Comments by "" (@josephcoon5809) on "This Is the Calculus They Won't Teach You" video.
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@Fyne17 Here’s a simple idea that occurred to me a decade ago…
When I was in school, my upbringing made me ambiverted: I could function just fine in large crowds; and I functioned even better when I am able to ponder things in solitude. This lead to a natural love for mathematics because 2+2 would always equal 4, but “yes” didn’t always mean “yes.” While people were prone to lying to me or giving me incorrect ideas; math NEVER lied to me. If math gave me a wrong answer, I understood that it wasn’t the math that was wrong; it was me. One of the greatest things about being human is the ability to make a mistake based on incorrect information and adjust your conditioning to accommodate a correction. Math is a great judge of truth.
Despite my early love for math, I distinctly remember classmates in middle school whining about “what would even use this for in real life?” Aside from all the particular examples our teachers gave, I distinctly remember NONE of them saying, “Everything. You use problem solving for everything.”
When that revelation hit me, something else became clear to me: society doesn’t solve problems the way they were taught to in they government provided educational systems. When I was taught to solve math problems, it revolves around remaining calm so rational thought (cerebrum) could be employed; ignoring irrelevant information (mostly applicable to word problems where 90% of the problem was narrative); breaking the problem down into more manageable constituent portions; assembling the tools required to manipulate those portions; assembling a complete solution from the constituent solutions; checking the work against the original problem; adjusting as necessary.
What I do not remember was using outrage (limbic system) to shut down rational thinking (cerebrum) resulting in constituent solutions including, but not limited to: protesting the textbook; canceling the teacher; calling some classmates “racist”, flipping your neighbor’s desk and dumping their book bag all over the floor; lighting the chalk board on fire; or rioting in the hallways.
We DEFINITELY did NOT vote for the most popular and least qualified student to solve everything by taking everybody’s lunch money.
Yet what does nearly all of “civilized society” do to “solve problems”?
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@Fyne17 “what is free market?”
Here’s a simple example: you own two houses and you need money. Two people have money, but they each want a house. So, you put up ONE of your houses for sale in a free market (one where all participants are free to offer whatever they wish in trade for whatever they d desire limited only by the subjective value each participant places on the items for trade) while the other two participants enter their money into the free market. Obviously, you would take all the money they have, so they wouldn’t put all of their money into the market for trade.
This is your basic economic setup. One side of resources is scarce (1 person with a house) while the other side is in surplus (2 people with money). Whenever there is an imbalance creating a surplus on one side, that side has to COMPETE for the limited resources on the other side. In this case, the two with money will offer slowly increasing amounts of money as they competitively try to outbid each other while you sit back and enjoy the show. How much is that house worth to you? As much as you can get for it. How do you get as much as you can for it? Enter a market with a scarcity of the item you wish to sell.
So, that’s how you increase the subjective value of a house. How do you decrease it, one may ask? Well, if making that resource scarce INCREASES its value, it stands to reason that making it UNSCARCE (create a surplus) would DECREASE its value. Is that what happens? Let’s change the thought experiment.
Now, you and somebody else both out a house on the market, but there is only ONE person buying. Houses being equal in all regards, the only thing that will determine how much they are worth is how much you are willing to part with your house for versus how much the other person is willing to part with theirs for. So, now the house side is in surplus, the money side breaks out the popcorn as they watch the homeowners COMPETE for the limited resource of money. So the homeowners start offering to sell their respective houses for more and more money in competition for the one person’s wealth. When do they stop? The moment the SECOND offer is made because unless the buyer is mentally deficient, they wouldn’t accept a HIGHER amount of money to buy one of two houses. The only thing a single buyer would do is get as much as they can by trading as little as their money as they can as the sellers try to get as much money as they can while also competing to be the one the buyer agrees to trade with.
Let’s throw some government and laws into the mix!!!
Let’s say TWO people are selling houses, and TWO people are buying houses. Neither side is in surplus, so no competition is necessary…
But wait!!!
Here comes government to help!!! They bring along with them a poor person that everybody in the free market believes should have a home, but NONE of them are willing to contribute their own resources, much less offer to take them into their own home. That’s where government comes in!!! Government is there for people who say they have a problem with something, but aren’t motivated enough to take care of it themselves!!
THANKS FOR ALLOWING ME TO BE A LAZY NARCISSIST, GOVERNMENT!!!
(We can discuss the ease with which incompetence and/or corruption can infect large governments that individuals have no time or expertise to monitor for and address that incompetence and/or corruption at a later date)
So, now we have three people looking for a place to live, but there’s only two houses. A surplus of demand arises but not a surplus of money. What does THAT do? Well, the homeowners obviously aren’t going to donate the house, and taking a house from somebody would be seen as as theft!!! What about taking a little bit of money from a lot of people? Surely nobody would consider that theft; especially when it’s for a good cause!!! So let’s pass some welfare laws!!!
Now, everybody in the free market (those who have something to trade; not the poor person) has just a little bit less wealth. That money is then offered to one of the people with a house to sell taking that hose off the market. However, nobody is competing with government; they have most of the guns. (Not really; they just somehow have the authority to use those guns on whomever they please while everybody else has to put the owe hands up…almost kinda like muggers in a “gun free zone” hmmmmmmm…) so, the government takes a house and a person demanding a house off the market, leaving us with the original two buyers (but with less money) and only ONE of the original sellers (who didn’t have any money when the law kicked in!!! Hooray!!! Dodged a bullet!!) which means we are in a surplus of buyers situation again. Referring up to the rule we established earlier, we find that the buyers have to compete NOW since government stepped in to help. When they would have gotten a house for less money, they now have to compete against each other by offering more than they would have before government helped. Remember, they also have less money to compete with, so in a natural surplus situation, the seller would have had more money offered than when the government helped.
The seller accepts an offer, and makes the exchange…
…then government says, “You thought you could get away with stealing your money back from us? HAH!!! SALES TAX!!”
That’s a lot of drama in the not-so-free market, aye? It so much drama, in fact, that most people tend to forget about that poor person and the guy the government agreed to pay rent to. What’s that? Pay rent to? They didn’t just BUY the house from the seller? Why doesn’t the seller get to seek his house like the guy in the free market did?
Because he really isn’t a seller. He’s the large corporation that drafted all those laws that interferes with the free market. When the government allocates Section 8 funding for rental properties to house the “poor”, who has equity in that rental property?
The taxpayers who funded the transaction?
The government that passed the laws and regulated the transaction?
The poor person benefitting from large corporations’ legislation nobody bothered to read?
Nope. Nope. Nope.
The only one that has equity in those rental properties is the large corporation that drafted those bills that national socialists DEMANDED be passed “for the good of poor people.” What did the poor person get? Shelter, and that’s it. They received nothing to help them generate their own wealth which means that as long as that “poor” person stays “poor”, those benevolent laws the corporations drafted for our legislators states that those benevolent corporations will receive a steady flow of income from people in the free market to care for the “poor” person.
Neat, huh?
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1:00 Infinity isn’t for the single mind just as seeing color isn’t for the single neuron. People are at the precipice of understanding the organization Nature perfected in the human brain, but they are constantly trained to believe the exact opposite societal design is better.
The answer to many of Life’s great questions are literally within us. 100 billion neurons with an average of 1,000 MEANINGFUL connections resulting in consciousness as we know it while humans can’t get past 100 million without starving and/or heavily oppressing large swathes of the population.
Billions of years of trial and error, and humans constantly fail at inventing a square wheel…
6:00 This is less a history lesson than it is an explanation of the thinking process.
Modern “education” is too focused on “correct” answers which detracts from the more important lesson of arriving at an answer. Personally, I learned most high school lessons by listening and thinking. I developed absolutely no note-taking skills. Instead of memorizing formulas, I memorized how to derive the formulas. I created a kind of mental map to go from one formula to the next. So when I took tests, I spent a little time at the beginning deriving the relevant formulas which (I now know) created a subconscious algorithm that allowed me to work out answers in my head quicker than classmates could on paper. It also allowed me to develop my own tricks and shortcuts. So instead of memorizing distinct ideas separately, I built a mural in my mind.
Unfortunately, college courses were faster paced, and I would work 60-80 hours while taking a full course load. So, I didn’t have the time to memorize how to derive formulas which left me gaps during my tests. I used to take this as a failure on my part until I started applying my gift for dissecting systems on society in general. The fault wasn’t mine or any student that didn’t fall in line with a standardized “education” system. The fault was with society assuming individuals are standard.
This isn’t to say that standardized education doesn’t have its benefits. We do need mindless workers to do the menial jobs… or do we? Personally, I don’t think anybody should have their role assigned to them based on their ability to take tests. Especially when the act of failing would sear some ideas into my head better than 20 hours of studying. Unfortunately, the “education” system doesn’t factor in what you learn after failing a test as if people are static creatures.
“No man can enter the same river twice. For he is not the same man, and it is not the same river.” - Heraclitus.
15:15 I didn’t panic and act irrationally based on claims by people I don’t know and amplified by corporate media conglomerates.
When a “tragedy” occurs, there’s a good way to assess the likelihood that it was a naturally occurring process (hurricane) or a manufactured one (“pandemics”): follow the money. Whoever became richer from the tragedy is a good candidate for being a party to its manufacture. When multiple “tragedies” produce the same results (the same people becoming wealthier), you can start establishing a pattern to predict who will become richer during the next “tragedy.” Then you just do what they do to cash in on the game.
OR
Work against the system to undo it.
OR
Cash in on the game, and use the resources to undo the system.
Choices…
19:00 That’s because two truths, at the same level, creates an understanding at a higher level. Two eyes create two images that are different, and their differences result in depth perception.
It’s basic triangulation where two points can establish a third.
People tend to have difficulty accepting more than one idea as true, so their limit their own depth-perception of the abstract. However, TWO people can maintain their individual ideas good enough for an amalgamated third idea to form.
Like conceptual sexual reproduction!!! Neither parent idea is eradicated while a child idea is formed. Once the child idea matures, it can replace both parent ideas.
21:30 In his defense, color is a fiction of the mind as well.
26:00 I, Plato, and Nature all disagree with the modern form of “education.” Formal education is designed to constrain imagination within particular parameters to arrest synthesis of new ideas. This results in few people innovating and more people building what is already known.
This is the fundamental cause for stagnation in wage growth. More employees than employers forces employees into competition by accepting less pay then their competitors. More employers than employees forces employers into competition by offering more pay.
That basic concept of supply and demand has been in effect for billions of years, and one of the first major transitions in biology was when CO2 was converted to O2 enough to force a new kind of life into existence to join photosynthesizers: metabolizers.
And back to the original point: the best way to educate…
Babies LEARN how to see color in the first two mint after birth. This is a subconscious process that humans counter with standardized teaching practices that assumes all students are sufficiently conditioned with the ideas conducive to more conditioning. Standardized education teaches students WHAT to think, and not HOW to think.
Nature found a better way: play.
Even Plato understood this over 2,000 years ago, while neuroscience has all but confirmed it, as consumerism profits off of it.
27:00 “A lot of students are pressed for time at college and university.”
Imagine that.
Quick lesson: the brain has two main modes of operation: collection and integration (as in connecting collected ideas together in meaningful patterns; not the opposite of differentiation).
Our consciousness runs in a serial process so when you collect a set of ideas that are intricately connected, serial collection of those ideas at a rapid pace reduces the chances of the full network of connections to manifest neurologically. Imagine describing a TV image a single pixel at a time to another person, and what image they would form in their mind from this process.
Integration of ideas occur subconsciously through parallel processing of ideas by allowing them to make natural connections with each other. This is best done when the beta waves of conscious thought are at a minimum and theta waves of subconscious thought are at a maximum. This state is found in trance-like states such as REM sleep or day dreaming.
I read an article summarizing a study showing that learning before sleep was more effective than learning after waking. In the current educational system, kids go to school, then ingest more information on top of the Information collected at school resulting in less coherent collections of ideas which are more difficult to integrate during REM.
Then there’s the issue with high-intensity blue light prevalent in electronic screens. I can only imagine a parent’s relief from the chaos of parenthood when an electronic device placates their children. Unfortunately, most parents are ignorant of the effect of blue light on the circadian rhythm.
So, not only is disjointed information crammed into a child’s brain stressing the natural process of ideological integration, but we have parents unwittingly ruining their children’s sleep habits and quality with excessive use of electronic screens within four hours of slumber.
28:15 I believe “history” is being conflated with ”evolution.” The absolute timing of when the events occurred is irrelevant. What’s important is the relative timing between events.
It’s like taking a classic story and modernizing it. As long as the relevant themes (relationships) are present, anybody can tell when a Romeo and Juliet story is being told, or any of the many instantiations of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” is projected on to the large screen. From “They Live” to “The Matrix”, everybody is familiar with the concept of an unconscious society controlled by a small group of shadow puppet masters.
The brain functions off of patterns, which is why gods and legends were created. It’s easier to remember a set of “good” traits when they are integrated into a single personification within an episodic story than it is to remember a list of ideas and why they are “good.” The brain is multidimensional because neurons have the freedom to explore the spaces between ideas to synthesize new ideas in the connection between two existing ideas.
29:00 One if the greatest ironies about education is that it treats ideas as concrete when ideas are literally abstract. Math is the ultimate abstraction. This is what allows it to be applied in innumerable ways as the abstract pattern is instantiated into reality.
A cup is an abstraction defined by the purpose it serves. The “cup” does not exist, but you can instantiate it with wood, glass, plastic, metal, stone, or even your hands at a river, around your mouth or behind your ears.
With all the amazing things in the universe, the first hammer existed in a mind before it existed in the Universe. This happened because purpose is an abstraction that only resides in the mind.
Gods, math, colors, ideas, words, thoughts, emotions, pain, flavors, odors, sounds, textures, and every bit of your reality resides in your mind which is a product of neurons virtualizing and simulating reality by abstracting the patterns it finds in the data around us and applying that abstraction in new instances and in new ways.
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