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I Am Retarded

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

My mother spent her life helping people with mental disabilities (which was very nice of her). But the one she helped the most was me.

In first grade, I had a learning disability, so they put me in special education. After a great deal of thinking about it, I believe nothing would benefit everyone more than a great deal of special education.

There’s this thing called perfect information, and this thing called perfect rationality (i.e. perfect ability to process said information). If you’ve got both, my hat’s off to you, and I would like to meet you because that’s what I call smart.

But my theory is that no such human exists.

Hold your hand up at the top of your head, and call that smart (perfect knowledge, rationality, and logic). Snails are down around your shoes. Monkeys are somewhere around the middle of your shin. Humans are a little bit above that. Dolphins are a little bit above the humans, and have the decency not to start wars about it.

INTELLIGENCE, DRAWN TO SCALE

SMART = perfect knowledge, rationality, and logic
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  +-- dolphins
  +-- humans  [village idiot to genius]
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  +-- monkeys
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GROUND

People believe there’s a binary line that divides “retarded” people from “not retarded” people. There is not.

Every human, genius to complete idiot, fits inside that tiny bracket near the bottom. So we are all varying degrees of retarded, bunched together near the ankle, and the gap between the smartest human who ever lived and the complete idiot is about two fingers wide.

Theorem (Universal Retardation). Define smart as the state of possessing perfect knowledge, rationality, and logic. Define retarded as any nonzero distance from smart. Then:

  1. No human possesses perfect knowledge. (Proof: finite lifespan, bounded sensory apparatus, incomplete observation of the universe. No one has read every book. No one has observed every event. Everyone is missing data.)
  2. No human possesses perfect rationality or logic. (Proof: cognitive biases are universal and empirically measured. Confirmation bias, anchoring, availability heuristic, sunk-cost fallacy, and approximately 200 others have been documented in every population tested, including the researchers who documented them.)
  3. Therefore every human is retarded. ∎

Corollary: the variance among humans is negligible relative to the distance from smart. The smartest human who ever lived is closer to the median human than the median human is to smart. The word describes a difference of degree, not of kind. There is no line to cross because the entire species is on the same side of it.

Exhibits for the prosecution

There is a common misconception that there is such a thing as smartness, and that the important people in important positions probably have it. The humans who are good at getting in charge of deciding policies and budgets are not necessarily good at deciding policies and budgets. They are merely relatively less retarded at the specific task of getting themselves into the rooms where the decisions are made.

History is not a parade of wisdom. It is a catalog of the species being dragged, over decades, kicking and screaming, out of one state of retardation and into a slightly less retarded one. Someone discovers a specific type of retardation. Tries to tell everyone about it. Is ignored for a few decades and dies. Then everyone decides it was obvious all along.

The court will now enter exhibits.

The corporation that gave everyone brain damage on purpose

Take the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation. In 1924 they had cars. They put gasoline in the engines, and the engines went. But the gasoline combusted too early and wore the engines out. They called it knocking. There were two fixes. One: put ethanol in the gasoline. Two: put a thing called tetraethyl lead in the gasoline.

The advantage of the lead was that the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation, a joint venture of General Motors and Standard Oil167, held the patents on it, and you cannot patent alcohol; any idiot with a still can make it at home168. So they made a great deal of money licensing the lead. The disadvantage of the lead was that it made everyone increasingly retarded. The best measurement we have estimates it cost Americans a cumulative 824 million IQ points, an average of nearly three per person, and closer to six for the worst-hit generation, while exposing more than half the country to dangerous lead levels as children79. It is also widely linked to a great deal of crime, which is enormously expensive to a society. A scientist named Clair Patterson worked this out and suggested it might be preferable not to give everyone brain damage, and to use ethanol instead. In response, millions of dollars, possibly billions in today’s money, were spent lobbying and controlling the government so they could keep putting lead in the gasoline and giving themselves, and everyone they ever loved, brain damage. They kept it up for about seventy years, until 199679, when human retardation had finally declined just enough to stop.

Why did it persist for seventy years? The smart-sounding answer is the one everyone reaches for: the benefit (patent profits) was concentrated among a few shareholders while the cost (brain damage) was smeared across everyone, and concentrated interests organize and lobby while diffuse victims do not. That is the textbook story, and it describes the mechanics of how the dysfunction kept its grip. But it is not the real reason, because it quietly assumes the shareholders were winning. They were not, which is the whole point of this chapter, and the reason the Loving Takeover works: there is no greedy winner to defeat here, only a roomful of people too retarded to notice they were losing too.

Here is the lesson people miss. Everyone blames selfishness and greed. But do the math: a diversified shareholder’s wealth lives in the whole economy, the lead lowered the average American IQ by 2.6 points79, and each point of national IQ is worth about 0.11% (95% CI: 0.04%-0.18%) of annual growth90. Compound that over the 73 years of the lead era and even the shareholders of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation would have been roughly 23.2% (95% CI: 8.41%-52.4%) richer if they had switched to ethanol on day one, instead of making everyone retarded and bribing the government to let them continue. They had to make the switch eventually anyway. The only reason they did it was that everyone, including them, assumed the people in charge were not retarded.

Now imagine if someone had bought enough Ethyl Gasoline Corp shares to change the board in 1930. The switch to ethanol happens sixty-six years earlier. 824 million IQ points saved. That is what Earth Optimization Services does to the military industry. The precedent already exists: Engine No. 1 did exactly this to ExxonMobil in 2021, holding 0.02% of its shares, won three board seats, and the stock went up. You do not need a majority. You need a proxy fight and a better argument.

The doctors who would not wash their goddamn hands

Another entry. A doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis worked out that if doctors washed their goddamn hands before delivering a baby, the share of mothers who died of sepsis afterward fell from about one in six to barely one in a hundred169. So he instituted a rule in his hospitals: doctors had to wash their goddamn hands after the autopsies and before the deliveries. The doctors, being retarded, were offended. How dare he suggest they were filthy, and killing their own patients. As a reward for the discovery, they had him committed to an asylum, where he died within weeks, beaten by the guards169. And then they went back to not washing their hands, and went on killing an enormous number of mothers and babies over the decades it took the profession to admit he was right, because they did not want to wash their goddamn hands.

The reason these two stories matter is that we need to calibrate our expectations about the wisdom of the people we currently think of as smart. Scientists, and math, and data, are smarter than the gut instinct of whatever human happened to be good enough at lying his way into power.

The pattern is the decades

These two are not flukes. They are the shape of the whole story. Pick almost any example and you find the same machine running: somebody turns out to be right, everybody punishes them for it, and the fix arrives a lifetime later anyway. A naval surgeon proved in 1747 that citrus cured scurvy, and the British navy took more than forty years to act on it, having killed more of its own sailors with scurvy than any enemy ever managed. A man proposed in 1912 that the continents drift, and was laughed at for fifty years until it turned out he was right. Two scientists showed in the 1980s that a bacterium causes most stomach ulcers, and were so disbelieved that one of them drank a vial of it to prove the point, won a Nobel Prize, and still had to wait years for doctors to stop being wrong. The discovery is never the hard part. The hard part is the decades we spend defending the thing we already had every reason to drop.

The measured delay between scientific discovery and clinical practice is seventeen to seventy years. Azoulay and colleagues validated Planck’s observation that science advances one funeral at a time: when a star scientist dies, younger researchers are more likely to enter the field and take it in new directions, and the field produces more high-impact work170. The old guard does not update. The old guard dies. Then things change.

This is not a metaphor. It is a measurable cognitive phenomenon. The decision-makers in government, medicine, and industry are fifty to seventy years old. Their mental models crystallized decades ago, when they were young enough to learn. Neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself in response to new information, declines with age. The neural networks that run their worldview are, in a meaningful physiological sense, frozen. They are not choosing to ignore new evidence. They are, at a neurological level, less capable of integrating it. The frozen network is not a character flaw. It is a hardware limitation.

So science advances one funeral at a time because the funerals are what clear the frozen networks from the decision-making positions. The scurvy delay was forty years. Continental drift was fifty. H. pylori was about twenty. Semmelweis: decades. Lead in gasoline: seventy. In every case the people who were wrong held power until they stopped holding power, by dying.

Now do the cost. At 55 million deaths/year (95% CI: 46.6 million deaths/year-63.2 million deaths/year) per year from diseases and aging, every year of delay costs 55 million deaths/year (95% CI: 46.6 million deaths/year-63.2 million deaths/year) lives. A fifty-year delay, the median of that range, costs something like 2.7 billion lives. That is not a war. It is not a famine. It is the quiet, distributed consequence of old men in conference rooms being neurologically incapable of updating their priors. The delay is the genocide. It just does not look like one because it happens slowly, across many diseases, in hospitals instead of battlefields, one grandmother at a time.

This is why Earth Optimization Services and AI tools matter beyond efficiency. They compress the delay by routing around the frozen networks entirely. You do not wait for the funeral. You buy the company. You replace the board. You hand the data to an AI that does not have a hippocampus to calcify and let it recommend the policy that the data supports, instead of the policy that a seventy-year-old’s pattern-matched worldview from 1985 supports. The Loving Takeover is a Planck’s-funeral accelerator. It does what death does to bad ideas, but without waiting for the death.

Why wrongness sticks

If bad information goes into a brain, the brain does not produce wisdom. It produces a confident little documentary narrated by itself.

Then the idea fires again. And again. Neurons that fire together wire together. Eventually the belief is no longer an idea. It is furniture.

Young brains can move the furniture around. Older brains can still learn, but their models are more crystallized, and now the wrong idea has status, staff, donors, shareholders, lawyers, and a pension. Changing your mind is no longer learning. It is demolition.

Everyone thinks they’re right

Here is the main problem: everyone thinks they’re right. And the day everyone realizes they’re wrong about a lot of fucking stuff is the first day anyone gets to stop being wrong.

A significant percentage of what we believe, what we have voted for, what we are angry about, and the solutions we are passionate about, is probably wrong. Not wrong because we are bad. Wrong because it is not actually moving us toward the things we would want if we had thought about it a little more.

Every human defect is curable with biotechnology

The 3 main problems in humans are greed, laziness, and stupidity.

I am very greedy. If there was a way I could steal your money without anyone finding out about it, I would probably do it. In my defense, I would actually look up what the poverty line is where you live or like the amount of money required to maximize happiness, and I wouldn’t steal enough to make you technically poor or homeless or unhappy or anything. But I’d rather me decide what to do with the rest of your money than you.

I am extremely lazy. If I could lie around on a cotton candy cloud watching The Simpsons for eternity without starving to death, eating garbage until I turned into a big gelatinous blob, I would definitely do that.

I am very stupid. I have believed many ideas because they felt correct when they entered my head, which is a terrible certification process.

Every political faction sees one of these defects in the other factions and is blind to its own. Conservatives look at progressives and see lazy: people who want money they did not earn. They are often right. Progressives look at conservatives and see greedy: people hoarding resources while others suffer. They are also often right. Libertarians look at both and see stupid: people trusting a government that has demonstrably failed at most things it attempts. They are also right. Each faction has correctly identified a real defect in the other two and is somehow unable to notice the one in the mirror.

Here is the part nobody brings up. These are not moral categories. They are biochemical states. Laziness is low dopaminergic drive. Stupidity is undertrained pattern recognition. Greed is a miscalibrated reward circuit. Biochemical states are adjustable. We know this because drugs adjust them every day, badly, by accident, with side effects, because the clinical trials that would do it well are not funded, because the money goes to the military, because we are too lazy and stupid and greedy to redirect it.

The cure for being retarded is biotechnology. Biotechnology runs on clinical trials. Our governments defund clinical trials in favor of the military. So the most retarded thing about being retarded is that we have the cure for retardation and we are spending it on bombs.

The most retarded thing of all

We created governments to promote the general welfare. That is the phrase. It means maximize health and wealth: health-adjusted life expectancy and median after-tax, inflation-adjusted income. That is the job. We gave them roughly $36 trillion a year to do it. Since 1900 they have spent $170 trillion of it murdering 310 million of their employers. That included something like 102 million children, a few hundred thousand scientists, a few hundred thousand engineers, over a million teachers, a million nurses, a few hundred thousand doctors. Murdering 310 million of their employers is the opposite of promoting their welfare. Nobody is bringing this up.

We discovered the scientific method a long time ago. It is easy to collect data on health and wealth. It is easy to look at what policies and budgets are predictive of increasing them. It is easy to find which countries spend the least and have above-average outcomes. This is called an efficient frontier and it has existed as a concept for decades. We did not do any of this. Instead we found a loudmouth who inherited $600 million and then proceeded to bankrupt six of the companies he created, which required actual management. He screwed contractors, retirees, and investors in each one. Then we put him in charge of everything. We had 300 million alternative choices.

Even if we, for some reason, do not want to use the scientific method to figure out the best policies, and we just want some retarded human to make all the decisions, we would at least pick one who had demonstrated good judgment in resource allocation. We would find somebody who inherited nothing and used their brain to turn whatever they had into more. Instead we picked the exact opposite: someone who inherited a pile of resources he did not earn, made terrible decisions with them, screwed everyone who trusted him, and then we handed him the entire country. That is the most retarded thing on the list and nobody on the list thinks the system that produces this is retarded, which is the whole problem.

Watch which hand you’re watching

I am going to describe what I see happening. I do not understand any of it. If there is a good reason for it that I am not seeing, I would like someone to explain it to me.

Your hippocampus is dissolving. Your grandfather cannot remember his daughter’s name. The proteins in his brain are tangling into knots and the neurons are dying, one cluster at a time, and there is no drug that stops it because there is no funding for the trial because the money went to the 122nd nuclear weapon that can end civilization, which could already be ended 122 times. He will spend his last years in a fog of terror, not knowing where he is or why everyone around him is crying. This will also happen to you, or something like it, unless someone does something, soon, with money.

Meanwhile, half the country is furious that the man putting new gutters on their house did not fill out the correct immigration forms.

That man is, at this moment, improving their house. He is doing it for less money than anyone else will. He pays sales taxes, he commits crimes at a lower rate than they do, and when he is done their rain will go where rain is supposed to go. He paid thousands of dollars to a coyote to get here, and would have preferred to pay that money to the government for an orderly process, but the government imposed an artificial cap on the number of people allowed in instead of charging fees to cover the vetting and making a profit for taxpayers. So he paid a criminal instead, because the cap made the criminal the only option. Now they would like to spend more money building detention camps and paying people to arrest him and put him in a cage and remove him from the country, because of the immigration forms, while their grandfather’s brain dissolves and the 604 (95% CI: 453-888)-to-one machine hums along and nobody is even slightly angry about it. I do not understand this.

Now the other side, because this is bipartisan.

Your grandfather’s brain is still dissolving. There is still no drug. The drug does not exist because it costs $2.6 billion and twelve years to get one through the FDA, and nobody has that money lying around for a disease that mostly kills people who already stopped buying things. The other half of the country is aware of this problem. Their solution is to tax the billionaires and give the money to the government. The government is controlled by the billionaires. They will give the money to their friends. They have just mailed their rent check to the man who is robbing them and asked him to please spend it wisely. I do not understand this either.

Or perhaps their solution is unions. They organize for decades, they fight, they strike, they lose jobs, they win a 10% raise.

Here is what money is. There is a fixed pie of stuff on Earth: people’s time, land, food, things. Money is your share of the pie. It is not an absolute number. It is a fraction. If there are a hundred dollars in the world and you have ten of them, you own 10% of the stuff. If someone prints another hundred dollars and hands them to his friends, there are now two hundred dollars in the world and you still have ten. You went from 10% to 5%. You just got a 50% pay cut and nobody told you.

This is what the Federal Reserve does. That afternoon, while people are celebrating their 10% raise, a building full of people nobody has ever thought about increases the money supply by 20% and hands the new money to banks and asset holders through something called quantitative easing. The 10% raise is now a 10% pay cut. If anyone did this with a printing press in their basement, it would be counterfeiting and they would go to prison. When the Fed does it, it is called monetary policy. The only difference is the building.

And because the effects of the pay cut arrive slowly, gradually, over months and years, as prices drift upward, nobody connects it to the people in the building. People blame the grocery store. They invented a word for it: greedflation. The grocery store, which is working very hard to get stuff made cheaply overseas and into their house, while filling out government forms and getting sued by people in its parking lot, operating on margins so thin you could cut yourself on them. That is who they are mad at. Not the people running the counterfeiting machine whose output flows, indirectly, into factories that build 122 apocalypses worth of weapons for a species that has one civilization to apocalypse. Nobody said a word about the Federal Reserve the entire time they were striking. They were watching the other hand.

Or some people try to regulate the corporations. The corporations write the regulations, through the lobbyists they pay with the money people already gave them via the government they elected to stop them. The regulations kill their smaller competitors. They have made them stronger and called it reform.

Or some people shut down the nuclear power plants, because they scare them, even though nuclear is the safest energy source per kilowatt-hour ever measured. Germany did this. They replaced the nuclear plants with natural gas. Emissions went up. They killed the clean thing because it scared them and replaced it with the dirty thing that kills quietly, and they felt good about it.

Or there is the drug war. Roughly $50 billion a year spent arresting people for putting chemicals in their own bodies. This has been going on for decades. Overdose deaths have increased by something like 1,700%. Portugal decriminalized the stuff and their overdose deaths went down. The data exists. It has existed for years. The spending continues. An alien visiting from a functioning species would be baffled, but there are no aliens here, so nobody is.

Republicans are mad at immigrants, who are doing very cheap labor for them, and who, mathematically, contribute more to the tax base than they consume. Democrats are mad at billionaires, who are building new technologies that, by allocating resources well, are radically improving their lives in ways they do not appreciate. Both sides are screaming, at full volume, at people who are mostly stealing very little from them, or nothing, in plain and comprehensible ways.

And almost nobody is mad at the parasites printing money by the trillion and handing it to their friends, starting wars, murdering people, and blowing up global energy infrastructure, who run the 604 (95% CI: 453-888)-to-one machine this whole book is about. Because those people rob in ways too elaborate and too boring to fit on a sign. That is what I see. I do not know if I am right about any of it. But I have been looking at it for a long time and I cannot make the numbers come out any other way.

The retarded part is the category

Now notice what is actually wrong here, because it is not which tribe is correct. There really is a parasitic subset inside each group. There are probably some immigrants on welfare who maybe should not be. There are definitely some billionaires who build a financial institution of no value or negative value to society, or a nuclear bomb company that then pays the government to take everyone’s money to build more bombs that make the world worse. Those people exist. The anger is not wrong because its targets are imaginary.

The anger is wrong because it sprays the whole category for the sins of a subset. There is no good reason to deport the man who is obeying the law and working very hard for low wages and paying taxes to improve everyone’s life. There is no good reason to hate the billionaire whose technology reduces pollution and raises your standard of living. The retarded part is not the target. The retarded part is the lack of specificity: the brain takes millions of specific, different people and crushes them into one word so it can be angry at the word.

And watch me do it. I just said “conservatives” and “progressives” and “libertarians” as though any of them were a single mind, when each is tens of millions of distinct people I have flattened into a cartoon so my own primate brain could fit them in a sentence. I am overgeneralizing in the exact act of complaining about overgeneralization. I cannot fully stop, and neither can you, because thoughts are made of language, and language is a crude, low-resolution model of reality. Every word for a group is a lossy compression. That is the deepest retardation of all: the tool you think with is itself blurry.

This is why math is better. Math is the least lossy language we have, the closest thing to a universal one. Two plus two is the same in every tongue and every skull. The conclusion: use words as little as possible, and math and logic as much as possible, when deciding what to actually do. Do not run a civilization on word-feelings about categories. Run it on math about specific, measured outcomes. That is the entire idea behind a machine that picks policy by checking the thousands of places that already tried it. The rest is detail.

So: I am retarded. So are all of us. So is everyone we have ever voted for. Now that none of us are pretending otherwise, we can finally get on with being a little less wrong, which is the only direction anything good has ever come from. The rest of this book is a list of ways to do it.

Why I told you all of this

So much good is possible by changing the numbers on 193 nation budget spreadsheets, but because politicians are too retarded to write the correct numbers everyone we love has to suffer and die of horrible diseases, possibly experiencing hell on Earth or afterward, or giving up an infinite duration of something good. Instead of fixing 193 spreadsheets, we somehow decided the best use of our time on this earth is to be mad at each other and fight over nonsense until the diseases murder us and I do not understand it.

I am retarded at the thing that matters. You are probably less retarded at it than I am. Between the two of us, and everyone like us, there might be enough not-retardation to cure the diseases that are killing everyone we love.

You could have a stroke today

Nobody acts like this is urgent. It is. A lot of people have strokes. You could have one any day of the week. So could everyone you love. Stroke is rising, fastest in young adults, and a growing share of these strokes have no identified cause171. Something made a lot more people start having strokes, which means there is a controllable factor, which means we could find it and fix it, if we did the science.

And it is not just strokes. Tomorrow an injury could leave you in unimaginable pain for the rest of your life, and the only reason there is nothing we can do about it is that we spend the money that would fix it on something else.

I am writing this manual and it is taking a long time. I could use your help. I might have a stroke and die today. So might you. So it would be good to hurry, before one of us has a stroke and dies, or is left mentally incapacitated by it as we will be unable to complete the manual and war and disease will continue indefinitely.

Spend some time with your family and friends optimizing Earth together instead of fucking around. Literally all you have to do is sneak into your friends’ rooms and write “I am retarded” on their t-shirts. Then on Earth Optimization Day, August 6th, everyone wears the shirt and realizes they are retarded, and that we should be working together to maximize health-adjusted life expectancy and median after-tax, inflation-adjusted income, instead of fighting wars and spending 604 (95% CI: 453-888) times more on the capacity for mass murder, to protect ourselves from mythical terrorists with a 1-in-30 million chance of killing us, than on the 6,650 diseases torturing and killing us and everyone we have ever loved today.