Science Proves Self-Deception is the Best Strategy

In a new study published in PLOS ONE, evidence is presented that a person who deceives themselves as to their talent and knowledge, and thus is more self-confident, is more likely to be judged by their peers as actually being more talented and thus are more successful than they deserve to be.

The converse is also true. According to this study, if you have low self-esteem, you are judged less talented by your peers and receive correspondingly fewer opportunities, promotions and so forth.

This is an interesting wrinkle on the “fools may go where wise people fear to tread” meme and suggests that the best way to get opportunity and get ahead in life is to be blindingly self-confident beyond all reason and experience.

The problem with this strategy comes when one tries to fake being unreasonably self-confident. Those who are merely deluded are the stronger type because they genuinely believe their bullshit, believe they are God's gift to ... whatever, and thus go further than someone who merely pretends to be delusional and has unreasonable self-confidence. Those that try to fake their delusional self-confidence are not as good at it, apparently, as those who are insane and thus are less likely to be promoted.

This is bitter tea. Many of us would try to fake delusional and unreasonable self-confidence if we thought it would help us, but the evidence does not support this approach. Merely faking it but not actually believing it fails to be convincing to your fellow biped mammals whose judgment you seek to influence.   

But there is a wrinkle that might be an effective strategy. Apparently these self-deluded and successful individuals are also more likely to overestimate the talent and potential of their coworkers. Thus if you feel stymied in your career, and want to get ahead, then by going to work for a deluded and over-confident manager is a way to possibly be given opportunities that you would not otherwise receive or merit.

The conclusion therefore is for all of us to find the most delusional and unreasonably self-confident people we know and go to work for them.

The abstract of the paper is below.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0104562

2014 Speculation about Mysterious Aircraft

As readers of this blog know, I am a student of the affairs of the intelligence community, in particular that part of the community that builds incredibly expensive, secret, limited edition devices of one sort or another. Previous posts have discussed whether the “mysterious booms” were evidence of a production vehicle flying and the conclusion of those posts was “maybe, but it isn't proven”. At least not from the evidence at hand.

That is where things have stood for a long time now. It was time for something new to happen and it has. There have been sightings of an unusual aircraft flying over Texas in recent months. The aircraft is an unknown flying wing, perhaps, and its a complicated story of just who saw what, who denied what, and then what was seen in the same flight path. But rather than go over old ground, I am just going to point you to a well-written, and very long, overly long, discussion of the evidence and possible theories.

The theory that I find the most appealing and possibly even plausible is that there was a secret plane built and used in production for 20 years and we kept it secret all that time. The reason we are starting to see it now is well, sort of a mystery.  It might be because they are using it so much what with all the crisis these days.  Or it might be that it is nearing the end of its life so there is less reason to keep it secret  (keeping an operational aircraft secret and yet using it is hideously expensive).  Or maybe it is being leaked now as a warning to those who do bad things that we have this capability.  Or maybe it is just coincidence.

This plane, so the theory goes, was the followon to various technologies being tested in the 1980s that were suddenly cancelled. When something like that happens it is a natural speculation that perhaps they were continued as a black program. One theory is that the plane was a manned, long duration, stealth, tactical reconnaissance vehicle that could penetrate enemy airspace and do a variety of things possibly in conjunction with the F117. Among other things it could loiter in enemy airspace and (for example) direct special forces missions happening below it, perhaps acting as eyes and ears for those missions.

Read the article at the link below.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/so-what-were-those-secret-flying-wing-aircraft-spotted-1555124270

My posts on mysterious booms can be found here:

<insert link>

Good Visual Effects in Really Bad Movies

What should we think of excellent visual effects or other exploits of difficult technical filmmaking in the service of a bad movie? Should we hate it? Applaud it because it gives work to our friends? Keep our mouth shut because often the problem starts with the script and it is not our place to say?

The question comes up often in visual effects because of the recent trends in filmmaking that have wisely chosen to reduce costs by eliminating the screenwriter (or any writing of quality) in return for having more pointless, visual effects shots. Furthermore, when in preproduction, when there is still time to turn away from Satan and rewrite the script, who is going to tell the director that his or her ideas are really bad?

Recall that the visual effects industry, if we may flatter it by calling it an industry, is a very competitive work-for-hire, production service business. If anyone were so stupid as to criticize the content of a screenplay when asked to bid on it they would rapidly get the reputation for being “arrogant” and in very short order not be asked to bid on anything. It is not the visual effects facility's job or privilege to judge the director's vision.

Nevertheless we all have our moments of outrage when an expensive Hollywood film or cheap television knockoff egregiously or outrageously abuses our willing suspension of disbelief and we crash to the ground, taken out of the moment, by some appalling or ludicrous cinematic plot point or creative choice. At such times it may be useful to remember that the Hollywood entertainment industries are about, well, entertainment, not about presenting reality. True, the appearance of realism is often used as a technique to make a story more appealing or involving, but it is always in the service of making a project more dramatic or effective and in the service of entertainment. It is rarely, very rarely, about showing “reality”.

As an example of this I want to describe three films with “something that flies” in an unrealistic fashion: two of which I found completely acceptable and one which irritated the hell out of me the first time I saw it and every time since. And yet all three are clearly fantasy movies intended to be entertaining. Why do two of them work for me but the third does not?

In the first example, we have the X Wing and Tie fighters from the original Star Wars (1977). When this movie came out, there were some who criticized it because these spacecraft made whooshing noises as they went by the “camera”. Whoosh! But this never bothered me in the least because I, as a devoted reader of science fiction, knew that in the classic space opera it would be quite normal and correct for such fighters to make whooshing noises as they went by. It worked in the context of the film and the genre.

In our second example, we have the flying carpet in Disney's Aladdin (1992). Now it might be a surprise to you to know that this is pure fantasy, but it is. Flying carpets do not exist in real life. Dont get mad at me, its true, do your own research. But if there were flying carpets, I have no doubt that they might work like the one in Aladdin and it certainly was completely believable to the audience.

But our third example is not so happy.

This is a remake of a French film, a romantic comedy, about a secret agent whose family does not know what he does for a living and think he is boring. Of course, through dramatic and unbelievable plot twists, they discover that he is a secret agent and his daughter likes him again and he has hot sex with his wife. The American remake of this important dramatic masterpiece was called True Lies (1994) of course and it is even less believable overall than either Aladdin or Star Wars. Given this fantastic nature, surely one would not be upset when our hero has a magic carpet of his own, in this case a Harrier jet.

In the movie, the Arnold flies the Harrier right up to the side of a skyscraper to kill the bad guys. Bang ! Bang ! You are dead! At another point in the film, his daughter falls from a crane or a bridge or something, but is able to hang onto the wing of the Harrier. Arnold yells to her, “Hang on!”

This irritated the living bejeesus out of me. I still want to spit whenever I think of it. Why?

Because a Harrier, which is a very cool airplane, is a very loud jet. Very loud. If you flew it up to a skyscraper closer than 50 feet it would blow all the windows out, and you would probably lose control of the vehicle. You would certainly not be able to calmly shoot out all the bad guys. Maybe you could do something like that by standing off about 500 feet or more, that might work.

Or when the daughter falls to the airplane and hangs on. First off I doubt you could hang on. Second, if you did, you would almost certainly be hurting yourself terribly and you would let go and hopefully die. Third you would probably get burned all to hell. Fourth, and lastly, the Harrier is loud, really loud. Like really damage your ears loud. LIKE REALLY FUCKING LOUD. You would not be yelling to anybody “hang on” because no one would be able to hear a thing.

But why does this irritate me so much? The movie is clearly a fantasy. In fact, I might go so far as to say that the movie is a cynical, derivative, stupid, inane, worthless piece of shit. What difference does it make? I am not sure. Maybe because the Harrier is a real airplane and a very cool one, but its limitations should be respected? Maybe because the movie expects me to take these ridiculous developments as reality and I know it isnt even close to what is possible?

All I can tell you is that whenever I see these sequences from this movie, I start jumping up and down because I can not believe how unbelievably fucking stupid they are.

Not even Jamie Lee Curtis doing a striptease can redeem this horrible movie in my eyes.

But the visual effects are very nice.

Aladdin (1992) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103639/

True Lies (1994) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111503/

Star Wars (1977) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076759/

Le Totale! (1991)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103103/

Nuclear Disaster and the Small Time Criminal

As many of you know, TEPCO, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, has been receiving a very hard time because of events at Fukushima.   Ok, so they made a few mistakes.  But how were they to know a tsunami would happen in Japan?  Its not as if tsunamis have ever happened there, well, at least, not that often.  Ok, so they do happen on a regular basis, but it would be expensive to protect against them, you know what I mean?

And what bad timing!  Just as the world was about to embark on another round of building nuclear power plants, they convince the world that private enterprise could never be competent to run nuclear power. Sure, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima did not work out, but is that enough to turn away from such a great way to extract profits?

And people are so critical about the plans for nuclear waste, or rather the lack of plans.   People are so fickle sometimes.  They do not mind when we dump toxic waste in Africa or plastic in the ocean.  Why should they all of a sudden get so picky about nuclear waste?  It just isnt fair.

But that is not what this post is about.

Its easy to point the finger at large corrupt companies and governments.  After all, they have a lot of money and power which they can use to betray trust and steal things.   But what about the little people?  The individual entrepreneur?  What can they do to exploit the sick or the poor or the frightened and steal money?  Do they also have a role to play in our modern globalized economy?

I believe that they do and this post celebrates the contributions of the little guy and his/her work to make our world even more screwed up than it is.   Our heroes or heroines did not attend the elite schools that prepared them for corruption on the big stage.  No, these are the small-time grifters, the petty thieves, the kind of people who would steal money from the poor or the sick on an individual basis.  The kind of corruption we discuss today is much more personal and demonstrates the lofty spirit of the individual criminal in society.

I have extracted from a Reuters article about the latest TEPCO scandal two comments that are part of a beautiful scam to exploit the unfortunate circumstances of Fukushima.  These comments attempt to exploit the fear of radioactivity to sell the reader some worthless snake oil to protect him or her from its dangers.  What spirit this shows!  What indomitable will!  Our enterprising criminal can not provide a direct link to his product because many comment systems forbid this in order to prevent exactly this kind of abuse.  So our spammer creates a brand/product name and asks you to search for it, so that he may attempt to exploit your ignorance and fear and steal your money.

Here are his/her advertisements masquerading as comments to an article about TEPCO.

We must thank the Internet for providing a medium for bold entrepreneurs like this.  Where would we be without the Internet and its anonymity, so useful and necessary to protect criminals of all types?

What a beautiful example of the beliefs and values of our fellow bipeds!   How clearly it shows us the very best that our society aspires to!  Not in some vast epic of stupidity and corruption like TEPCO but in the actions of the little people we find the true spirit of our civilization and our hope for the future.

The article from Reuters about TEPCO is here.

The Professional Objectivist

This essay is an indirect meditation on the very broad questions of what it is that makes a place desirable, or entertaining or pleasant.    For some people, it is the weather of S. California with its endless overly bright sunlight and extremely strong opinions about what constitutes success and failure.  For me, there are many issues but one of them, discussed here, is my eccentric sense of what is entertaining.  So, for example, the following afternoon social event which I describe here I found tremendously amusing.  It still makes me smile whenever I think of it.  But I wonder how many other people would find it as rewarding?

For many years I lived in the Upper West Side of New York City in a sublet of an incredible apartment overlooking Riverside Drive and the Hudson River (estuary). I have been fortunate to also live in other places that had high entertainment value, such as Los Angeles in the 1980s when computer animation was but a gleam in a few idealist's eyes, but none so beautiful and rewarding as the apartment on Riverside Drive.

Although my role in the Hayden Planetarium's Digital Galaxy Project was sadly over I still maintained many relationships with my friends there. One afternoon I was invited to join two of them, Anthony Braun and Gretchen Schwartz of the museum, for afternoon tea at some cafe on Columbus Avenue. It was a beautiful day and we sat outside. I am pretty sure that Steve Gano was there that day as well. (1) Gretchen had also invited her girlfriend who we will call Amy. Amy and Gretchen had both been interns for Michael Moore, the famous director of documentaries (and they both hated Mr. Moore with a passion).

Amy had invited her current boyfriend a tall, good looking young man.

So what did Amy's boyfriend do? It seems he was an “intellectual”, and that he worked as an Objectivist philosopher for the Ayn Rand Institute.

Ayn Rand being interviewed somewhere

Now, let me ask you, did you ever read Ayn Rand? Well, I was an undergraduate once, and I read Ayn Rand like everybody else, and was somewhat amused. It did not seem very practical. And I wondered, I truly wondered, who could write that 150 page rant near the end of Atlas Shrugged that went on and on and fucking on? It turns out that Ayn Rand was a Jewish refugee from Stalin's socialist paradise. So a Russian Jewish author of romantic political tracts, we now knew who could write such ummm, well, emphatic material. Ayn Rand, or whatever her real name was, could.

One more thing, to help complete the picture before I comment thereon. It was clear to me that whatever Amy's long term interest in this Objectivist was, her short term interest was, ummm, romantic, which I think puts a more respectable spin on what she wanted from this relationship. That was my impression. A nice looking, big, healthy young man. Such are the lofty motives of so many of our peers and colleagues.

Now, how many Objectivists are there in the world? Well, there are a fair number of people who might call themselves an Objectivist, I suppose. But how many of them get paid for it? Only very few, I think. In the entire world, are there ten professional Objectivists? I doubt it. In all this world are there five professional Objectivists? Perhaps there are five. Perhaps.

So this was truly a great and rare honor. I was having tea with a professional Objectivist!

Now out here in Hollywood I know many interesting and accomplished people. Writers, visual effects supervisors, academy award winners, famous computer scientists, successful entrepreneurs, actors, actresses, poets and porn stars.

But in all these years on the west coast, I never once met a professional Objectivist.

The Ayn Rand Institute

http://www.aynrand.org/

Objectivism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivism_(Ayn_Rand)

Atlas Shrugged

http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145

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1. Some of the people who read this blog will know Steve well. He is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab and a veteran of Apple / Kaleida among other ventures.

Improving Elementary Education with H.P. Lovecraft

Education for young people is an area that most agree should be improved but there is no consensus as to what should be done to improve it.  I am aware of one specific area which I believe that we can all unite behind and work to see that this area is better represented in our elementary curriculum.

After some study, I have concluded that our school children are not being sufficiently exposed to the genre of American horror fiction.   This is a disgrace.   Immersed in a diet of graphic novels that emphasize sexually aberrant superheroes and heroines, our children are sadly unaware and uninformed about important topics such as the hollow earth, the elder gods, the forbidden knowledge, the unspeakable horror, ancient curses, and other important topics.  Why many have never even heard of Cthulhu, let alone understand his/its importance to the traditions of American fiction.

We must take action now and correct this error in our educational process.  We must make the point to our school boards and teachers that our children would benefit from being exposed to a greater diversity of outsider fiction.  And first among them should be the autodidact and self-published author H.P. Lovecraft who is considered one of the greatest writers of horror fiction in this or any country.

H. P. Lovecraft

But it has been argued that Lovecraft is not suitable for very young audiences.  These people are wrong. What could be more appealing to a young child than The Nameless City, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow Out of Time or The Call of Cthulhu?

If it is still believed that some of Lovecraft is a little advanced for our very youngest readers, I have a solution. I want to present to you an approach that the artist R. J. Ivankovic has created and I think that this will answer any objections, silly as they may be.

R. J. Ivankovic has pioneered a mashup of Dr. Seuss with H.P. Lovecraft and other authors of the macabre, the horrible, and the grotesque.   Here are some images from his/her “Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers”, a reimagining of the original Lovecraft story about Cthulhu published in Weird Tales in 1928.

I believe that we should embrace Mr/Ms Ivankovic's vision and bring it to all our young children. I feel certain that the Dr. Seuss estate would look favorably on the request to use the Seuss style in such a noble cause.

And here is a “One Fish, Two Fish...” as reinterpreted through a zombie, night of the living dead, filter.

Please join me in recommending to our various school boards and committees this important work and help improve elementary education in our country.

DrFaustusAU can be found on Deviant Art at

http://drfaustusau.deviantart.com/

Find his or her The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers here

http://drfaustusau.deviantart.com/gallery/34469914/The-Call-of-Cthulhu-for-beginning-readers

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Notes

Cthulhu on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthulhu

H. P. Lovecraft on Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft

Elitism, Privilege and Fast Attack Submarines

Over the years I have gone back and forth on the issue of whether there are “rules” that apply to all of us or not. Or are there people for whom the rules do not apply, a privileged elite for whom special accommodation is made?

It seems to me that every time I come across a rule that is supposedly applied evenhandedly, for example, taxes, that no such thing is true. That in fact, there are one set of taxes for the rich, one for the remnants of the middle class and one for the poor with most of the tax burden falling on the middle and lower classes. Or consider the laws against stealing. A poor man steals $500 from a 7-11 and goes to jail. The mortgage industry destroys the world economy, is gifted 2.5 trillion dollars by our government, and the only people who go to jail are the very poorest who defaulted on their pathetic mortgage and are imprisoned in debtors prison in Michigan while the rich go free and laugh.

But I thought that at least in the area of submarines, submarines, for goodness sake, I thought that our country had some integrity. But sadly I was mistaken.

As a student of the cold war and as a strong believer in the role of vast, expensive, over-complicated technological solutions to impose our will on the world and bring the benefits of our culture to other nations whether they want it or not, I am of course a supporter and student of submarines.

And who could not be? The dream of traveling under the water to explore the unknown lands to be found there, filled with strange and wonderful creatures which we can now eat and drive extinct, the ability to visit mysterious underwater phenomena as described by our science fiction authors, to sponsor cooperation between nations by tapping their most secret communication cables, all of these are compelling justifications of our devotion to submarines.

Surely as time passes, more and more will be revealed about the activities of our submarines during the Cold War.

Layout of Japanese WW2 Mini Submarine

For years I had been told that it was impossible to take a tour of one of our nation's active duty nuclear powered submarines.  Since one would not want to get close to a nuclear missile submarine, this would be one of the Los Angeles Class (three different types), Seawolf or Virginia class attack submarines. Tours of every other class of ship of the US Navy were possible, but not nuclear submarines, I was told, on one occasion by a former captain of an attack submarine.

So I was told.

Its all bullshit.

The rules are for the little people and do not apply to those who secretly run things.  Such as a limited number of Stanford Alumni.

See the evidence for yourself, below.

This damning document can be found at the following url:.

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/events/details?event_id=8594

For those of you not up on your subs, the “Los Angeles” class is the class portrayed in the movie Hunt for Red October (1990)

I plan to be calling the San Diego Naval Station and asking for my tour soon and I encourage all of you to do the same.  Lets smash this egregious elitism and restore the right to visit nuclear submarines to all our people.

_________________________________________

Notes

Chief of Naval Operations Description of the Fast Attack Submarine

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/today/ssn.html

Hunt for Red October (1990) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099810/

Is Writing A Blog a Form of Therapy?

Before we go further, I want you to know what I think about psychotherapy, sometimes called talk therapy, sometimes called psychoanalysis although not as commonly today. I think it is mostly an entertaining mistake from the early part of last century, one part scam, one part Jewish intellectual disease, one part self-deception. (1) I have friends who are the children of very successful psychoanalysts and who have been in therapy all their lives and clearly it hasn't helped.

There are many kinds of therapy of course, and the kind I am being dismissive of is the one in which the patient talks about his life and the doctor concludes that the patient is hostile because he secretly wants to have sex with his mother.

But keeping an open mind, when I was in NY and consulting for Viacom, I decided to give it a try. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Besides, I had as close as I was going to ever have to a steady income, so now was the time.

A great scene from the President's Analyst (1967) right before he confesses to killing the Albanian.

Anyway, I tried it for a year and did get some benefit out of it although I did not realize at first what was going on. What happened is that I noticed that when I saw the therapist, I leaned less on my friends. I live alone and so other than talking to myself, the only way I can release certain kinds of stress, to share as it were, is to talk to my friends. I suspect my friends find this tiresome.  But when I was in therapy I noticed that because I could spew once a week at my therapist, that I did not do it as much to my friends and in fact that I was also a bit less neurotic in the workplace.

Apparently this benefit is sometimes called “Rent a Pal” and is not unique to me.  One is still as fucked up as before, may have as many neurosis or unrealized desires to have kinky sex or whatever, but at least one is not as compelled to blab about it to your long-suffering friends.

I wonder whether I am getting a similar benefit from writing this blog? In writing many of these posts, I get my entertainment by trying to find an amusing way to beat the shit out of things, events, concepts or people that annoy me. 

 I am in touch with my feelings so there are a lot of things that annoy me.

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1. There was a period of time, perhaps the 1950s or so, when between three apostate Jews we were able to fuck up nearly everybody in the world. The three of course were Jesus, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. Technically, Jesus was an apocalyptic rabbi, and not really apostate.

Administrative Notes on the Blog Fall 2014

These are notes to myself and anyone else interested in the blogging process.

We are now a month or so into the third year of writing this blog and many things have been learned but nothing too unexpected. Many intermediate goals are proceeding along very well. Its probably my single most successful project of the last 5 years or so, take that for what you will.

The two things holding it back are my normal tendency to fail to be very organized in achieving long term goals and the amount of time to do a post when one is trying to be productive in other areas. These are not new issues, but I want to go over them briefly anyway.

The advantage of the blog process is that it can tolerate a “skip around and talk about whatever pops into your head” work process. It can tolerate a “five different posts in progress but this one is the closest to finishing so lets do it and put it up”. But there are other things in life that do not respond to this devil-may-care, gotta-be-free, seat-of-the-pants life style. These things may require a “do these five things by this date and three of those things are really obnoxious and not fun at all”, or may require addressing unpleasant topics or modest amount of confrontation. But in these tasks, failure to make the deadline (which may not even be explicitly known) or failure to do one of the five tasks no matter how well you did the other four results in a total wash.  It is as if you did no work at all. 

So the blogging process must accommodate these other, less forgiving projects.

The second issue is that a decent post is a solid 4 or so hours of serious work. Again not a surprise. Not all posts take this long, this post is taking a little over an hour. But in general my best essays, the ones that contribute the most value and are the most entertaining require many hours of thinking, writing, rewriting, some research, selection of visual materials, and so forth. This is the kind of work that a good client proposal might require or making some progress on a technical project that one has ongoing.

Anyway, it won't surprise you that it can be very hard to find those 4 plus hours when trying to make progress in other things, traveling to conferences, dealing with society, etc. Some days have at best one 4 hour period of dedicated work in it. Some days don't even have that.

So when you do not see a post, or a post of substance for a while, it probably has as its subtext that whatever is going on in my life is getting in the way of applying that serious time to finish or write a post.

A minor issue for the blog is that as it gets more material, it needs to be reorganized, with better choices of tags, various subject pages and so forth.  That project will be a little nasty, like cleaning the kitchen floor, and also like cleaning the floor, becomes more annoying the longer one postpones it.

The Illusionist Table at the Scitech Awards

Is it the Addams family or is it our table at the Scitech Awards?

This picture was taken so long ago that David Coons is still married to Carlye.   There is very little light in that room and I am morally opposed to flash units, so that explains the use of the candles to try and add a little illumination.

Besides David Coons and Carlye, we have Rick Sayre, Nicki Kaiser, Josh Pines in the center, Stu Moscowitz (sp) and his lovely girlfriend.  I am inquiring the names of the other people there and about when this happened.

Nikki points out that the candles and the tuxedos make it look like a meeting of illusionists, perhaps earlier last century or even before.