How to Destroy Talent

I recently read a story about how the fastest girl in America was broken down by a training regimen designed by idiots and it reminded me of my university experience.

When I was in university, there was a daily race to complete problem sets and those who ‘worked together’ had a much easier time finishing those sets. Intellectually, the experience was a lot like drinking from a fire hose and then being told to pee out the shape of the alphabet. Most of the material seemed to wash right through you.

Well, that was a terrible metaphor, but I’m sure you get my point.

Despite its shortcomings, I do not feel that my university experience was wasted. Rather, I feel like the important lessons took a long time to sink in — a really long time. The more associative lessons literally took decades to take their final shape and it was only when I began to try to recover and reconstruct all of the stories I’d heard in classrooms over the years that I discovered that I really did understand the material and that many of my fellow students had only developed the illusion of understanding before they were taken away to their academic or corporate treadmills.

By seeing how people answered physics questions on the internet I discovered that it was as though many people had learned the rules of the game of chess while lacking any concept of what the chessboard looked like.

I’m sure that I’m not the only person who caught a glimpse of the chessboard, I just wonder where all of the people who caught that glimpse went because once you understand the basic shape and meaning of things, you will have little patience for studying the field any further. You will feel frustrated with those who continue to gaze through their microscopes with a sense of mystification and wonder.

It is, of course, okay and natural to be mystified for any length of time because life doesn’t typically give you the time to do the sort of thinking required to piece everything you’ve learned together. You need time to do a bit of independent thinking at your own pace and that thinking is not typically done consciously. It is done in the background as your mind develops a model of the world at different length scales. When your mind has completed these models, it will present them to your conscious mind so that you can compare and contrast them.

The next step would be to find a community with which you can discuss your understanding, but this community never takes shape because when each individual arrives at their understanding independently, their description tends to be created in a private language that is incomprehensible to everyone else. When a thousand people end up speaking a thousand different languages, it is no small wonder that the community as a whole decides that all of the inconsistencies are mysterious and in need of more study when what they really need are some adept translators and politicians who can corral all of the languages into one, coherent, consistent form.

In the meantime, I recommend thinking about how mirrors work, taking a look at chain fountains, and minding your p’s and q’s…

avoiding unnecessary complexity (Lewis Caroll also hated quaternions)

and spending some time learning about the Mandelbrot set.

Thinking independently is so much more fun than trying to drink from a firehose in an accelerated, competitive classroom environment and when you start to think independently, all sorts of strange questions will begin to occur to you.

For example — why can’t I find a decent online recipe for that fluffy white stuff used in US grocery store cakes and inside of twinkies and hohos?

The fluffy white stuff in commercial cakes is not the same thing as the crappy, powdered sugar and butter stuff that all of the online recipes suggest. And if you search for recipes for fluffy white icing, you will find absolutely terrible recommendations involving marshmallow fluff, cool whip, or horrible icings that involve egg whites or inappropriate amounts of cream cheese. I have tried many of these recipes and they are absolutely terrible imitations of the goal product: commercial-grade fluffy white stuff.

When confronted with this mystery, my inner conspiracy theorist demanded to know: who is protecting the secrets of how to make fluffy white stuff? The ingredients list on the side of store-bought cakes implies that some sort of complex chemistry is involved.

Unless these conspiracy-theoretic conditions occur organically within corporate incentives structures which have, in some sense, a mind of their own, I have discovered that there is a powerful, Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (DISC) that does not want us to know how to make fluffy white frosting because if people found out how easy it is, they would stop purchasing pre-made cakes and the entire cake economy would collapse.

Since the coronavirus has already collapsed the economy, I am going to reveal to you the secret of the fluffy white stuff used on US grocery store cakes and inside of twinkies and hohos. It is an astoundingly simple combination of sweetened condensed milk whipped with some sort of fat like butter or lard, yet you would never be able to figure this out from the complex ingredients list on the side of a store-bought cake.

Sweetened condensed milk whipped with butterfat or lard. Nothing more is required.

If you whip those two ingredients together for long enough, you will get the mysterious, fluffy white stuff that goes in pre-packaged and grocery store manufactured cakes everywhere. Strangely enough, this secret recipe is referred to on the internet as ‘Russian buttercream’. My goodness! The Ruskies have claimed the frosting secrets which our capitalist overlords have been keeping from us for decades!

This Great Icing Conspiracy ™ ties back into the theme of this article — “how to destroy talent” because when you feel inept at making something as simple as fluffy white frosting and when this feeling of inept, helplessness is cultivated by capitalists who want to protect their monopolistic icing secrets, you learn about a powerful technique to destroy the impulse to innovate on an individual level. If you discourage youngsters at an early, cake baking, experimental phase in their development, you can train them to fall back on corporate products whenever their internet research fails to deliver the secrets of commercial-grade fluffy white icing.

I don’t think that this subversion of individual innovation is exclusively the domain of US or multinational corporations. It also seems to be funded by foreign powers with political aims who mass produce misleading, clickbait educational videos for YouTube.

In any case, if commercial-grade fluffy white icing recipes are being hidden from us, what else is sitting in our collective blind spots?