Memories of the 28th Century

Once again I have noticed a lack of understanding of logic tripping someone up. I’m beginning to think that few people have any understanding for logic, even though it is central to the understanding of human speech, as just one example. I have had little training directly in logic, but it has been part of many things that I have learned, including grammar and mathematics. Perhaps some people don’t take their lessons in math and apply it to other aspects of life. And some people seem to have trouble applying any lessons until they receive specific instructions.

There was a man I worked with a number of years ago who was reasonably competent, but in the course of conversation he mentioned that he had been unsuccessful in burning a rotten stump. Someone asked whether it was dry, which seemed like an unnecessary question, since one doesn’t even bother trying to burn wet wood. He answered that the stump was quite wet; he just dragged it inside and put it in his fireplace. The other person there and I shared glances that expressed incredulity, and the non-drier of stumps said, “No one told me that it need to be dried.” In a way that suggested that it was so unlike wood that it would be treated differently. If he had been taught elementary logic as a child, that guy would have learned how to take what he knew about wood and apply it to something slightly different, or I hope he would have.

Similarly, some people who learn grammar notice that there is a relationship between verb tenses and the way that things happen in the world. But there are people who speak and write only in the present tense. That has become more popular recently. The only explanation that I have for that phenomenon is that some people do not notice that cause and effect happens only in one direction, and that everything is not happening at the same time[ that is, there is duration separating events. I am beginning to think that this way of speaking indicates a problem in mental development.

I may have had an epiphany recently, but I’m not all together sure what an epiphany is. There was a beautiful example of bogons doing what they do, stopping things from working around persons afflicted with bogosity. And I realized that it often is a sign of an intellectual lack, which wasn’t a surprise in itself, but I also noticed that the particular variety of intellectual deficiency is marked by a lack of understanding of sequential events. More specifically, there is a tendency to speak in the present tense only and to neglect cause and effect among people who are so afflicted.

The example got me started on this was someone running a washing machine with the temperature set to “warm” when there was a sign on it that said that only “cool” should be used, and this was a machine that had recently been out of service, and the repair was not yet complete because it needed parts related to temperature sensing and water levels. The machine took twice its normal time for that load, but it got back to its normal speed for later users who heeded the sign. I had considered the person in question to have been reasonably intelligent, but it seems that he had trouble connecting the temperature setting and the slow operation of the machine.

That event was also a classic example of “bogosity”. The individual who had he trouble usually has trouble running complicated machinery, and that is the chief symptom of bogosity. But then underlying cause was the inability to comprehend a simple written message, which is another example of lack of comprehension of grammar.

The greater questions are whether this condition is curable, and whether the problem is a result of lack of training or a somatic defect or something else, and is bogosity a form of mental illness. I suspect that the final answer is that there are some of each. In my limited experience, people with this sort of intellectual deficiency are afflicted with vegetarianism to a much greater degree than are normal people, but I can’t tell without experimentation whether that is a coincident problem, a cause, or an effect. I think that putting some people on the high IQ diet for a few months might answer the question.

Volunteers for this study are desired. Subjects will have to adopt the High IQ diet for a period of time and endure an initial interview to determine initial state and a follow-up interview after a period of time on the diet to determine what, if any, differences there were and what other events might have caused those differences. There is no compensation and subjects must pay all of their expenses.

There are some other possibilities which include: This is part of the development of the new world order which will lead to many people dying in accidents because they didn’t realize that there could be consequences to their actions. There may be some other conspiracies that are working on this, but they haven’t told me. ANd I just removed the most insulting suggestions.