. As described in my Personal History for this era, I took the PSAT, did well, interviewed with CalTech and MIT, and ended up at UCLA.

 

IQ test

In the 11th grade, after scoring well on the PSAT, one of the things that happened, in addition to being summoned and recognized by the college counselor, was that I was pulled out of class one day for a private session with some visiting official, who gave me what I gather was an IQ test, or some test about identifying special students. I don’t know; I never heard the results. I do remember a couple particular things about the test.

First, one part was a page of simple arithmetic problems. I started at the top and worked my way down. The instructor said, the ones at the bottom count more. Feeling manipulated, I determinedly kept working them in order. And the time ran out, I didn’t finish the entire page. What was being tested here?

Second, another part was that I was given a blank page and asked to draw a human. I can’t sketch for beans, but I tried to do something, and what I realized was that I was using just the upper left corner of the sheet to draw and small figure – not the entire page, with a large sketch centered in the middle. Was that what was being tested?

As I said, I never heard anything about the results of this test. Presumably I was not identified as any super-extraordinary student.

College Entrance Exams

I took the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test, PSAT, sometime in 11th grade (as discussed in my Personal History essay). I scored 61 verbal, 73 math. According to the booklet that accompanied my results, those corresponded to about 95 and 98 percentile of all juniors who later entered college (and higher for all juniors). I was among the top four scores at my high school. This is what attracted the attention of the college counselor/AP English teacher, and got my photo on the front page of the Valley News and Greensheet, along with all the other 11th grade high-scorers in the San Fernando Valley (population at the time about a million).

The PSAT doubled as a test for the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (NMSQT). I don’t remember the details of that program; I think it depended on the college you went to, parents’ income, and so on. Since I went to nearby UCLA, where the tuition was something like $200 per quarter (three quarters a year, not counting summer), I didn’t qualify. So I never got any kind of scholarship.

Then in 12th grade I took the SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, which is used by the colleges you apply to, along with your high school GPA, and in some cases personal interviews (as I had with representatives from CalTech and MIT). And, optionally, you take various Achievement Tests in particular subjects.

You can retake some of these tests, but from the paperwork I have, I only took the SAT once. Verbal 650, math 780; 98 and 99 percentiles among all students, 95 and 99 among college bound students.

I took several Achievement Tests, a couple of them twice. Math 2: 760 the first time, 800 the second time. English: 710. Chemistry: 710. American History (why did I take that? I never had a decent history course in high school. Maybe it was required.): 460.

Some six years later, as I enrolled at Cal State Northridge for a Master’s Degree (which I didn’t finish), I took the GRE, the Graduate Record Exam. There were three scores, for verbal, quantitative, and analytical. I scored 760, 790, and 770.

UCLA, 1973- 1977

I’ve said this many times in various places, that attending UCLA, living at home with my parents and younger kids, commuting to school over those four years, was the worst situation I could have been in. Parents: sent your kids away to college. Let them live on their own. That’s as much a part of the college experience as taking university courses. Whereas I was stuck at home, with three younger noisy siblings; my four years at UCLA, driving there every day from home, were to me an extension of high school.

At UCLA, I did OK. My initial ambition was to study astronomy, my early passion. But an astronomy major entailed studying physics for the first two years, and I did OK only up to a point. Many people, I’ve understood from some of my Facebook friends, have a point in their studies, especially in physics or math, where they suddenly don’t “get it.” Their intuitive understanding of the subject disappears. (This evokes a deep theme, the idea that perception of reality is limited or enabled by one’s native intelligence, one that I’ll explore in my book about science fiction.) For me, it was the third quarter of my sophomore, quantum physics, Feynman diagrams, and I just didn’t get it. I couldn’t work my way through them. I got Cs, even a D, in those courses.

I didn’t have any clear goal about a career. At the end of my sophomore year, I changed major to math, where I’d done better. As in any major, certain core courses are required, and beyond them are various options, specific courses of study one can select from; every field has specialties. I did better in some core courses than in others, and so I gravitated toward the fields I did best in. I hit a wall with what’s called “analysis,” which is the justification from first principles of calculus. It involved much study of infinitesimals, and asymptotes, and I struggled. On the other hand, I liked, and did well, in math classes on discreet topics: number theory (elementary topics there involve prime numbers and the Fibonacci sequence), linear algebra, group theory especially, and so on. I moved from getting Cs in math classes – my major! – to getting As.

I notice, riffling through my files, that on my SAT tests I identified my career goal as “doctorate.” My early ambitions to become an astronomer would obviously have indicated that direction, since there are few industry jobs for astronomers. During these years at UCLA, I had to recalibrate. For a time I considered becoming a teacher, say, a high school math teacher. Even then, I felt I was good at explaining things. (….whatever happened to that?)

As I look at my “Undergraduate Student Record Card” (shown here), i.e. my grades while in UCLA, I recall another issue about attending college. Having taken AP, Advanced Placement, courses in high school, I had license to skip introductory college courses in those subjects. In retrospect, bad idea: college courses are faster and more rigorous than those in high school. My first quarter at UCLA, I took math 11C – skipping 11A and 11B – and got a C. Similarly physics; I got a B, then a C in second quarter. I should have started from the beginning, in college.

CSUN, 1980- 1983

Here we come to the second point in my introduction. After working a non-technical job for a couple years after finishing UCLA, I rallied myself and decided to go back to school, this time in the more useful field of computer science. Part of the timing here is that I had to have supported myself for a couple years before I was eligible for student loans and work/study. Thus, I quit my day job and lived, for two full years, on student loans and a part-time job on campus. I took a full load of courses in each of four semesters, over two years. I enrolled at first for a second bachelor’s degree. Having the first such degree, I was exempt at CSUN from various “breadth” requirements, courses outside your major required to broaden your horizons. So I only had to take computer science courses, and some peripheral engineering and philosophy (i.e. formal logic) courses, to satisfy the requirements for a B.S. in computer science. I also took a few math courses, some of them perhaps required (e.g. combinatorial algorithms) but some perhaps just for fun.

Anyway, for four semesters running, plus one summer session, I got straight As. In 22 different subjects. (Some were small courses like labs or 10-week intros to old computer languages like Fortran and Cobol.) Of course, there’s a substantial difference between a UC school and a Cal State school; the Cal State campuses are middle-tier universities, somewhere between community colleges and the top-tier UC system. So it would always have been easier to get straight As at Cal compared to UC, whatever my determination.

By Spring of ’82 I’d decided to pursue a career job, and got much assistance from campus programs to bring corporate recruiters on site. But I’d also decided to continue school, and changed my intentions from a 2nd bachelor’s degree (which I therefore did not receive) to a master’s degree. I started work in June ’82, but kept taking courses in the evenings for another year and a half, three semesters. The Cal State colleges, unlike University of California campuses, served many students who worked during the day and took classes at night.

But it was a lot of work. In Fall ’82 I enrolled in two full courses and one prep course on how to develop a thesis. Too much work. I dropped the latter, got an A in one of the others, but only a B in the third—only because I didn’t complete the special project required for the A. I took one course in Spring ’83, and got an A. And then I took one class in Fall ’83, one which required writing two or three big papers, and was not keeping up—so I dropped it and got an incomplete. Ironically, that last course was in “software engineering,” i.e. the process by which industry software projects are planned and managed – exactly what my day job was all about!

So I finished with a cumulative GPA of 3.95, without a degree. But the courses at CSUN had served their purpose. I had a full-time professional job, one that I kept, with variations in assignments, for 30 years.

Certificates and Awards

If in Boy Scouts you got lots of badges and patches, so many that you need a vest-like “patch jacket” to display them all, but no paperwork, in school and college (and later at work) you lots of paperwork in the form certificates and awards that one could frame and put on your wall (but no badges). Here are some photos of a bunch of them from Junior High and High School.

The earliest, at upper left, is for participating in an “Elementary School Mathematics Field Day,” in May 1967, i.e. near the end of 6th grade. I don’t remember this.

The next, upper right, is an “Industrial Arts Award” in 7th grade for having done well in that drafting course. I suppose my father was tickled, him being an architect.

The next two items, with ribbons, were for participating in Math Club test, the MAA; again, I don’t remember the details. I was 3rd in my school one year, 2nd the next.

The three at the bottom were consequences of my having scored well on the PSAT, and having become a finalist for the National Merit Scholarship and a life member of the California Scholarship Federation. My membership in that federation never had any consequences beyond receiving these certificates.

And the ones along the left are various “service” and “honor roll” certificates for having had high GPAs in 7th and 8th grades.

I’ll have a bunch more analogous certificates and awards when I summarize my professional career at Rocketdyne.

Another IQ Test

A few years later I took another IQ test, this one self-administered. That may sound odd, but the test was deliberately designed to be extremely difficult and not open to the casual looking up of answers. It was called the Mega Test – it even has a Wikipedia page, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mega_Society — and was designed to discriminate among those who score highly on standard IQ tests. (I seem to recall that I did take a standard IQ test at some point, and scored 132? But I have no record of it.) The test was published in Omni magazine in early 1985, and readers were invited to submit their answers, taking as much time as they needed to work them out, for scoring. I spent a considerable amount of time—I have a folder full of several dozen sheets of paper with calculations and diagrams trying to work out the answers – submitted my answers, and got a scoresheet in return dated May 23, 1985. Of the 48 questions, I answered all but 7, but I got only 31 correct and so was incorrect on several I thought I’d figured out.

Anyway, I got 31 of 48 correct, corresponding, according to their booklet, to an IQ of 162.

I can’t find the test itself anywhere online, though there’s a similar one here, http://miyaguchi.4sigma.org/hoeflin/ultra/ultra.html. But I’ll photograph the photocopies I have of the test I took, along with my answers and results. (I’ve inserted this photo at especially high resolution so you can read all the original questions.)

I never bothered to apply to Mensa (or similar organizations); I wasn’t interested in joining a club, I just took the test for fun, as a solitaire puzzle to see how much of it I could figure out.

Final Point

Of course, there’s an obvious third point to make: there’s not a high correlation between high grades, or a high IQ, and success in life. I had a decent career, earning a bit over six figures a year by the end of it (in 2012), but I didn’t move into management or become any kind of expert. Outside work I built some databases, wrote some reviews, created a couple websites. I even won a major science fiction award. But I’m not the least bit famous, and it’s unlikely anything I’ve done will be remembered once I’m gone.

 

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