Kalıntı

He was extremely precocious, extremely powerful and inventive, with an apparently innate mathematical curiosity that I now appreciate is rare. Mathematical talent is perhaps more common than mathematical curiosity.

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.

I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever.

In our acquisition of knowledge of the Universe (whether mathematical or otherwise) that which renovates the quest is nothing more nor less than complete innocence. It is in this state of complete innocence that we receive everything from the moment of our birth. Although so often the object of our contempt and of our private fears, it is always in us. It alone can unite humility with boldness so as to allow us to penetrate to the heart of things, or allow things to enter us and take possession of us.

This unique power is in no way a privilege given to “exceptional talents” – persons of incredible brain power (for example), who are better able to manipulate, with dexterity and ease, an enormous mass of data, ideas and specialized skills. Such gifts are undeniably valuable, and certainly worthy of envy from those who (like myself) were not so “endowed at birth, far beyond the ordinary”.

Yet it is not these gifts, nor the most determined ambition combined with irresistible will-power, that enables one to surmount the “invisible yet formidable boundaries” that encircle our universe. Only innocence can surmount them, which mere knowledge doesn’t even take into account, in those moments when we find ourselves able to listen to things, totally and intensely absorbed in child’s play.

Always, in the beginning, before his conscious life dawned, he had crawled toward the mouth of the cave. And in this his brothers and sisters were one with him. Never, in that period, did any of them crawl toward the dark corners of the back-wall. The light drew them as if they were plants; the chemistry of the life that composed them demanded the light as a necessity of being; and their little puppet-bodies crawled blindly and chemically, like the tendrils of a vine. Later on, when each developed individuality and became personally conscious of impulsions and desires, the attraction of the light increased. They were always crawling and sprawling toward it, and being driven back from it by their mother.

It was in this way that the gray cub learned other attributes of his mother than the soft, soothing tongue. In his insistent crawling toward the light, he discovered in her a nose that with a sharp nudge administered rebuke, and later, a paw, that crushed him down or rolled him over and over with swift, calculating stroke. Thus he learned hurt; and on top of it he learned to avoid hurt, first, by not incurring the risk of it; and second, when he had incurred the risk, by dodging and by retreating. These were conscious actions, and were the results of his first generalizations upon the world. Before that he had recoiled automatically from hurt, as he had crawled automatically toward the light. After that he recoiled from hurt because he knew that it was hurt.

The visitor from outer space made a serious study of Christianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found it so easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of the trouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament. He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teach people, among other things, to be merciful, even to the lowest of the low.

But the Gospels actually taught this:

Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn’t well connected. So it goes.

The flaw in the Christ stories, said the visitor from outer space, was that Christ, who didn’t look like much, was actually the Son of the Most Powerful Being in the Universe. Readers understood that, so, when they came to the crucifixion, they naturally thought, and Rosewater read out loud again:

Oh, boy–they sure picked the wrong guy to lynch _that_ time!

And that thought had a brother: “There are right people to lynch.” Who? People not well connected. So it goes.

The visitor from outer space made a gift to the Earth of a new Gospel. In it, Jesus really was a nobody, and a pain in the neck to a lot of people with better connections than he had. He still got to say all the lovely and puzzling things he said in the other Gospels.

So the people amused themselves one day by nailing him to a cross and planting the cross in the ground. There couldn’t possibly be any repercussions, the lynchers thought. The reader would have to think that, too, since the new Gospel hammered home again and again what a nobody Jesus was.

And then, just before the nobody died, the heavens opened up, and there was thunder and lightning. The voice of God came crashing down. He told the people that he was adopting the bum as his son, giving him the full powers and privileges of The Son of the Creator of the Universe throughout all eternity. God said this: From this moment on, He will punish horribly anybody who torments a bum who has no connections.

We live in a highly structured environment dedicated to research. We earn our living by it and we pin our hopes of recognition on it, but the questions we ask and the problems we solve are determined more by tradition, more by our colleagues than by our own natural and spontaneous curiosity. We are seldom playful; our efforts are never simply for our own amusement.

Ok, so you see it’s a little moral game with a message that you discover for yourself. It’s pretty obvious what it’s going to be right from the beginning. I don’t really think that this game “works” in the sense that it doesn’t actually teach anyone anything, and it will never convince anyone to change their mind on the topic. […] People sympathetic to the message will go “oh yeah” while people who don’t agree will think “this is stupid, it’s not like this”. Of course the movies of Mich[ae]l Moore et.al. are pretty much in the same boat or even worse.

I was thinking about what it would take to make a game that could actually change someone’s mind. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and something I often think of. People are so pig headed, they have some retarded idea, and they can manage to see every bit of news in a way that just supports their preconception, and all the news that doesn’t reinforce their preconception they either just ignore or claim is lies. With games, in theory you can put them in the actual position of the thing they misunderstand, and make them actually make a decision, and perhaps they will see the logic of the decision that they disagree with.

One of the key factors to successfully teaching someone in this way is that you have to let them discover the connection to the real world issue themselves. If you show that this is a game about terrorism, or a game about global warming, or whatever – you’ve already lost. As soon as they see that issue, their head fills with their preconceived ideas, they presume that your game has some certain message, and they’re not going to convinced by anything they see. They begin judging the game based on how it fits their preconceptions – either they approve or they think you’re full of it – they no longer judge the scenario on its merits.

Instead, you have to present them with a purely logical or immersive situation in which they are making a decision based on either rational thought / logic (eg. if I do move X I get more reward than move Y) or their immersed emotions (eg. I need to save my character’s family). That is, they’re judging it as a fresh situation seperate from their memories and their political identity.

Once you achieve that, hopefully they can make the connection back to the real world issue. This is a tricky part, because if you’re too obvious about it, then they will see the hand in the machine and know they’ve been set up and reject the lesson, but if you’re too subtle they won’t see it.

Of course, getting to children is much easier.

Algebra is the offer made by the devil to the mathematician. The devil says: `I will give you this powerful machine, it will answer any question you like. All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry and you will have this marvellous machine.’