Hip Rip
The pull of a cord and your spinning legs will propel you to heaven
Woah living on a duckstack
Living in a Tuesday Duckstack. We are still working on moving to a Monday night publishing schedule.
Relax. Its just The Duckstack. It isn’t going to shoot you or anything. Whatever its done in the past is all in the past. Its turned over a new leaf. A leaf you can read right now, without getting shot, again. Don’t you find that comforting? I sure do. I am incredibly calm, writing about how safe you should be reading this week’s Duckstack. Can you feel your blood pressure decreasing? No? Well, nobody’s perfect.
How about this. Lets make a deal. Nobody shoots you. In return, you keep reading. No strings attached- just read and you’re done, and safe, back in the comfort of your couch or chair or wherever you are currently not being shot. Sounds like a good deal, yes? There’s really no downside for you. Everybody wins. Except, I will notice, your blood pressure. You should really get that checked out. For your own sake.
Duckstack Technology: Blood Cells
Locked inside your body for high crimes against the state
Prowling the cities are villains, seeking world domination. They have power, and robots, and monsters. The only thing that stands against them? The blood cells.
Red: The leader of the Blood Cells, Red is known for his unfailing courage, his strong heart, and his confident optimism. Adept in martial arts, Red takes down enemies with flair, inspiring confidence in us all.
White: Arguably the strongest of the Blood Cells, White acts as leader where Red can’t, battling with wit and strength. Germs flee and scatter when White is around. Lets hear it for white!
Blue: Blue Blood Cell supports Red from the back, but don’t write him off! Blue has an arsenal of gadgets and talents which keep the city moving and strong!
Yellow: Yellow Blood Cell fights villains with humor and technology! He is a powerful scientist and knows a lot about the body1 and is always one step ahead! He fights evil with a smile!
Pink: The Pink Blood Cell is only found in women, and they help everything go well. They’re known to be a voice of reason2, forming the glue that holds the team together.
Black: While the Black Blood Cell is a bit of a loner, he always comes through when it counts, sometimes preventing problems in the nick of time through careful preparation. Operating in the shadows to protect the light, everyone loves the Black Blood Cell!
Each of these blood cells combines their powers to form the Super Cell! Fight against Kaiju demons! Teamwork saves the day!
The Death of The Author
If there’s more authors than anyone knows what to do with its basically the same thing.
IQ and Joseph Smith.
It is an incontrovertible fact that computers are better than they used to be. Our processors and screens and internet speeds have improved by miles. So why does everything feel… Worse?
Simply put, intelligence is not just about computing power. When computing power was limited, clever designs and careful resource management made doing well not just nice to have, but a necessity. Now that people can afford to be lazy, they are going to.
While your computer is in technicality limited by its hardware, there is nearly infinite room for improvement in software programming efficiency as well as in outsourcing, an incredible technology called “cloud compute”. With a decent internet connection, you can even run very high end games in a sort of virtual machine someone with better hardware hosts for you. This has very good implications on the question of IQ, which I will discuss shortly, and very bad implications for the future, which I shall discuss now.
It is a very basic principle that creativity is increased by constraints. Whether its poetic forms or just mechanical limitations, you have to do more unique things to get more expression out of smaller spaces. The original super mario game was about 40 KB, which is actually smaller in disk space than the following image:
The bad news is, constraints are not increasing. Society trends directly towards freedom in the negative sense, so creativity is becoming scarcer resource. The more compute we have the more generic our art is. The next star wars movie will be done in beanmouth. But I don’t just mean creativity, I mean all intelligence. The more information is conveniently at your fingertips, the less effort the vast majority of the population is going to spend learning how to acquire and test information. What you will see is, in aggregate, culture is going to spiral the drain as everyone forgets how to do math, a process already well underway. If AI can code for you, you don’t need to know the reasons why for example you might use a float over a double. The AI doesn’t know the reasons either, its all inherited tradition3 which means AI is going to sink to the lowest common denominator, just like everything else.
I am not saying this to bring about doom and gloom, because memetic force can very easily go the other way. The picture I’ve painted for you isn’t set in stone and many things could force it to change. Law, leadership, necessity, tragedy and its counterpart, among other possibilities. What I wish this picture to illustrate is the power of funny memes on the internet.
A person’s intelligence is, in some senses, hard capped by their IQ. IQ does not change throughout life- its the literal hardware you’ve got to work with. You’ve been born, your CPU and RAM and everything else are basically baked in, but life is not a set of processing units, life is a set of decisions- and the software a person uses to make those decisions can vary wildly from one person to another.
If I may dip into celebrity gossip, Elon Musk is a decently smart guy. I’m not convinced he’s 160 IQ4 like some estimates put him but he’s obviously able to state a thought and then model various implications of the thought, what in computer terms might be termed something like “multithreading”. A standard part of an IQ test is unscrambling words, memorizing dots in a pattern, and so forth. How many variables can you hold in your head. But if you plug those variables into the formula wrong, you’re just going to get a wrong answer. Elon Musk has lost millions of dollars and been caused immeasurable heartache by who he has chosen to sleep with.
If you were tasked with multiplying 9 * 9, there are several ways to approach solving this. One is to work through the problem from first principles. 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 + 9 = 81. Each step takes you a second. 9+9=18, 18+9=27. Its slow. Worse, its prone to mistakes since each step has its own margin and what if you miscount how many you were supposed to do. Is there a better way? Many. You can also memorize times tables. Memorizing 1-12 on the times tables can reduce most complex multiplication operations to manageable chunks- a simply memorized heuristic can reduce the error margin by a ton and let you solve things much faster, and there’s a threshold where you’re just going to be faster than a 200IQ guy counting through each iteration one at a time basically no matter what. You have made up for your lack of mental hardware with faster maps- “programming tricks.”
Most developed nations have tons of these programming tricks ingrained at levels so deep that most people don’t even know the reasons for them anymore. Tricks like “Monogamy” and “punish criminals”. Its possible to reason your way to these from first principles, but its way faster to just use the tricks without thinking about it, and you still arrive at the correct solution. I may be a little smarter than some5, but what sets me apart (I think I’m special) is mostly that I am good at learning my lessons. When I’m given a moral question I can usually stake out a starting point quickly, and it tends to be a fairly good starting point with more predictive power, increasing my agency and letting me see deeper into the situation. Some of these lessons have taken me years to learn, and I document many of them here. A learned lesson is something like adding VRAM .
I credit the vast majority of my wisdom, such as I have, to religion. I believe The Book of Mormon presents an explicitly human and political bloom of the gospel that allows Latter-Day Saints to “get right” questions that other religions can take decades working out step by step from first principles- if they ever work them out at all.
A common moral question of our day is “where is the line between meekness and being abused.” Is self defense justified? When? In the New Testament, Jesus is mostly a pacifist. This is the part where Christians usually go “but” and mention something about moneychangers and buying swords. Jesus used the whip on animals, not humans, Jesus recommended buying a sword but no apostle ever used it, much less Jesus himself. The closest you will find to direct violence from Christ is the smiting of Ananias and Saphira- but what lesson can be drawn from that? It isn’t even something Christ did while he is alive. If you only have the New Testament to go on, a well rounded study will find a nearly unilateral glorification of martyrdom. Many are falling away from Christianity because this worldview is self-evidently insufficient, self destructive, and also insane. God sees more than us, he will definitely command us to do things that look insane, but “let everyone abort their kid”? Christians know the answer and the Bible is not sufficient to solve the problem with clarity. Christians stumble trying to work these things out step by step from first principles. The Book of Mormon just says “self defense is justified.” It opens with Nephi being commanded directly by God to behead Laban just to get some scriptures. The pacifism and meekness is there to a careful reader- but it doesn’t let the reader be reductive about these things. In some situations, the Book of Mormon peoples are fully martyrs, and righteously so. In other situations, the Book of Mormon peoples are aggressors, and righteously so. To put it in an atheist literary critical way, it blends the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament in a way that makes sense. This doesn’t make Latter-Day Saints immune to error, but it gives them an “advanced starting point”, and many subjects are like this. I feel like I am constantly watching friends and family outside the church learn painful lessons from first principles that the church basically solved for me when I was 6. A lot of church members do nothing with all the excess compute power they gain from this, which lends Utah its reputation for naivete. That is how I see it.
I have seen more than my fair share of divorces caused by how a party had predisposed themselves to look at the situation and interpret the information. I’ve seen fights flare up when bad faith was assumed, and I’ve seen abuse perpetuated when bad faith wasn’t. You can work through the issues from first principles, but it is a lot easier to get a shorthand from somewhere else, but from the internet its easier than ever to pick your shorthands based on humor and style, popularity and guilt. Most people’s mental maps are not that good, and I think if you look around you will see most of them have not found success.
What you are able to see is directly dictated by the memes you inhabit. Consider this, the next time you lean towards optimism and pessimism. Truth is a knowledge of things as they really are, were, and will be.
Duckstack Interviews: Egg
Chicken could not be reached for comment.
Duckstack: “So what’s the best part about being an egg?”
EGG: I’d say its the potential. What could I grow into? The possibilities are endless.
Duckstack: “Well couldn’t you just look up who your parents are?”
EGG: “And spoil the surprise? I’ll spoil first.”
Duckstack: “Fair enough. We did some research and I was going to tell you because we had some questions but I wouldn’t want to put you in that situation.”
EGG: “Well, wait hold on, you can tell me.”
Duckstack: “Are you sure? Like you said, it would ruin the surprise.”
EGG: “I… Well maybe you could just give me a hint?”
Duckstack: “Well honestly I can’t think of any hint that doesn’t just give it totally away. I guess we’d better move on.”
EGG: “Wait! Actually I do want to know. Please tell me.”
Duckstack: “What’s in it for me?”
EGG: “Seriously?”
Duckstack: “Yeah I mean I want to get something out of this.”
EGG: “Besides an interview?”
Duckstack: “Fair point. I lied about looking your parents up btw I just wanted to see how you would react.”
EGG: “…”
Duckstack: “anyway would you rate your day as ‘eggcelent?’, or maybe ‘eggciting’?
EGG: “I’m out of here. I can’t believe I agreed to this.”
History
Toddler is covered head to toe in scratches that he has had no opportunities to gain
A distressed toddler told us: “The trees are going to poke Jethro!” Don’t know what he was talking about. Was he worried about Jethro floating along like a ghost?
Toddler has been pretty good at seat belts. Mostly. Sometimes he still gets stuck, but he still tells us “I can do it because I’m big!” one time this week we let him try and he couldn’t, and he cried for help: “I growed little again!”
“This is the pizza peel. Do not eat this.” (crust)
Toddler packed a ball of play-doh and told us “I made a planet!”. We haven’t even told him about kolob yet, it just comes naturally
“Baby you are so cute!” Baby: *grimaces*
Environmental PSA: The Steaks Have Never Been Higher
Not to get all political or anything
Are you a gambling man? Would you gamble that there are hundreds of steaks floating menacingly? Would you gamble if your life depended on it? If you were in a situation where your life depended on gambling that there are hundreds of steaks in the air, would you do it? Would you lay down your life to say steaks do not float menacingly? Is that what steaks mean to you?
Ducksnax
Birthday
what am I even writing about anymore
I just learned this from the power rangers wiki
In the form of stack overflow posts
Most online tests put me around 129 IQ, which is certainly decently smart, but the fact is many people much smarter than me make much dumber choices much more consistently.