Musings Report #19 05-5-12 Genius or a charlatan?
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Another Warning Chart (stock market)
Another chart of the S&P 500 that features a warning sign--a rising wedge broken to the downside. Technically, this means "look out below."
Genius or charlatan?
I get a lot of email from readers. This is a source of "intelligence," critiques and ideas from smart, knowledgeable people. I would be a lot dumber (and a less interesting blogger) if nobody took the time to write me. A blogger in the U.K. recently sent me this email:
"One of my readers pointed me to your site and some extracts. You are either a genius or a charlatan. What would you say to convince me that it is the former?"
Though there is certainly a challenging tone to this, it is also amusing in a trenchant sort of way, and so I replied "I'm too lazy to be a charlatan."
I don't even claim to be clever, much less a genius, but this either/or choice (genius or charlatan) raises several points worth pursuing.
History is replete with people who were viewed as charlatans but who turned out to be geniuses. History is equally replete with people who were viewed as geniuses who turned out to be if not charlatans then horridly misleading.
Ideas and policies can also be classified as "genius or charlatan." For example, the entire artifice of "economic recovery" based on secret institutional trading to prop up markets, monumental money-printing by central banks and equally monumental borrowing by central governments is presented as "genius," but it actually a policy doomed to fail, i.e. charlatan.
The point of my response is that being a charlatan requires a lot of work: lies and artifice are constantly being eroded by the truth and reality, and so it requires constant effort to prop up that which is false and phony. A policy which aligns with reality and which enables low-intensity instability of the sort I describe in "Resistance, Revolution, Liberation"--feedback, innovation, experimentation, failure, dissent, adaptability, etc.--is essentially effortless. It is the idea that removing barriers, eliminating monopoly and preventing predation will enable solutions to be found by freeing up people, resources and ideas.
Any policy which requires constant artifice, propaganda, prevarication, lies, manipulated data and borrowing vast sums to prop up the Status Quo is a charlatan policy. All the work and expense required to prop it up will eventually consume enough resources that it will implode.
A link from last week's Musings, In Nothing We Trust (via Cheryl A.), is worth reading just for its brief depiction of the difference between the local charter school and the conventional centralized school-district school. The conventional school system is "broke" financially and broken as an institution: maintaining budgets, security and discipline appear to be "Job One."
The charter schools use the same funding per student to provide a laptop PC to each student, and teachers are in constant email communication with parents and students. The system is transparent and adaptable. Which system is sustainable? Which enables "genius" to evolve, and which one stifles "genius" by its very nature and organization? Which one will always be "broke" no matter how much funding is increased? Which one is brittle, crippled by high overhead costs and bureaucratic rules, and which one is flexible and adaptable? Which one welcomes dissent and experimentation, and which one squelches them as "threats"?
Genius welcomes dissent and the freedom to experiment and fail. Genius believes in "faster, better, cheaper," not propping up a brittle, failed Status Quo.
From Left Field
How to Muddy Your Tracks on the Internet: It’s probably impossible to cloak your online activities fully, but there are steps you can take to make them harder to follow. (via Joel M.)
I found an interesting site which claims to list individual names from Census data. You can look up a name or a surname. Here is the list of "Trask," a surname of one of my fictional characters (Garrett Trask): there appears to be a "Garret Trask" but no Garrett Trask. I discovered there are roughly 46,000 gents named "Charles Smith." That's enough for a convention in Vegas...
"When a man's best friend is his dog, that dog has a problem." Edward Abbey
Thanks for reading--
charles
