Technical Education vs. Mental Illness

BIG FEE, Article 1

This is the first article in a series I'm calling "BIG FEE", which stands for Bitcoin, Investment, Gambling, Finance, Economics, and Education. Stirring these topics into one pot is sometimes necessary to make some important points regarding how we can approach the future. The acronym of the series is a warning that anyone who fails to educate themselves pays a big fee in a technological world.

This will also be a home for a few articles on my poker playing hobby, which is becoming an increasingly important part of my income since I gave up two lucrative careers for a thin income trying to break through the noise to give correct statistics about the pandemic (while people were being psyoped from two differently incorrect sides in a modern tale of Hegelian pinball).

Understand that in this first article and others, I use the term mental illness in the most broad possible way such that we may refer to every human as having and managing some form and level of mental illness. Hopefully, this makes clear that I push back against the stigmatization of mental illness. So, if I describe you in a way that implies that you are mentally ill, understand that I will also be writing about managing my own faulty perceptions at times—particularly in my articles about poker. I hope to use that as a way to hone my game.

More importantly, I hope that it becomes clear over several articles how the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS) manages the various forms and levels of mental illness it learns about by collecting all our data before it deploys poker players attuned to the game theory inherent in our individual profiles.

Raise your game to stay in the game. Raise your game so that you have influence in the future of humanity.

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Mental Illness Wrecks Democratic Participation in Technology

A young woman stands in front of a nuclear power plant. She is a practiced speaker. She protests the dangers of nuclear power holding a large sign with a picture of a two-headed snake. The audience seeing this protest in person and over the internet includes many people who then relate the two-headed snake to the nuclear plant, then donate to the organization run by the woman with the sign. This organization gains momentum, leading to pressure on the company running the nuclear plant. The quality of life of everyone working to create energy at that plant begins to degrade as their costs playing public relations and legal games increases, even though this particular plant is cleaner, better run, and more efficient in terms of negative externalities (risks and pollution emissions) than any power plant of any kind within hundreds of miles.

The young woman, Maya, tells her audience that she studied geo-economics for a decade, so she came to understand how the community should manage the nuclear plant. In truth, she did uncover various forms of corruption between government and the energy industry, and spends time getting friendly with members of the community, telling them stories of her research, patting them on the head each time one of them expresses their own frustrations, real or imagined.

While most of that corruption emanated from Big Oil's early consolidation of capital and political power, Maya aims community outrage at the operators of the nuclear plant. The value of the company running the plant declines, and the owners begin talking about selling the plant and walking away. Maya tells the community that her years of experience studying the issues of nuclear power by watching Russell Brand videos help elevate her understanding of the nuclear plant, so you can trust her to use your donations to buy the plant and operate it according to community interests. She has never operated machinery more sophisticated than a car or personal computer, nor worked in an industrial business of any kind.

In reality, Maya never solved an equation involving basic nuclear physics. She does not know the basic terminology involved in nuclear energy. She knows the name of the elemental isotope used in the nuclear plant, and can rattle off several facts about it that anyone can read off of Wikipedia, but she has no real understanding of how nuclear energy is generated. She cannot explain the differences between the processes of generating endothermic and exothermic reactions, or the calculations associated with the size of the artificial lake on the side of which a cooling tower sits. When confronted with this lack of understanding, she turns the accusation toward the operators of the plant, saying that they have not demonstrated their understanding of how to safely generate energy from unstable elements. She consistently baits conversation with the operators of the planet through local newspaper articles that explain how they behave with callousness toward her unnamed friend who suffered a mild injury that made him want to kill himself after being conned by a conman into doing something dangerous at a nuclear power plant that might or might not have been the local plant. Enough of the crowd buys Maya's story that the economics of the power plant are under local mob control unless surveillance and policing are ramped up to control the mob's proximity to the plant and its operators.

The picture of the snake was not local. Maya's photo came from a zoo in France, but could have been one of any number of pictures of two-headed snakes pulled off the internet. But the crowd associates the unusual characteristic with radiation pollution and the three-eyed fish in the introduction of so many episodes of The Simpsons cartoon. The result is thought-terminating fear. Three different morticians begin claiming that they've pulled two-headed snakes out of corpses.

Despite efforts by the operators of the nuclear plant to promote better science education in local schools, they fail to motivate the local populace to learn enough to participate in the conversation productively. Many of the members of the community struggle with time and family finances, and do not know how to begin a technical educational journey, and Maya has misled mentally ill members of the community into attacking their own best community resource in the energy sector. Because Maya is well-spoken, and wields jargon and facts that they cannot recognize that she does not understand, they do not recognize Maya as being herself critically mentally ill.

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Shaking Fists at Bitcoin

My simplest take on Bitcoin: Bitcoin is a technological upgrade to money management because it is a solution to the optimization problem of how to best manage money using the least amount of energy. Put more simply, it costs less than having people at a bank move money around in spreadsheets, a process promoted by the military conquest of nations that push back against using that form of money, which ensures that money being siphoned out of the system does not cause too much inflation in the short term. That way, the people don't notice how much of their money gets spent on the system.

From that take, I liken people complaining about Bitcoin to those who complained about planes, trains, and automobiles. And computers. Sure, all those things were used by the Empire to loot the world, but that's the problem with asymmetric use of technology. Technology only becomes increasingly symmetric as everyone learns it. Learning is the great regulation. Standing around, shaking our fists at each new development doesn't solve anything. And honestly, I cannot help but to recognize mild to serious mental illness in so many people wasting their time in a way that looks little different than barking at cars on a busy interstate.

Understand first that I have serious questions about Bitcoin, and worries about the future of the monetary system. In particular, it is truly scary that we live in an era in which a small number of very powerful people are hiding their poker hand in the game of choosing between Bitcoin, precious metals, fiat money, or some as-of-yet unrevealed plan for the monetary system of their Cybernetic Empire. While I suspect that the answer is Bitcoin (the least expensive option), I do worry that the managers of the system can use any potential solution as a pump-and-dump scheme. In fact, I suspect that this is going on with gold, which is being promoted by "dissident" podcasters, not to mention sold by the ounce in the checkout line at Costco. How's that for an impulse buy?

"But gold has intrinsic value, genius!"

Yeah, so much that if the banks dumped it, it would still retain one or two percent of its current value, maybe. Intrinsic value is not what monetary economics is about. All economics is energy economics. If you haven't yet moved past the rhetorical battles to recognize and focus on this truism, you're probably barking at cars, and some A.I. is probably recording you barking at cars while updating your expiration date that only exists if you choose to be a dependent of the Cybernetic Empire. I am not here to mince words, and I do not have time to hold everyone's hand. I do not want for you to become a dependent of the Leviathan State, tagged with the profile of a "useless eater by Date X." I would rather have you join the independent network that stands strong outside of it all. That isn't going to be easy. We have work to do.

Is Bitcoin just a bubble, as so many fist shakers exclaim?

Remember, technology is what drives economic growth. You cannot have one without the other by definition. We could all become luddites, but that rarely worked out in history. Recall that the Jesuits riled up Native American tribes for war with the colonial settlers, telling them a magical spell protected them from European bullets. That didn't work out well for the natives. I suspect that something similar is taking place where today's pandemic dissidents are being steered into cults. History tells us that you either compete, or die out. The challenge is to find ways to compete without selling out to Moloch.

On a not unrelated note, you might be interested to what Dr. Anthony Fauci, educated by the Jesuits, said in an interview with the Jesuits. Can you hear history rhyming?

I do very much worry about scams involving cryptocurrency, which is one reason why I both write articles and ran multiple educational groups (no longer operational due to time spent on harassment by mentally ill people) where I consistently discouraged people from investing in the vast majority of digital assets. After I found clever ways to make money stepping in between digital asset pumpers and their target dupes, I wrote most of a book (The Cryptoeconomicon) on trading. But instead of reaping the likely hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in book sales, I chose not to publish it out of fears that mentally ill people would jump into a shark-driven poker game, and then watch their chip stacks evaporate—quickly or gradually. I wrote 150 pages of what might have been a free thousand-page Bitcoin education guide had I not waded into the conversation about how the mRNA COVID "vaccines" are both deadly and ineffective. The Scams chapter might have expanded to 20 or 30 pages were my efforts not cut short. If you were to ask most of my Bitcoin friends whom they know personally that donated the most time to educating people about cryptocurrency scams, most of them would nearly all name me first. I've tried my best to do that during the plandemonium as well.

One of my thousand or so warnings to friends about cryptocurrency scams.

Note: BTC has been more than 99% of my digital asset portfolio for the past several years. I conclude nearly all comments about using other digital currencies with disclaimers about "only test-using tokens to see what System Z does, not stocking up on them to speculate" for instance.

I also worry that Bitcoin was in fact created by the Military Occult Banking Syndicate (MOBS), even to the irritation of some of my Bitcoin friends. I believe that who invented Bitcoin is far less important than how individuals make use of it. Failure to understand technology gives the oligarchs asymmetric control over it, which can lead to further consolidation of power and wealth. I see part of my job as encouraging as many people as possible to invest so that the investment pool is as large and democratized as possible. I am open to discussion and debate on this point, though writing up my research on the matter hasn't hit the top of my large priority stack.

That leads me to why I'm writing this article. I hope that this article is educational on its own, but it is a forced response to Tereza Coraggio, who posted a video and article that impugned my character after my conversation with Hrvoje and Gabe a short time ago. She picked out a brief exchange between me and Gabe where I expressed that the money stolen because of Bitcoin is orders of magnitude less than money stolen in the status quo system in particular, but all other systems, historically. The frustrating thing to me is that Tereza impugned my character without doing very basic research on the subject matter, or observing that I've spent hundreds of hours educating people on the topic on which she twisted the conversation to paint me as being "callous".

Bitcoin vs. the Caret

Almost every paragraph of this conversation is so nonsensical that it would take weeks to sort it all out. Years, actually. I hate saying that, but there is a time when you need to be direct before people who haven't ridden a tricycle try to steer a train onto a busy highway, giving the train engineer the finger on the way into the intersection. In the comments, I am pressured in each response to spend endless hours educating in order to avoid some sort of Scarlet lettering.

It's fine for people to discuss matters on which they are ignorant. But it's a problem when they cast aspersions at people who have done the hard work that they have no conception about, but delusionally believe that they do. This is one of the fundamental problems with a complex society in which education has been sabotaged for the purpose of turning technology into magic in the eyes of the larger populace. This shields the oligarchal class from any form of revolution—peaceful or violent. We reached the point at which we're living in a cargo cult world that would collapse into the Mad Max universe without the oligarchs and their Mandarin class (which is shrinking with each round of Big Tech layoffs, and possibly in the government soon). The implicit blackmail works because when you hand over the keys to a technological kingdom to people who don't know what they don't know, you wind up with Kazakhstan, the immense black hole in the middle of Eurasia desertified by the attempt to make communism work after kicking out and murdering the competent people. This is what a post-apocalyptic world would actually look like, except everywhere.

Right. It's not because you, dear peasant, drive an SUV that the world's most frightening ecological disasters have occurred. The Aral Sea has almost entirely disappeared because the government run by philosopher kings dispatched by the City of London, riled up mobs, and mafia goons took so much in resources from the people who previously sustainably managed (to use that phrase properly) a bountiful land, that the ecosystem collapsed in the world's largest and most obvious (though not prominent in the media) observed process of desertification.

Tereza is something like a Bitcoin Bolshevik. Whether or not she understands her role, she leads protests like Maya's that would result in the [lower case] mobs taking over the nuclear plant. The runaway feedback loop of then making her ideologically-driven replacement system work would result in some version of the disaster that befell Kazakhstan. There's no better way to make the oligarchs of the empire look better than to prop up the worst possible rival—have the blind lead the blind.

There is a distortion of perception between people who have worked hard at non-technical subjects and people who have put in the mental blood, sweat, and tears to gain expertise at modern technical subjects. My friend James Heaps-Nelson, who was hired out of retirement as a computer chip designer to help build the elevated level of cameras introduced in the iPhone 10 (dual optical image stabilization, faster portrait mode, 4k video, 10x zoom, 12-megapixel wide-angle, facial detection, six-element lens, etc.) tells his story as, "I was not as smart as my brother, so when I went to Cal Tech, I had to study 80 hours a week…" That's ultimately the story of nearly every exceptional technical mind. While I've traded billions of dollars in some of the world's most sophisticated operations, written math textbooks, taught statistical forensics, coded in a dozen languages, and so on, If I wanted to learn to do what he does, I'd only have to study 50 hours a week because I know more math and science than a Cal Tech freshman. Then I'd have to spend years building experience on high pressure corporate projects. That's how long each expert arm of the technology tree has grown. Even a technical journeyman should assume himself to be a child again when dragging his boat to a new river in that network.

The people building the Bitcoin network—the ones you don't see talking smart on podcasts—are a lot like James. You don't know their names. They're almost entirely invisible. They aren't interested in being part of the political games. They do more technical heavy lifting by the end of their morning showers than most people do in a lifetime. Their favorite sayings are things like, "None of us understands Bitcoin the same way none of us understands quantum physics," expressing humility in the face of the uniquely challenging journey we are all on.

People who have learned a great deal about non-technical subjects, such as history, sometimes wade into technical fields and push forward without a guide there to help them get a handle on the dramatically elevated level of rigor involved. Like Maya, assuming her role in protesting the power plant is merely confused good faith (which we cannot really assume), Tereza is one of those people. She identifies as an expert in Economics after making a self-study of geo-economics for ten years. And while she did identify corruption in the system, that's the easy part. She shows no ability to research even the basics of a technical subject as evidenced by her misuse of basic terminology. She works to bait me into conflict, but shows none of the motivation driven by the curiosity of people who educate into technical arenas. This is a mental illness parallel to Wokism, and probably devised by the Empire she believes she combats as part of the ever-granular culture wars that leave most people frightened, frozen in place, and codependent with new alt media figures who pat their audience participants on the head while stating the obvious, "This new Wokism is mental illness."

The result of this particular mental illness is a mess that few people who have put in the time want to handle with another adult. The cost in time and patience is enormous, and trades off…everything. This is one of the reasons I chose to focus educational efforts on children, prior to the point at which they would enter the world, earn college degrees, and have careers, without ever learning the different forms (by kind) of discipline involved in technical topics. At least children are aware of the difference between earned expertise and their own current state, and are therefore willing to work without breaking down into, "Your claims of understanding are merely appeals to authority."

As an aside, that different form of rigor is at least part of the reason why the mystery cults are able to elevate nonsense like "sacred geometry" into place as a shiny object to people with no experience with such discipline. It's a Pied Piper's game, whether it's played accidentally or on purpose. Though "gnosticism" may not be a crime by implicit description, it too often becomes wrapped with the distortions of perception that lead people into the bondage state of cult followers.

While I plan to talk about some of the basics of Bitcoin in future articles, I'd like to begin with a story that I hope will dispel the notion that most people have that they can understand technical topics without expending enormous energy in a disciplined effort.

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A Story of Climbing Rigor Mountain

My wife, Amanda, grew up in gifted programs, skipped a grade, and now has degrees in Economics, Finance, and Biology, the latter in Microbiology at the PhD level where she works as an Instructor of Bioinformatics at a research university where she studies cancer mechanisms in fruit flies. While psychometrics can be misleading, she has an IQ that qualifies at the low end of "genius", and I doubt many people who know or have worked with her would suggest that's terribly off-the-mark. She also builds her own computers and furniture, and manages to design some kick ass quilts for friends.

After graduating as a major in economics and finance, Amanda spent time working in finance, dealing with the nasty people and politics who inhabit some corners of that industry. Within three years, she chose to begin transitioning to a less-well-emunerated field that felt like a more inspiring journey—Biology. She first went to Washington University in St. Louis (a top Biology program) to get a masters degree. That's an appropriate step for transition, rebuilding a base, going a bit further, and with more maturity than a serious undergraduate student. After spending a couple of years working as a tech assistant on a project for a defense contractor, she enrolled in a PhD program before moving into a more standard research career.

While Amanda completed Calculus 2 en route to her undergraduate double-major in Economics and Finance, she was not aware that undergraduate calculus at a top 12 university actually did not guarantee a strong enough base to study rigorous graduate-level statistics in a PhD program—especially with a several year gap where she made little or no use of most of the material. So, when Amanda jumped into the serious Calculus with Statistics course, mostly reserved for future Mathematicians and Statisticians, she was instantly in over her head.

My wife is not an easy person to shake. I can count on my fingers the number of times I've seen her break down and cry. These are moments like a family member or pet dying, or the time that the first car she bought new and paid for was crushed from behind by an uninsured sixteen-year-old weeks after she made the payments, and the vehicle, with frame damage, was not considered "totaled" by a small stack of pennies. But after her first week of class, Amanda showed up at my school at the end of one of my classes, and broke down bawling over how out-of-her-depth the course was.

Together, Amanda and I reversed this hopeless state, but not without effort. We worked at one of my white boards for three hours that night. After some Socratic back-and-forth about "why calculus works this way in this class problem," I realized the need to rebuild her entire foundation. I started with the same questions I have used in over a thousand student interviews (which YouTube sadly nuked).

Over the next six weeks, Amanda came to the school three nights a week after my classes were done, and we worked for three hours at a time. We covered my Counting & Probability curricula that I used with motivated sixth, eighth, and ninth grade students. While that sounds "underpowered" for the task, it is not. After those several hundred pages of lessons and problems, I would wager on my high school freshman to do better on the exam I would give than sophomore math majors at all but the top ten or so university math programs in the world.

The goal of every lesson is a comprehensive understanding, from multiple angles and perspectives, or the foundations on which Statistics is built. Those who master the material slice through the challenging PhD courses like butter. Scroll past the solution if you like, though some readers may enjoy seeing the leaps of thinking in the solution lesson.

It's not bragging if you can do it. It's not an appeal to authority when it's not the predicate to an implication.

For years I taught the problem above to students who have not yet had a lick of calculus. It's not "calculus" that makes the hardest problems harder. Hard problems are the ones that require both organized and creative use of whatever fundamentals are at play, and nearly everyone stumbles many times along the way, thinking they were working rigorously, when they weren't. The students who put in the work to fully understand the foundations breeze through Statistics courses reserved for graduate math students and actuaries because the only new wrinkle is the use of calculus in the line-by-line math. The educational system steers so far afield of this rigorous foundational work that most people do not even know what it means to participate. Ten thousand steps later, the endpoint seems like magic to nearly anyone graduating college with a non-technical degree. And in the grand scheme of modern technology, that's still just one of several steps toward participating in modern technology beyond a basic and highly compartmentalized position.

Not only did Amanda nearly ace the course, but she had the reconstructed foundation to understand the technical side of all the hundreds and hundreds of Biology papers she read in route to her PhD. Having made such a journey once, she had a far better understanding of each additional journey in her path. The lack of understanding of such a journey creates a vast gap of understanding between technical and non-technical minds. This makes her part of a rare breed of computationally proficient scientists in Biology. She was and still is often called on to help out with the computational/informatics work for the research papers of everyone else in the lab. Her PhD advisor still hires her to do his own computational work more than a decade after she graduated, and while she only took that one graduate course in Statistics, she was elevated to the position of Instructor of Bioinformatics. That can only happen through a commitment to the journey, and nobody should claim to be an expert in a technical field without first demonstrating the commitment. Those who identify as experts without the journey are mentally ill.

Square that with a sobbing first-year doctoral student going after her fourth degree in a technical subject with five years of work experience across multiple fields in her background.

Now you're getting closer to understanding the James Heaps-Nelsons of the world. More importantly, you should be gaining some sense of the leaps in conception [of the leaps in the journey] that are practically invisible to nearly everyone in a cargo cult world.

That's the best approach I can take to make the, "You're actually still at the base of the mountain," point to most people talking about technology without ever having participated in technology. My hope is that some number of readers will understand, at this point, why it is that we're at the point at which vast numbers of people trust The Science(™) as discussed by,

• Dr. Anthony Fauci, rearranging his word salad every few months in face of mRNA "vaccines" that are neither safe nor effective, and also

• Anointed leaders of his opposition like Steve Kirsch and Robert Malone, who fool a lot of sit-at-home viewers by telling them, "Pat yourself on the head, you were right," while selling new packs of lies and disinformation narratives.

I would absolutely love for Fauci, Kirsch, and Malone to sit for the exams I used to give my high school kids. I'd let them do it with an open book.

But Tereza never took the steps to be able to read the books that matter. She wasn't even willing to peruse any of the many guides that explain what a token is, what the "crypto" in cryptocurrency means, or how Bitcoin mining works. Is this somebody you would trust to design a whole new monetary system?

Tereza has characterized my attempt to explain the vast difference between actual technical experts and under-educated protesters as "appeal to authority," but the purpose is not to hoodwink anyone into accepting some "A implies B" statement of reality, as labeling of fallacy would imply. I just want for everyone to be aware of the efforts and lack thereof that precede the conversation because there isn't enough time to hold every Tereza's hand, and not enough Bitcoin on all the exchanges to pay me to do that.

How would you handle it when such a person begins baiting you? My choice is to cut off communication, and unfortunately begin a process of vetting people better before I'm even willing to have a discussion with them. This is the result of the mind viruses planted by agents of the oligarchs into the populace for the purpose of having them become agents of the Matrix who attack anyone doing the work that could develop into a network that competes with the status quo ruling class. It's just part of the culture war process, and it's a dollar bill auction that should be avoided. The cost comes in the form of time and energy that would be better spent on effective education.