The last post that didn't use the word "I" was probably very short.
I still check Autumn's Twitter account. I don't expect anything positive to come from it. I do so because I don't know why she posted a status in 2013 that included me in the recipients, or why she interacted with my third Twitter account later in 2013 and in the following years. The only possible conclusion is "Autumn isn't friends with Sherine, but Autumn still has not publicly shared this proposal, and so and the fact that Autumn interacted with me isn't important".
I could have avoided going online, using the plan that "maybe someone will share this proposal if there is something that will happen that I don't like, but I don't publicly talk about it or even privately in an unpublished post that only someone with access to Blogger's servers could read." Maybe this would have implied that the person who took action was smart enough to understand what I didn't like, and that I was 'nice' because I wasn't trying to force anyone to do something by implying that I would be unhappy if they didn't. I have already tried publicly talking about something that would happen that I didn't like.
It was also implied that what Autumn said wouldn't be important during the time I was going online, because I wouldn't know about it. So if she expended any effort on saying or retweeting things that sent a particular message, she would have been wasting her time. This would have implied she was stupid and if there was anyone who knew I wasn't going online, maybe they would have shared this proposal so Autumn wouldn't feel unhappy because she felt that she overestimated someone, possibly herself.
But my sister called me this morning and said she was buying an airplane ticket for me. I had been trying to delay the purchase of a ticket. Since a 'wasted' airplane ticket would make me just as unhappy as using it to go somewhere, I felt the chance of someone doing something if I waited decreased. So I write this, despite all my arguments that convinced me not to before.
A thought; even if people who didn't share this proposal were above average in intelligence, other people, who think they are above average in intelligence, might think that people who didn't share this proposal were generally below average in intelligence or performance.
For example, even if someone tested better than 99% of other people, people might say that this person performed worse than over 50% of other people who tested above the 99th percentile, by not sharing this proposal. So it was fair for me to call people stupid because of the chance that other people would think people who didn't share this proposal were stupid.
This post is diverging a little. The main reason I've wanted to make a new post was because I learned that human brain size has been decreasing for the past 20,000 years, and that most people don't know this. I came up with reasons for why I should avoid going online — basically, "it shouldn't matter that I found a problem that people haven't already agreed is unimportant, and acting like it does matter won't do anything anyway" — but it's generally the main topic.
At the same time, I still think what Autumn says could be important. I felt it was likely that if she said anything at all, I could stop checking her account or wondering what she thought, and so I should emphasize that I haven't yet reached this conclusion, despite that she has said things.
The fact that I learned about the 20,000 year-old problem of decreasing brain sizes was unexpected. I don't know if Autumn knew that I missed someone's birthday; I certainly don't keep track of the birthdays of my friends' friends. I don't think it's accurate to say that Autumn is my friend, so even though she has celebrated the birthdays of people she knows on Twitter, I don't actually know the birthdays of any of my friends' friends, and I don't keep track of the birthdays of Autumn's friends.
I personally feel the reason I stopped going online was that I learned that my oldest sister was no longer doing something, which meant there was an opening for me. Maybe I had been trying to avoid going online, but me knowingly missing someone's birthday probably wasn't the reason why I haven't been online in several days.
I had even thought about sending a mass email after I learned of decreasing human brain size. I gave up the plan when I remembered that 'Person B' would be a recipient. Although I might be able to do something that would make people use this proposal sooner, I don't think it would be a statistically significant increase in the chance for it to ever be used. Even if it was, I probably don't think "humans will be smarter in 1000 years" is worth doing something that would make 'Person B' unhappy, by letting her know that I'm alive without implying I care about her. But it was the first time I thought about sending a mass email since I said I would stop, in early 2013.
Regardless of whether Autumn could have predicted I wouldn't go online in the past few days, during which she has retweeted two statuses, she could have been 'testing' my motivations and values. The blog post earlier this month was published a few minutes ago, so I had not said anything on this site, or on any online account, for half a month. Autumn could have predicted that I wouldn't say anything for the remainder of the month, but might not have been sure of this.
My tentative plan before starting this post was not to bring my laptop with me. If I had avoided going online before I left, I would have gone a month without any public blog posts.
So I can't fault Autumn for saying something.
I also can't fault her for not 'turning against' Sherine. Even if this would have in effect freed me to do other things, and possibly caused this proposal to be used sooner, the fact that people have not supported any of my many explanations of this proposal means that it's reasonable for people to think the problems that will be solved aren't important, or maybe not urgent. But if she did 'turn against' Sherine, it would mean that I wouldn't be isolated if I treated Sherine as an enemy. To reiterate, the ways that Autumn could do this would be either to 1) treat this proposal as important, and find fault in Sherine for not publicly sharing it already 2) treat this proposal and Sherine as unimportant.
I was thinking about society's changing values and how it demonstrates that people are stupid. Shrinking human brains suggest that people in the future might think this proposal was even more important than I had thought. Or maybe I was thinking about the use of fossil fuels. The point is that it isn't useful to ask if it's reasonable that views about some issue could be completely the opposite in a generation than what they are now. People are well aware that young people often have different views about something than old people. What you should ask is whether it's reasonable that young people in a generation will have completely different views about something than young people today. One reason this is effective is that it forces young people to compare themselves to old people now; this creates a cohesive group with potentially unified opinion; this contradicts the notion that "there are people who know the truth and are smart, they're just a minority and lack power".
What would be great is people could evaluate the evidence about whether shrinking brains is directly decreasing intelligence, and whether we should think this is bad. It seems if people wanted to discuss important problems and promising solutions on their own it would have happened already, so in this context, it would be great if the US government could get a bunch of smart people to analyze this. This isn't an easy task, since many of the indicators that society associates with intelligence, like "being a professor at a prestigious university" or "having made a lot of money", are flawed. See fighting over the order of authors' names for an academic paper or study.
This is what I wrote when I thought about how I might start off a discussion about decreasing brain size and whether the method described in the first pastebin argument addresses its cause:
evolution as a vector.
a species values a trait in potential mates. the species moves in a certain direction. can be from genetics, or memetic (culture). development of intelligence preceded complex culture, so probably a genetic preference. also possible that environment selected for intelligence, or that opposable thumbs rewarded it or something.
(brain's use of energy, etc.; reason not to always have a large brain.)
knowledge vs morality dichotomy no more recent than 20,000 years, when brain size started to decrease?
income tax in the US only started in ~1913. Subsequent government spending, welfare.
Decrease in average intelligence only observed in recent decades. Masked by nutrition improvements, which follow from technological improvements. Possible increase in rate of decline, but not necessarily different from previous 20k years.
Due to the genetic or memetic factors that resulted in intelligence, tendency to say "we should be smarter". But likely that future humans would be content no matter what happens, even if conditions revert to what they were 10k years ago with no 'advanced' technology.
World will soon level out in population. Probably increasing for all of past 20,000 years.
A group that experiences conflict with other groups will always benefit from more population. The number of 'smart' people has always increased, even if number of stupid people has increased faster.
But this is no longer the case, with population decline in prosperous countries. If population is assumed to be constant, a change is needed to prevent the number of smart people from decreasing. If population decreases, it might be acceptable for the number of smart people to decrease for a while, but should eventually level out or slowly increase.
The idea that "we are part of a group of limited size, and increasing the number of people in our group is always good" must go away. "We" could potentially apply to any person on this planet.
"Fighting for challenge" could be a subversion of "fighting to win". Using less people is a challenge.
Background: Why Brain Size Doesn't Correlate With Intelligence | Science | Smithsonian
The problem: If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking? | DiscoverMagazine.com
This is a problem that people don't know about. It wasn't mentioned in what was supposed to be a comprehensive list of important issues that this proposal would solve in Jan 2013.
Digression, recent fires in the US (American) state of California affected a city where someone previously mentioned on this site might have lived.
A problem that was also not mentioned on that list was "smart people have decreased chance of successful romantic outcomes". Being smart is a positive quality, like being physically attractive; if it doesn't significantly increase positive outcomes, then it's a problem.
My efforts regarding this proposal were supposed to fix that problem, making it so it was no longer a problem. The expectation was that it only affected a small number of people. Other people who were not affected, either because they weren't smart or because they were lucky, could choose to care about the problem, with the implication that if people did not care about helping smart people, smart people should not care about helping other people.
Decrease in human brain size over 20,000 years suggests the effects are much more pervasive.
The description of the data, in that it correlates with community size, is evidence that it's related to 'signalling' and the difficult of having accurate signals while simultaneously spreading awareness of the possibility for inaccurate signals. I don't believe that genetic drift, and accumulation of random mutations, would lead to decreased brain size, but it would help if a large number of smart people could discuss and confirm this.
I note that a correlation between 'domesticity' and smaller brain size could happen if unnecessary conflict decreases individual fitness, and genes that cause smaller brain size (whether deleteriously or the 'saving calories' thing) are grouped with ones that also decrease aggression because it's better for the individual and the group for a less intelligent individual to be 'nice'.
There is no national conversation, or United Nations task force, on what to do about decreasing human brain size. Having one would be the intelligent thing to do, and there should be one. I don't expect one. Surprise me.
Now I try to remember what I just remembered while writing the previous paragraph, then immediately forgot again.
Fixing unemployment, or economic inequality, was never really the important part. I found a solution; people didn't use it; then it became about describing why people didn't use the solution, what distinguishes a good solution from a bad solution, and how to ensure people can recognize the good solution. The question is, what's the difference between a future in which people have a good understanding of this, and one in which they don't? "A reversal of the 20,000 year trend of decreasing brain size" might be the answer.
The Aurora theatre movie shooting was something that people agree was 'bad', even if people in the comments of this article celebrate the idea of 90% of humans dying. It seems to me it wouldn't have happened if I had never talked about this proposal, or had stopped at a single blog post on my personal blog. Even if authorities celebrate that they have prosecuted everyone responsible for the Boston marathon bombing and so on, people still might think that some things are my 'fault' even if they aren't legally my fault. If someone is responsible for something 'bad', they can be called a villain. People expect villains to be competent, up to a point. So I act like things have gone according to plan. After I declared the US economy had been fixed and stopped saying anything on this site, I tried to meet 'Person A' and 'Person B' again. If they had met me, I would have asserted that it was according to plan. They didn't meet me, and I still assert it was according to plan, kind of.
The point is that no one should expect me to act like I've made a mistake, because it would imply that people who died were unimportant.
It's hard for us to care about our descendants (yay English) whom we'll never meet, but we should.
It should be easy to see how "decreasing brain size" is not included in the mission of the US's Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example. Addressing the problem requires people to do more than just their jobs, which they may be reluctant to do. . . .
The argument for why I shouldn't make this post was that there already seemed to be people who thought it was important. MH370 vanishing and so on. Even if you assume that the major problems that people knew about weren't important, there was evidence that it could fix the problem affecting a small number of smart people with negative romantic outcomes. (Some people also care about things like a random chance of death, even if preventing them would require a change to society.) It still makes sense to treat this proposal as important if it affects a small number of people in an important way, because the effects on other people are also positive. There are many 'zero-sum' solutions, or solutions that appear to be this way like territorial conflicts.
The last time I cried was watching parts of the film 'Musa' again in the chance that it was where the melody I couldn't identify in the past came from (I think I was thinking of the melody while dreaming, but not sure it was actually the same one I wrote down before). There are two different versions of the film that include some different scenes that result in a slightly different story, but I don't remember the differences except that I thought the longer one was better. "A pure heart makes dreams come true". In the film 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon', the male interrupted the wedding procession of the female in order to convey his message. This may have made him feel his heart was no longer pure. He may also have assumed, as viewers of the film may have, that the female died at the end, or left this world.
