The dumb get dumber: "The Meritocracy of the Mind".

hey guys if I look exhausted it's
because I am exhausted early early morning here in Victoria Harbour on my way to the gym to do my 200 push-ups just a couple people out here in the early morning jogging and such okay I'm making this video partly because I should have forgot to bring my books with me to the gym and I got to the gym if it weren't open yet alright they're opening a little bit later today so they can do yoga classes before they open up the floor for the rest of us to lift weights it's another story so come down and see the seagulls maybe we'll see some seals maybe we'll see some some river otters to hear on here on the coast before I go and go on the Floyd's look guys inequality always has this kind of aura of injustice about it and I think as children we appreciate or were taught to appreciate fables stories in which the poor become rich the rich become poor the ugly duckling rose up to be a swan the ugly girl grows up to be a beautiful princess even that that poor people marry rich people which is statistically very unlikely in our society and historically in European society we we respond positively the stories that don't represent the familiar tragedy of the rich getting richer of the poor getting poorer of people's disadvantages just getting worse and worse as this life goes on and of course I think we all rank hole against this also within the system of formal education credentials and in terms of informal education being an autodidact educating yourself just learning without the strictures of a university around you whether a teacher without an assigned textbook without a test or an exam simply the inequalities and human intelligence those can be quite scary and quite frustrating to that natural sense of human justice I don't know just the yearning the yearning for people to have an even playing field for for the game to be fair rather than rather than rigged there was a comment on my most recent video that got a lot of thumbs up and I don't think people were giving it a thumbs up because they felt this guy was disagreeing with me or that he was refuting something in my video I think people gave the because they sympathize with his story a guy wrote in and said that he was 31 years old and you know he had wasted ten years of his life but that he was going back to university now that he was pursuing his dreams and that he really didn't like the fact that I stated bluntly in my video that I felt the person I was criticizing Amy Kay a particular person that she had wasted years and years of her life and now in her 30s was not going to be able to accomplish much of anything she wasn't going to be able to make the transition to being a parent she wasn't gonna make the transition having a particular career or what have you so various people responded to that and as they say I think people were giving the thumbs up not so much because he was contradicting me but because they liked the uplifting story of him saying that even though he had wasted ten years of his life and put a foot on that we don't know we don't know what that means when someone tells you they didn't go to school and they didn't have a career then do they mean because they wasted 10 years or does that mean cocaine does that mean methamphetamines does that mean video games does that just mean I don't know lassitude just lack of ambition not that we don't you don't know when someone tells you they've got a gap of 10 years in life and there were also people responding this about whether or not my meaning was strictly biological like that this person had lost their I mean there were two sides the biological view of it some people believe and then this is quite false that like the human brain is only capable of learning new things when you're young or that the the human body is only capable of having and raising children when you're young we'll know this this isn't about capability this is about ability this is about acumen it's about self discipline okay so Amy Kay know this is really for me a digression this is the main point of the video why would she make a bad mother so the woman specifically featured in that that video it's not just that she's old she's old and she's still childish this is about the development of the mind that's what I'm talking about here why is it that she is incapable of going back to university and starting a new career learning some new field it's not that she's old it's that she's old and she's still childish she's still immature and and those issues of developing acumen they don't rely on formal education they don't rely on credentials they don't rely on having a teacher and an assigned textbook and an exam it certainly is possible to work as the checkout guy at a grocery store you know to stand behind the counter end cashier via cashier in a grocery store and to be going home every night and reading Aristotle and passionately studying ancient Greek and to be incredibly well-prepared when you decide in your 30s to go back to university but that's not what we're talking about here I mean those people real autodidact are extraordinary and the other tragedy here I mean education takes unequal people and makes them only more unequal if you had the self-discipline to be an autodidact for ten years while being a cashier to work really hard at any one thing whether it was ancient Greek or modern Korean or Japanese or you know almost any serious intellectual pursuit you would develop the acumen you would develop the self-discipline to then apply your mind to a new and different field which is something I've demonstrated in my own life again and again for better and for worse now I could here digress there are limits to that to what extent that to what extent can I apply the mental self-discipline I gained in learning lotion and poly and studying Cree and working on Chinese and studying history and politics to what extent could I apply that to mathematics could I go back to university and really try to do math seriously could I go back to university and try to do chemistry seriously you know to some extent I mean to some extent I'm prepared just with my level of alacrity acumen self discipline my understanding of the academic process just how to study for an exam and any topic how to you know how to be organized how to you know even how to ask for help how to recognize when you're working alone with the chemistry textbook wait wait wait I understand this part but I'm not following what's here and whether I go to Google for help or go to the tutor for the in the universities intro and being positively encouraged and focused on filling in the gaps you're on understanding there are some skills that I can take from the study of Chinese language history and politics and apply to chemistry or math but for sure there are limits and some things are much more directly applicable would have been very easy for me to apply my background in philosophy from philosophy in one language to philosophy to another from you know ancient India to ancient Greece or from modern Europe to modern China Japan and so on some some of these things are some of these transitions are easier than others and for sure I mean my yeah enough about me this guy left a comment saying you know in this positive and uplifting way that even though he wasted ten years of his life he's now going to throw himself into university and he doesn't feel that he's lost as his opportunities in life he doesn't feel that he's about wasting ten years whatever the waste really means he doesn't feel that this is something he he can't redeem or can't compensate for really so your claim is that because at age 31 you think you can still do what a 19 year old can do when they just finished high school you think you can compete with the 19 year old so you think you're cool so you think there's nothing for you to regret you don't think it's a problem that you lost those 10 years of your life you're dead wrong you're dead wrong so you think when you finish this program in your 40s you think you're gonna be at the level of what a 25 year old or something it's tragic we don't want to accept it we want to imagine that okay just about the time we're getting mature enough to accept that you know the rich get richer and the poor get poorer we want to have a kind of meritocracy of the mind we want to imagine that you know at least in terms of our intellectual accomplishments we have some kind of democracy we have some kind of even playing field and we don't we have up we have a slanted playing field and the inequality over time only gets more and more extreme there was a young woman who I flirted with and joked with in one of my university programs saying young woman but like this guy she was she was into her 30s and one day you know I asked her kind of what happened to a gap of about 10 years in her life so we talked a couple times before we got along with some some kind of mutual attraction which was why we talk to each other as much as we did and all she could say to me was you know during those years during some number of years after she'd finished high school she said all she did was party and you don't know what the word party means you don't know if it means cocaine or methamphetamine or champagne or just video games just sitting on the sitting on the couch playing you know Nintendo or whatever the video system was at the time you you really don't know what it means but you know whether you're looking at a TK or this guy writing in to me about his dream to go back to college if you weren't developing your own mental acumen your own mental ability your own depth of knowledge and experience in some really meaningful way you've got a deficit there that you're not gonna be able to make up that you're not gonna be able to compensate for and you know the depth and significance of that tragedy it's very hard for people to accept it's very hard for people to deal with that same young woman who lost 10 years partying she did get a master's degree she finished her master's degree and I knew the whole contest she was in a vet university frankly a lot of the time professors with an older student like that they just kind of waved them through they don't really hold them to the same standards other people she finished her master's degree but what what was she a master of she was a master of nothing and I mean was she at the level of knowledge ability I don't know capacity of a 25 year old or 22 year old not really not really she was a she was a dried up has-been who you know happened to have this credential and had nowhere near the level of knowledge that someone should have at her age in her field she wasn't a master of her field she wasn't a master of anything and if you have become a master of one thing of something you can as I was saying before transfer that from one field to another you can take the level of self discipline focus clarity and acumen that you've developed studying one thing and apply it to another the reason why Amy Kay could not now make the transition even to starting and raising a family is not in my opinion biological it's mental its intellectual the problem is not that she's 31 years old or whatever she is the problem is that she's still incredibly childish if any man any scene intelligent man is looking at her as a possible mother he'd be looking at someone who still needs many many years from the present to prepare mentally intellectually probably even economically to make the transition from her current totally self indulgent totally childish lifestyle to being a mature responsible self disciplined parent who can take on responsibility not just for feeding and clothing a child but for educating that child instead of being preoccupied with educating yourself or being preoccupied with just being a being a brat herself it's appealing the myth that you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps it's appealing the myth that you can just bounce back but the vast majority of people simply put balance I challenged Maude vegan about this when we had our a long long debate I think it's a three-hour debate about drug policy drugs hard drugs like cocaine and heroin being legal or illegal and it's really reassuring for people who tell themselves oh this person was an addict like a drug addict for ten years but it's okay now they're back in university they'll bounce back no they won't the way you would develop your mind if you spent those 10 years just worrying just being clean and sober but worrying not necessarily hitting the books not necessarily learning and some other more positive sense but being clean and sober and worrying knowing that you were gonna go back to university one day you would develop your mind in a whole different way from someone who's living without any worries because they're high on painkillers because they're adult and distracted and deeply involved in their own life of self-indulgence self distraction there's a guy here on YouTube called bio s3 training and he had the honesty to say when he got clean he was a drug addict for about ten years and he said I'm sorry I forget the exact years in volt but he said something like you finally quit all drugs when he was 27 but he said emotionally he was still at the level of a 17 year old or even worse that he was this really really immature 17 year old he didn't know how to regulate his own emotions he didn't know what discipline his mind he'd had girlfriends he had long-term relationships but all those girlfriends have been high on drugs and he'd been high on drugs so we didn't really know how to talk through problems like even just on that personal face-to-face basis he didn't have skills in terms of management you know again even in a sense of management of himself management of his own time management own feelings self-expression and so on and you know he was left in this situation of being uh you know much older than his own level of of mental development guys it's much much easier to bounce back economically it's much much easier for someone who was a cocaine addict to turn around and earn a decent living then it is return all right for them to turn around and become a decent parent or for them to turn around and become an intellectual capable of really accomplish something with their minds