What I think needs to happen

If it matters what Sherine says, thinks or does, she needs to decide whether she's completely confident that she doesn't want me to die. If she's just 90% confident, I think it's better if I just die, and it seems like I can't expect anything to happen before that. It's a risk for someone to admit that they like me, and I wouldn't want or expect them to take that risk if there's a 10% chance that it would ruin their life.

So, Sherine: think back to the Boston bombing. You said you spent that day in front of the television, watching stuff and maybe doing stuff online. I don't know how you felt then. I might be wrong and it's unconnected, but if Dzhokhar and Tamerlan did know of this idea, and the bombing wouldn't have happened if I had done nothing, or if I had simply stopped at the end of 2012 when all the petitions expired, then what would you want to happen to me?

I can't really imagine myself wanting someone to die. But that could be a fault. I always wondered, what if I had gotten into a combat situation while in the military, like my instructors at the United States Army Intelligence Center in Fort Huachuca, Arizona, tried to prepare us for by having us practice 'walking tactically' on a short stretch of unpaved terrain on the way to class?

https://www.google.com/maps/@31.5624153,-110.3431482,206m/data=!3m1!1e3

https://www.army.mil/article/126746/u_s_army_intelligence_school_at_fort_devens_closes_leads_to_construction_boom_at_fort_huachuca

If someone was pointing a gun in the general direction of other people on the same team as me who were under cover, would I have tried to shoot that person? If my gun was pointing at them and I could see them in my iron sights, would I have pressed the trigger? Or would I have just let other people shoot at each other, even if it meant someone on my team, or I, might die? Not having any desire to kill other people might be a bad thing.

If it doesn't matter what Sherine thinks, then it doesn't matter whether she wants me to die since she and I will never talk to each other again, if it could be said that we ever talked to each other at all.

Macadamia nuts

Had to record this thought: I imagined a Japanese person reading about US people being confused about why someone would commit suicide, and the Japanese person laughing at how people could have such poor understanding of the problem and saying to themselves, "We Japanese have a really good understanding of the reasons for suicide, it's why we have so many of them."

This post was supposed to be about what someone could do if they didn't want to waste time. But it is now also about a person who killed themselves. I think the most important thought I was in danger of forgetting was this: a dramatic action in which misunderstandings can result from timing (as in Romeo and Juliet, with the letter) is the consequence of problems in society. A story in which such misunderstandings can't result is more boring, but better, even if people are not interested in hearing about it.

I'd forgotten something that another thing, which I've also forgotten, made me think of, but I hope that was it, or at least more important than the other thing I'd forgotten.

Question I ask myself here is, does it matter if people think I'm crazy? Other than the mysterious "B" who commented on a post a few years ago and knew who Sherine and Yara were, I've no evidence that anyone except perhaps the US's FBI reads this site. So even if it's embarrassing to speculate publicly that anyone could care enough to read this post and follow the suggestion in it, if no one knows about this post, it isn't embarrassing.

If you don't want to waste time: contact Yara, at https://twitter.com/___yaara, and ask her if she's interested in me, or if that's too much, if she remembers me at all. If you don't want me to waste time, you can let me know the results of this conversation, or attempt at conversation. You could also do it privately, like by sending an initial message then continuing in direct messages and deleting the original message.

The evidence that causes me to be uncertain about the truth of this matter, instead of being able to simply say "no": I started looking at Yara's account around the start of this month. I wrote an unpublished post around July 1, or possibly submitted something to Reddit, which frustrated any attempts to do nothing for the month, but I deflected by acting like it didn't matter and that I had not changed my behavior in months, which implied that enough time had passed to make a decision. That was to say that Sherine might have died based on her inactivity, but it would take too long to determine, and I needed to look at someone who was more active. Apparently Twitter does a really bad job of updating in realtime if you leave a web page open on an account, but when I finally refreshed the page after a few days of doing nothing online but leaving that web page open (with my computer on even while I was asleep), it turned out she had protected her account. I finally put my computer to sleep then, maybe turning it on briefly to do a quick web search related to something I said to no one in particular maybe six years ago.

When I checked again later, Yara's account was no longer protected, with nothing to explain why it had been protected. The point is that it seemed like an unusual event. Since Twitter doesn't seem to reliably refresh profiles while viewing them now, I don't know when she protected her account.

Some other stuff, I emailed the FBI (about 90 personnel in leadership roles) with no reply, there was a misunderstanding and the police thought I might kill myself so they put me on a psychiatric hold. I decided not to eat during this time. So I didn't eat breakfast at the general hospital where I was at, and sometime during this time period, Yara retweeted a status about starving yourself before a meal. Her next status after that was around 11 am my time, so it's possible she could have retweeted the one about food after the hospital learned I was refusing food. I didn't eat food for a total of about 110 hours before they became worried from my low blood sugar level, after which I agreed to eat, but Yara acted normally during this time.

After I came home (maybe nine days ago), I was basically looking at Yara's account constantly for several days. Then one morning, I didn't connect my computer to the Internet or even answer several landline phone calls that were likely 'spammy' (none exceeded about five rings). When I did randomly decide to go online, Yara's account was protected again. Later on in the day, it was unprotected again.

Around this time, I noticed that when trying to look at Sherine's account, it said the account didn't exist. I did a search for any messages sent to her old account name and the conversation said that the account was protected, so she had changed the account name and protected it. However, a day or two later, it was back to the previous name but still protected. If I remember correctly, the last time she said anything on her account was Christmas 2018 (~Dec 25, for the Russians who use a different date).

That's basically all I can think of. Some accounts getting protected or changing usernames. Sherine's account is here: https://twitter.com/KlLAMNYAZ

Both Yara and Sherine were fans of One Direction. (Kilamnyaz and Kilamzayn were already taken; it's based on what one of the other band members said to that member.)

I've discussed the idea on this site a little with my aunt. I suggested there isn't any way for her to help me now, even though in the past she could have signed petitions (the first had a goal of 100,000 signatures, I believe, but got around five, and initially just two.) That is because she is old and therefore not cool, I guess? I believe that a young female trying to contact Yara could have an effect, even one of my sisters, but I'm not sure if a male would be ruled out from doing anything. Maybe a male could have offered to be in a relationship with Sherine or something similar, but Sherine basically stopped doing anything after she reached 150k statuses on Twitter several years ago. The only ways I know of for contacting her would be on Twitter or to search for her parents' phone number and address, and she could easily deny receiving any messages sent to her on Twitter due to her inactivity. If someone wants to send an anonymous email to the administrator of this site (as seen in About page), I could tell you Sherine's family name.

Summary: contact Yara if you don't want to waste time. (She blocked me on my Twitter account, which is banned, but she only did so because Sherine blocked me because I was threatening to contact Sherine's crush on Twitter.)

The other issue. A person who "was the highest rated player in @Warcraft, now the creator of @PlayEverland", killed himself. Some other high-profile people who have killed themselves recently include the mother of popular singer Utada Hikaru; Robin Williams; and the German finance minister. I read about how Byron had become less interested in playing games; I can't find where I read this, but he expressed as much on his Twitter account early this year.

We look at this: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sra64l

And this: https://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sradgv

Quote from second:

Poor Becca. I was around them when they dated. They weren’t soulmates and she wasn’t the key to fixing Byron. He had a girl over a couple months ago that he seemed ecstatic about but she lived far away. When she left I asked if he had thought about Becca or missed her during the time, his answer was a firm “no”.

It wasn’t drugs, it wasn’t Becca, and this didn’t happen out of nowhere.

 

So why did he ask Byron about Becca?

Byron responded to a recent status from Becca about a game culture hostile to females, or to anyone who acts decently and expects the same in return.

Exhibit A, this comment thread from February of this year:

https://twitter.com/Byron/status/1229478832341757953

Byron: "life isn't about games"

Becca: "it's fine to spend all your time playing games"

Exhibit B, from three days before Byron killed himself:

https://twitter.com/BeccaTILTS/status/1277658772429664257

I just wish I had more information on how to deal with detrimental thoughts at a young age so that I wouldn’t just default to trying to escape them through distractions like video games instead of working through them

Stronger mental for all

Becca: "Video games are a distraction"

Second point: society is not functioning correctly. That was true when Byron killed himself, and of course is still true. Byron in March:

https://twitter.com/Byron/status/1239655157001891840

https://twitter.com/Byron/status/1239763104952504321

everyone stays home 2 weeks, the sick continue to quarantine, the rest return. but humanity is irrational

(He could have picked up on Elon Musk's misinterpretation of the graph here, but people make mistakes.)

Then: "Covid and the 90+ degree Texas summer hit around March and really isolated Byron. He loved food and nature, we couldn’t go to restaurants and we couldn’t walk around and explore."

Yet, "He was very lonely and sad. Getting him to go float on tubes on the river, something he would have previously loved, with a group of 6 girls and me took 30 minutes of pleading irl, 4 phone calls, and eventually us pulling up and throwing him in the car. He ended up having a great time and was super thankful we dragged him out."

"I went out Wednesday night and didn’t sleep at home. He spent the night with our 3rd roommate and his friends, they said he had been more talkative and fun than he had been in a while. They spent the night talking, watching movies, eating at one of Byron's favorite restaurants, he had two entrees and a boba tea."

Why go to restaurants when there is higher chance of infection with coronavirus than in March? Because people were not acting optimally.

I once asked my aunt and uncle what they thought the purpose of art was, but even I can't remember what I thought the answer was then (15 years ago). Hopefully, it was the same answer I would give now. Art makes people think in different ways. If the apparent result of the existence of a piece of art is just that people stand in front of it for a while, staring at it, then it at least gives people a new goal: "stand in front of art and stare at it, perhaps thinking about it". Since even the richest person on earth has limited time, this means the person has conflicting goals with what to do with their time, which forces them to construct their own value system for measuring achievement, which teaches or reminds them to look for the flaws in other systems that measure ability or intent (i.e. signals).

The same thing can result when someone does something confusing, like killing themselves despite having a plan to go to an expensive treatment facility in the near future, or despite that doctor-prescribed drugs have alleviated the chemical symptoms of depression. It forces people to think about their options in a new way, which encourages them to think in a way that can lead to them helping to fix problems. One person's death rarely makes any difference, though.

I should point out that if people are already accustomed to thinking critically about the systems they encounter, someone killing themselves for confusing reasons does not cause people to think in a new and beneficial way.

A comment about this:

Imagine going through a week of that in a loony bin (a bit insensitive of a term but think of a place built for people in straight jackets)

A short story. Two individuals. Both somewhat older. I'm bad at ages but I'd guess they were both between 40 and 75 years old. A male with African ethnicity and dark skin. When talked to, he would sometimes respond with something that seemed relevant, but it was often syllables that seemed to have no connection to words. But he laughed at situations that other people found funny, like when I tried to use an entry on the schedule of "music appreciation" to gain access to a room with musical instruments.

A female with European ethnicity and light skin, somewhat less fat than the average for the US where 40% of females are obese and another 26% are overweight. A family member of hers had died recently and she often didn't look at whoever in a group was speaking, but she did smile at times. During a meal, she goes over to a chair to sit down. The male in this story, who is already sitting at the table, immediately reaches out and grasps the back of the chair with his hand, and just as quickly the female turns away and heads elsewhere. I call out her name, Karen, twice, and when she turns around she sees the male has turned the chair to allow her to sit on it.

(The title is a reference to the Korean scandal. Also, I already used this title on 22 Aug 2018, in a post that has since been returned to a draft. Lame.~)

Arabian heat

This is a test of whether Sherine is aware that I'm still alive. I would like it to be more than that, such as whether she has been contacted by any governments that know of the idea, but this will have to do.

If the 'message' form, url '/ask', on Sherine's Tumblr profile continues to say

Not Found
The URL you requested could not be found.

posted

then it means that she doesn't read this site and isn't aware of anything I do online. (If it changes, it means she knows what I post here, but she might not have access to more information than that.)

Why I expect to die

It is suddenly very loud as my brother is cutting something with an electric saw outside. I hope this doesn't prevent me from thinking.

I recently decided that I think that Sherine doesn't want me to die. If you don't know who Sherine is, I'm sorry. This conclusion was based on, among other things, remembering that when I checked certain bookmarked statuses of hers that could have suggested that she wanted me to die, they had been deleted. If people using the idea meant that I wouldn't die, and people not using the idea meant that I would die, this would have been a useful conclusion. However, I can't say that I think people using the idea means I won't die.

At one point, I posted the things I said to Sherine. This missed some early things I said, I believe. One thing I said to her early on was "Tell people [about the idea] so everyone can laugh at you and I can disappear". Maybe I said 'so I can pretend to be dead', which should have the same meaning. In any case, what I said implied that I would cease communicating with her.

I'm trying to describe what would happen, which depends on other outcomes. One layer of complexity was removed last year when I learned that the person I refer to as E. has apparently gotten married.

First, we look at the possible outcomes if Sherine had told supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev about the idea in 2013 and tried to get them to share it. She may have done the first, but she definitely did not do the second. I think it's most likely that people would not have shared it, but I'm wrong about lots of things like this. I think that people won't share or talk about something that they do talk about, or I think they will support and talk about something that they don't. This may be a misjudgement of the situation that existed then, but the question I ask is "would Autumn have shared it?"

So, what if hundreds, or even thousands of supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had shared the idea? He gained 50~100k followers on social media, and it's conceivable that this number of people could have shared the idea if they believed, as I do, that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother knew of it. It's also possible that almost no one would have shared it.

If 50k supporters of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev had shared the idea, and this had led to broader society discussing and using it, the results would have been similar to people using it through any other way. But we also look at what if people didn't share it.


It is implied that I tried to make Sherine think that if she shared it, even if no one else did, then I would be 'hers' and would be able to stop caring about the idea or other people who might have been interested in me in the past. Although my 'reputational capital' was low, I was still someone with typical to above-average health and intellectual capacity in the top 1%, and I should have been able to have a normal life.

However, it was also the case that I was not sure if I could convince myself to do this. I am still not confident I shouldn't have ended my life in mid-2009 by shooting myself on the stomach with the bullets I saved when turning in all other ammunition at the end of a deployment to Iraq.


If people did use the idea, either in 2013 or at some point in the future, I think the most critical possibilities regarding what happens to me involve the person I refer to simply as 'Person B'. I think I would just wait to see if she would email me, and if she didn't, I would die. I don't know how long I would wait, but people using the idea would start the timer, so to speak, as it would be a global phenomenon that everyone who uses the Internet would know about.

One might ask here, why I wouldn't email her in this case before killing myself (or starving to death, etc.)? The answer, basically, is that I've done it before (unless my thoughts are getting confused, because I just thought of that question before answering it), and the reason I think she wouldn't email me is also that this has basically happened before.

Let's forget about the question of what I would do, though, and focus on what I expect other people to do: why I don't think 'Person B' would email me if people discussed and used the idea and realized how to solve most other problems.


First, I discuss how several times I tried to get the person I refer to as 'Person A', as well as the person I refer to as 'Person B', to meet me in the city where I lived and which I believed they were living close to as well. It may seem unusual that I acted like meeting 'Person B' would be important, given that I lived on the same floor as her for over a year. I was basically copying from the plot of the drama 'Hana Yori Dango'.

These attempts to meet failed, and after the last or one of the last ones, or possibly before that, I said that it didn't seem reasonable to expect a meeting to happen if someone didn't reply to me first — which neither of them were doing. It may seem incredible to characterize a message sent over seven years later as a "reply", but in any case, I was suggesting that I could not continue to act like it was normal for someone to avoid communicating with me.

This brings us to the period from around August 2007 to May 2008, when I was emailing 'Person A' with no reply. She did eventually send me an email, but I believe it was in response to an email I sent her, and if I hadn't sent that specific email, she would not have emailed me.

If I had ceased emailing her before she replied to me, I don't think she would have ever contacted me again. That describes the current situation with 'Person B': I was emailing her; she didn't reply; and then I stopped emailing her, seven years ago, or seven and a half if you don't count emails about the idea that were sent to everyone on my contact list.

The evil plan to stop brown people from breeding by making them rich

As I read about 47% of voters in the US saying that the economy is good or excellent (and probably still thinking about rules about paying people that imply that it would, indeed, be illegal to use this system in the US right now), I am seriously tempted to rename this site,

"An evil plan to stop brown people from breeding by making them rich, by a brown person with no money"

I am just not sure about "evil".

The forgotten

I missed a friend's birthday. I mention this in case they check this site.

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.

A Message to No One

It looks like no influential person is going to support this idea.

What I have said...

• "Economists are not going to [support this idea]"
• To Yoko Ono: "If you support this idea but fail in the attempt I will probably die"
• To Yoko Ono: "If you don't support this idea I will probably die because I'm too lazy to find someone else interested in helping the world"
• If someone was unsuccessful in supporting this idea I would view it as a personal failure for not being able to determine their ability more accurately
• I concluded my efforts in 2011 only after identifying mistakes by everyone I thought might be willing to support this idea or deciding that they would probably fail

I am, unfortunately, still able to imagine a scenario where someone with a reputation tries to get people to use this idea and they are unsuccessful.

I look at things like interest rates this way. They are known to influence investment and spending, and so can change the level of employment. But this is limited.

In contrast, through working less we can create as many jobs as necessary.

To anyone wondering why influential people haven't supported this idea, it is for the same reason that you have not.

The reason that problems exist in the world is that no one thought of this idea before. Since the prevention of war is an essential component, you could also say that no one understood the competitive drive that causes people from other cultures to accept war. It does not help a society to be peaceful if it is overrun by its neighbors, and historically a lot of war was about the loot.

As I said I have tried to avoid conveying that I think that supporting this idea is the 'ethical' thing to do, but I don't accept this as a reason for people not to support it. I would benefit from it just like anyone else from the lower risk of being killed or other similar things for myself and people I know, and as I have mentioned it would also lead to higher quality in games like World of Warcraft.

If anyone thinks that influential people should support this idea, they should say so. The feedback from the Occupy Wall Street forums was that we should distrust authority.

People who have not supported this idea are assumed to view the following issues as not important enough to act on:

• A small chance they, or people they know, will be killed
• Mass shootings like the ones at Aurora and Sandy Hook
• Unemployment and associated problems, including wasteful government spending
• War and its effects like someone you know joining the military and being killed
• Rapes
• Unexpected events in general that cause harm and could have been avoided if people were smarter
• Occupations that appear to be unethical having a 'wage premium', including the sex industry and finance
• Nonviolent crime, like computer viruses and scams
• Unwanted climate change like global warming
• Smart people being unhappy because they feel more responsible for problems
• The fact that the human race is getting stupider as time goes on due to genetic selection
• Biased feedback for games like WoW or Aion that lead to people wasting time on things that do not have the intended result
• Starvation in Africa
• Friends or relatives committing suicide because of relationship problems or depression
• High cost of college in the US and the inaccuracy of attendance at an 'elite' institution as a signal of ability despite that many people perceive it to be accurate
• 'Nice' people going to prison or being accused of crimes, such as Aaron Swartz who committed suicide
• Economic sanctions against nations such as North Korea that are seen as unethical
• Intellectual property law that causes obvious inefficiencies, such as the patenting of round corners on electronic devices
• Government corruption in places like China
• Female persons, or even male persons, not being able to attain important positions in society because of a lack of time

It seems like the definitive statement on the competence of influential people is whether they expected something like Sandy Hook or Aurora could happen. If they did not consider it at all, they are stupid.

In that case, I would expect James Holmes to announce his motivations so that people can agree that the problems of the world are not due to poor intentions. There are enough conspiracy theories floating around (on Youtube, a 94 minute video has 500k views) without expecting people to evaluate another; besides, blogs are not considered "reliable sources".

I dedicate this post to Monk of Firetree US server in the World of Warcraft, who defended me from respawns after I stopped talking after losing a neck item with intellect and spirit to, I think, a rogue, in March 2005. His email address went inactive sometime between an email I sent on his birthday on October 5 and another email I sent on 10 Nov.