I Should've Known Better

  That's me, not that I faced some sort of a moral dilemma but rather my discovery that despite my added years of age, that there were things that should have seemed obvious but as it happened were...well, I should have known better.  As the Beatles said in their song, "I never realized a lot of things before."  We've all had those things happen, that taking out that one screw before realizing that it held a lot more behind it and now there was no way to get it all back together, or that slip of the tongue that once out you were immediately aware that it was the wrong thing to say.  Perhaps I'm having these thoughts because at the moment I feel like crap,* or more politely, feel a bit under the weather.  I also had the misfortune to watch a batch of history videos titled "Events That Changed the World," which turned out to be all of the major wars, from Chinese emperors to Napolean (his invasion of Russia cost him 475,000 men and eventually his retreat and later defeat at Waterloo), and from Korea (where General Douglas MacArthur, after going through the back channel of Inchon in Korea wanted to keep going and to do so requested 26 more Atomic bombs to use in Korea, China and Russia...President Truman turned him down and removed him from his position as leader of the United Nations coalition of troops) to Vietnam (a piece in the New York Review of Books mentioned this about that war: The American war in Vietnam was a catastrophe for the elephants, because it was waged against the forest itself.  Napalm and Agent Orange were used to defoliate enormous areas, thereby removing cover, and US air command had a policy of deliberately targeting elephants.  The edict was not popular, however, with one helicopter pilot, who said that “killing elephants is like blasting your grandmother.”  Despite the revulsion, the strategy was effective.  By war’s end, Vietnam’s elephant population had declined from thousands to a few hundred.).  So many lives lost of both humans and animals, and all for the hubris of a few leaders' egos or that of their countries...after watching so many "histories" in a row, I left the couch feeling even worse.  Dang, we humans seem to not be learning a thing.  We should have known better...okay sorry, this post really had nothing to do with my feeling out of sorts.  Actually, my intention was to point out a few things that I've recently discovered or did incorrectly (and apologies for those of you already quite well versed in computers and such...).

    First off, is your computer working fine, that is all is going smoothly and you have all the confidence in the world that it will continue to do so?  Okay great...stop right here and create a restore point.  As in NOW.  You may find out too late that Windows doesn't really keep too many of those "go back" points, often deleting them after a certain period (say, six months), so when your computer does crash, and it will, getting it back might prove a surprise when you discover that you don't have that restore point (just type those words into your Windows search bar and it'll take you to your Control Panel which will ask if you want to "create a restore point now" -- doing so will only take about 2 minutes).  In my case, the entire keyboard on my laptop stopped working and I discovered that when that happens virtually all computers have a backup of sorts in the form of an "online" keyboard, a virtual keyboard that allows you to do things such as log on, punch reset keys and the like; but it involves moving your cursor to each and every letter or symbol and hitting "enter."  So why did the use of my "keys" just suddenly disappear?   As it turned out, the possible causes and solutions were many, and most (about 95%) were NOT correct.  Thus, after following some of the suggestions posted in online forums I found that, well, I should have known better than to trust such "advice," even if it came from places such as Microsoft or the Windows "community"  (sort of that feeling you get when you open an attachment and find that you've been hit with malware, something that happened to Washington D.C.'s street cams when they got hacked by that method during Trump's inauguration...see, it can happen to anyone, but would you also believe it happened during the last Olympics?**).  Many in such techie communities advised deleting certain files (most of which I had never heard of such as "upper and lower filters") or to go into the registry of one's computer and change such and such.  Don't do it!  Or at the very least read all of the comments that follow and preview what others went through and what year it all happened (yes, sometimes "advice" stays up there forever).  When it comes to computers (or cars or fixing things ad nauseum) most of us think that we sort of know what we're doing but the truth is that for the most part we really don't.  Messing with your computer's registry can become a point of no return as in goodbye computer.  But if you're lucky as I was (even after making all of those above mistakes) you'll have a restore point to go back to and will be able to reset your computer to a time before any of this happened...did I mention that you should stop everything, even reading this, and create a "restore point" NOW?

    So lump all that with my learning that when Amazon lists reviews of its products it always throws its "most favorable" reviews to the top even if they're older even if the product might have completely changed since the review (you need to click on the tab that says "most recent" reviews in order to get the latest opinions on whatever it is your buying).   And here's something else, an external hard drive is not an external backup (which you should get since they're only about $45).  But you have the Cloud you say, as well as your security program and so on.  But when a fire hits, these tiny grab-and-go devices will prove easy to just disconnect and yet preserve all your stuff. Said one such maker of those devices, Western Digital: Always remember that backup means that the data is stored in at least two (2) locations.  Moving data from a computer system to an external hard drive is not a backup, unless there is already a duplicate of the file on a different storage location...Western Digital recommends that best practice is to keep a backup of your important data at all times.  Maintaining a valid backup protects against: computer viruses, data corruption, hardware issues, or environmental hazards.  So blah, blah, blah and likely you're not interested since you're not that into your computer (photos, music, some key documents, but nothing really important...really?) and that you're always really careful of clearing out your cookies and cache before logging out, and let's be real, your  passwords are pretty tough for anyone to crack?  So you think so?  Here's what a piece in WIRED had to say: ...storing passwords in your browser is a terrible idea!  If other people (like the system admin at the office) have access to your computer, they can open Chrome's setting tab and see all of your passwords in plain text.  Yikes!  

   But that was me, stuck in my old ways of learning, of dipping into those years of "knowledge" and trying to figure out if I could read about another way or another outlook...but it turns out that this method might be entirely wrong for these times.  In a piece in The Atlantic (on the changing U.S. Navy, of all things), it was pointed out this way in a test: you're told to observe four quadrants, one with letters to memorize, one with numbers to add, one with a button to push when you hear a sound, and the last being a fuel gauge to monitor; but then during the middle of the test you're told that one of the squares actually now accounts for 75% of your total test results.  What the study showed was that some of the test takers immediately shifted and concentrated only on that one square, while others kept monitoring all of the four squares.  And there, right there, was the difference (which person do you think you would be?).  It's what they term "cyrstalized" intelligence vs. "fluid" intelligence.  Always come to work on time, always try to finish the job, always give it your all to try and figure out how to solve a problem and to work conscientiously?  As Zachary Hambrick, a psychology professor at Michigan State University, discovered: We like conscientious people because they can be trusted to show up early, double-check the math, fill the gap in the presentation, and return your car gassed up even though the tank was nowhere near empty to begin with.  What struck Hambrick as counterintuitive and interesting was that conscientiousness here seemed to correlate with poor performance.  In a related study, the article said: ...tasks were explicitly military (for instance, assessing the “threat level” of 75 aircraft based on speed, altitude, range, etc.) but the curveball was similar: Unbeknownst to the participants, the scoring rules changed partway through the game.  When this happened, he noticed that players who scored high on conscientiousness did worse.  Instead of adapting to the new rules, they kept doing what they were doing, only more intently, and this impeded their performance.  They were the victims of their own dogged persistence.  “I think of it as the person literally going down with a sinking ship,” LePine (Jeffrey LePine, a professor doing research for the Navy) told me..

   In another related article in the same magazine, it was described this way: ...British psychologist Raymond Cattell, who in the early 1940s introduced the concepts of fluid and crystallized intelligence.  Cattell defined fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze, and solve novel problems -- what we commonly think of as raw intellectual horsepower.  Innovators typically have an abundance of fluid intelligence.  It is highest relatively early in adulthood and diminishes starting in one’s 30s and 40s.  This is why tech entrepreneurs, for instance, do so well so early, and why older people have a much harder time innovating.  Crystallized intelligence, in contrast, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past.  Think of it as possessing a vast library and understanding how to use it.  It is the essence of wisdom.  Because crystallized intelligence relies on an accumulating stock of knowledge, it tends to increase through one’s 40s, and does not diminish until very late in life.  Careers that rely primarily on fluid intelligence tend to peak early, while those that use more crystallized intelligence peak later.  For example, Dean Keith Simonton has found that poets --highly fluid in their creativity-- tend to have produced half their lifetime creative output by age 40 or so.  Historians --who rely on a crystallized stock of knowledge-- don’t reach this milestone until about 60.  Hmm, hard drive or backup?  Or put another way, have you heard any hit songs by living but old composers recently?

   But then no matter what your age is we all tend to think that we're pretty creative or adaptable at whatever life may bring, just as we realize that some people may observe things differently or perhaps have a solution that doesn't seem to make sense...until it does.  The ancient game of GO is often considered as difficult if not more difficult than chess to master.  In a piece in Fortune, the Alphabet-owned DeepMind's algorithm, AlphaGo, made a move against a champion human player: ...so unusual that, at first, Go experts commenting on the match assumed the person responsible for physically placing AlphaGo’s stones on the board had made a mistake.  AlphaGo itself estimated the odds that a human player would make the same move in that situation as one in 10,000.  And yet, for reasons puzzling even to DeepMind’s researchers, it also saw the move as a clear winner.  (And AlphaGo did, indeed, go on to win.)  But would you trust your investments with such "fluid" intelligence, human or otherwise?  In 2014, one company that managed 100 million euros named an algorithm to its board (they retracted the decision after some outcry), the reasoning being that human decisions rely primarily on intuition (or were they trying to say "crystallized" knowledge).  Then came this podcast On Being with Krista Tippet which interviewed the Jesuit Father, Greg Boyle.  Placed into one of he roughest parts of Los Angeles, deep into the heart of gangs and poverty, Father Boyle has gone on to create HomeBoy Industries but here's just one story he told: So recently, I gave a talk, a training, an all-day training to 600 social workers, a training on gangs.  I had two homies with me, and one of them was a guy named José.  And he got up -- he’s in his late 20s, and he now works in a substance abuse part of our team, a man in recovery and been a heroin addict and gang member and tattooed.  And he gets up, and he says, very offhandedly, “You know, I guess you could say that my mom and me, we didn’t get along so good.  I guess I was six when she looked at me, and she said, ‘Why don’t you just kill yourself?  You’re such a burden to me.’”  Well, the whole audience did what you just did.  They gasped...And then he said, “You know, I guess I was nine when my mom drove me down to the deepest part of Baja California, and she walked me up to an orphanage, and she said, ‘I found this kid.’”  And then he said, “I was there 90 days, until my grandmother could get out of her where she had dumped me, and she came and rescued me...My mom beat me every single day.  In fact, I had to wear three T-shirts to school every day...I wore three T-shirts well into my adult years, because I was ashamed of my wounds.  I didn’t want anybody to see them.  But now my wounds are my friends.  I welcome my wounds.  I run my fingers over my wounds.”  And then he looks at this crowd, and he says, “How can I help the wounded if I don’t welcome my own wounds?” And awe came upon everyone, because we’re so inclined to judge this kid who went to prison and is tattooed and is a gang member and homeless and a heroin addict, and the list goes on.  But he was never seeking anything when he ended up in those places.  He was always fleeing the story I just told you. 

   Whatever we choose to call it, wisdom or crystallize knowledge, adaptive intuition or fluid learning, we are all marching through life at our own pace and learning to make our own decisions.  Such choices can be as simple as deciding on whether to take a shortcut or as difficult as making medical choices for an elderly loved one.  Looking forward or looking back, the key word there is "looking."  And perhaps with that comes the feeling that whatever choice we decide to make, or have made, we don't want it to end with our conscience haunting us in the background by saying, "I should have known better."


*Those of you not in the U.S., the more common phrase is to say "I feel like sh*t," although I'm not sure that most or any of the people actually have felt or tasted such (as in someone saying, "This tastes like sh*t"...really?  Gross...)  Unfortunately for me, my 14-year old German Shepherd these days is often times "explosive" in her incontinence so cleaning up poop has become almost second nature (an interesting if somewhat disgusting aside posted in some veterinary sites lists descriptions to use when describing such poop to your vet...runny, soft serve ice cream, cottage cheese, pellets.  Ewww.  Accurate to a tee, but ewww)…ADDED NOTE: Not to worry about my own "crappy" feeling as I don't have the flu, even if I never have gotten a flu vaccine.  But it got me thinking about the flu virus and what a bugger it is, not only to prevent but to try and create a vaccine for; our bodies do a spectacular job in fighting all of this off -- as Bill Bryson writes in his new book on the human body, we actually get exposed to cancer cells in our body 4-5 times per day but our bodies' immune cells take care of the invaders.  To see just how amazing this entire process is, watch this quick animation from Xvivo; although it is 7 years old, it does one of the better jobs in showing just how complex our internal systems help to keep out viruses and bacteria (and how clever at adapting such invading organisms are at changing their ways).  Prepare to be awed...

 **The story in WIRED is but a glimpse of how state-run hackers have advanced exponentially, even placing false "clues" in the coding to make it appear that another country did the hacking.  Obviously in this case, the "signature" led to North Korea.  Or was it China?  But wait, was it Russia?  The story says that the tampering with the 2016 elections will prove to be nothing once compared to the advances made in malware since four years ago; that was when coders nearly took down the entire Olympic games!  Yikes...