Sunday, April 21, 2019

Children’s Games Of Yesteryear Prove Our Enstupidation




By Professor Doom



     “Enstupidation,” the act of making someone stupid, is an actual word. I remember, years ago, explaining to a group of Leftists how the process works. I got nowhere, of course—they couldn’t stop laughing at the word “enstupidation,” to learn anything. It’s sad that so many of our youth are so damaged they’d rather hoot and throw poo than learn.

     There have been many claims that we’ve been “dumbed down,” i.e., enstupidated, but I’m in the mood to talk about how we can tell that this activity isn’t simply the rant of an online conspiracy theorist…something has gone wrong here. Allow me to show it unarguably.

     When I was a kid, I loved board games. Computers, much less “computer games” hardly existed, and the early computer games were rudimentary, with line graphics and LEDs at best…I’m pretty sure I could sit down and code some of the ones I played as a kid, in a single afternoon.

       One game I played often was Code Name: Sector. A quick pic of the game:




--a laminate board, crayons, blinking lights, and some plastic bits. The slot at the left? That’s where you put the bits.



     The whole “computer” is about the size of a pocket calculator, but with a smaller display. The basic purpose of the computer is it kept track of a submarine’s hidden position (the plastic subs in the game are “trophies” which you don’t really use or need for the game…but look cool!). As the player, you controlled imaginary destroyers, whose location you plotted on the grid, with the crayons (you could have up to 4 destroyers at once, hence 4 different colored crayons). As you moved the destroyer, you’d get rough information on the sub’s location; if you got close enough, you could drop a depth charge and, hopefully, sink the sub, ending the game. It’s basically a solitaire game, but you could play with “up to 4” players if you really wanted to, all competing to sink the sub first.

     Certainly a fun game for its time, and quite cutting edge for 1977 when it came out. A key part of the game is plotting your ship’s location, inputting your speed and direction, and having the computer “calculate” your new location after a move. Then you’d plot the new location, and connect the two plots.

      This is the “hard” part of the game, where you plot two points and connect the dots. Now, the gentle reader might recognize “plot two points and connect the dots” as the key concept in graphing a line.

      So, what’s the recommended age for this game where the player would have to be able to graph a line? Ages 12 and up. I want to hammer this point home:

     In 1977, it was understood that a 12-year-old was quite capable of learning how to graph a line, simply by reading the game rules. Corporate America seldom over-estimates consumer intelligence, so they figured any 12-year-old could do it, and probably younger children as well. Twelve years of age is “definitely old enough to understand how to play,” and I point out again this is basically a solitaire game.

     Flash forward a generation, to 2019 (although what I say next has applied for at least a decade)…now how old do you need to be to understand how to graph a line? Well, let’s look at college, and find out. Here’s an excerpt from a typical college algebra course:

Recognize the equations and sketch the graphs of the following: Lines,…



     I assure the gentle reader, every college algebra course covers lines, I’m not cherry-picking here. But the point is, it’s understood that a college freshman, definitely a high school graduate and probably 18 years old (or older), will not only not know how to graph a line, but will need instruction by a professional with an advanced degree before he could possibly figure it out.

      I’ve taught college algebra many times, and I assure the gentle reader that I rarely managed to get much past 50% of the class to understand the concept of how to graph a line, at least when I was at open admissions schools. I would spend about a week on the concept, incidentally…and nobody spends a week learning how to play a board game.

     Now, anyone could buy that game, just as anyone could stumble onto campus. So, in 1977, any 12 year old could figure out how to graph a line on his own in a few minutes, while in 2019, much of our population can’t figure out how to graph a line with professional help and a week of effort.

     We’ve been enstupidated, clearly. But perhaps I’m using too obscure a game to make this point.

     A game everyone knows about is Monopoly, which has a fascinating history. Most people find the game incredibly complicated, particularly two calculations: the penalty for un-mortgaging a property, and the cost of income tax (the latter dreaded both for the penalty, and for the “work” of calculating it!).

     “Income tax” in Monopoly is either 10% of all you have, or $200. Most folks just pay the $200, because they can’t figure out how much to pay in the former option. There’s a page explaining how to do it, and there are even special Monopoly calculators just for folks who need additional help.



      But...the hardest calculation in Monopoly involves calculating 10% of a number. Now, Monopoly was patented in 1904 (although versions existed in the 19th century)…well before the age of calculators.

      It’s for ages 8 and up—they clearly haven’t updated their age scale to account for the enstupidation of our citizens, or just assumed even little kids can use cell phones for the Monopoly calculation app.

     What has happened to us as a people, that a century ago it was understood that even a child could, say, calculate 10% of $200 without much effort, but now adults use hundreds of dollars of electronics to do such a thing because they just don’t know how?

    There was a time when a child could graph a line or calculate 10% of a number, as these games show. But now we cannot expect such of our kids. There’s one obvious explanation:

     We’ve been enstupidated. Clearly.






     



              


17 comments:

  1. Example of ancient attempt to stupefy: in fall 1968 in second grade I noted from the first day my teachers' repeatedly declared conviction the latest always trumped an older version. When they presumed to teach the rudiments of politics I was struck by their insistence Greek direct democracy, which preceded Roman representative republicanism, was in every citable way, specially moral, the preferable if not imperative model. In winter 1976 as a high school freshman I gathered the nerve to be conspiracist enough to think my teachers, with whom many I had clashed mean time, were not so much mistaken as perverse. My point is a smaller proportion of formally taught people of my generation & briefly thereafter could be stupefied. In the 6 years I spent in the mediocre elementary school I & my class mates attended all but the dullest learnt things, along with how to reason logically, whereof collegians in bachelor programs for some time have never heard. All intervening change has been for the worse. I thank God on my knees I graduated high school before the rot ate too far.

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  2. The problem goes beyond enstupidation (which my computer spell checker didn't even know was a legitimate word). There is an ABSOLUTE COWARDICE among the American people to face reality in any significant way.

    The ancient myth, Zeus and Hermes Go Visiting, is a story of how the flood came to be because the Gods found men too corrupt and evil to be worth saving.

    While those charges could certainly apply to today's times, too, I feel the Gods of today would destroy the world as a form of mercy-killing. I really thought the internet was a tool that would make humanity smarter. I think there's enough raw data over the first generation of its existence to see that the internet is truly a WEAPON against humanity.

    I've had a lot of fun on the internet, so has everyone else. But the act is getting jaded real quick with all the superficial fakery going on in people's lives.

    I'm glad I got out of the formal education biz almost two decades ago. I refused to participate in CHILD ABUSE by fucking with our kids' minds and destroying their future.

    Thanks to the BULLSHIT STORY of 9/11 for waking me up!

    What terrible KARMA is coming our way as a nation and a world!

    I'm still an optimist and a fighter, but I need some downtime from Humanity's Bullshit.

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  3. Not sure about the US, but here in England, it is all but a proven fact that older people are smarter than young people. The OECD came out with a report around 2013 (https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Country%20note%20-%20United%20Kingdom.pdf) which states:

    In England, adults aged 55-65 perform better than 16-24 year-olds in both literacy and numeracy. In fact, England is the only country where the oldest age group has higher proficiency in both literacy and numeracy than the youngest age group, after other factors, such as gender, socio-economic backgrounds and type of occupations, are taken into account.

    I am not sure how the "other factors" bit skews this, but it is interesting to compare this to the number of graduates for each generation. According to UK government statistics, the number of people graduating in 1970 in the UK was about 50,000; by 2011 it was 350,000.(http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf).

    So, a hell of a lot of good all that Higher Education did — it just made people dummer!

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  4. The purpose of modern "education" is not to elucidate and inform, but to enstupidate and conceal (and make money, of course). It is not education, but brain washing and gas lighting on a massive scale.

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  5. Enstupidation and capitalism at its finest :

    https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/22/accusations-forced-failing-grades-fly-arizona-state

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    1. I was just writing about that the other day...I'll post soon, it's a fascinating case, and I'm not buying ASU's denials.

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  6. Same with traveling. A friend recently drove me 50 miles to take a cruise. Using his GPS he still got lost; made more absurd by the fact that he was ignoring the well placed street signs while listening for where to turn off.

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    1. IT's amazing how much those GPS devices have damaged our ability to get around. I see people use them for 5 minute trips they've made a dozen time before...but nonetheless I have to sit and wait when the machine locks up for whatever reason.

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  7. My god, I went to school at the University of Arizona way way back in the very late 1960's and early 1970's and left in 1974 due to getting married, having a baby, moving to NYC and discovering that real estate is a much better money-maker career...the Universities in Arizona are goofy places.
    About the above article: 30% students must fail. Why? Because the entire process of 'schooling' is to push for the best, the hardest working students who have to have the intelligence and hard work to excel.
    Passing everyone ends up degrading all degrees due to slackards, idiots and other riff raff getting to pass when they are not well trained or good at anything. This has been called 'grading on a curve' and I grew up playing that game, namely, working very hard to be on the upper end of the grade curve, not in the cellar.

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  8. I think of the board games I played as a kid: Monopoly, Sorry, Life, Battleship, Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Scrabble. All require some level of planning and future time orientation for the strategic goal of more points, money, or just winning. I guess we are getting dumber.

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  9. HEY PROFESSOR!
    ALGEBRA IS SUPPOSED TO SYMBOLICALLY REPRESENT ARITHMETICAL OPERATIONS. ADDITION, SUBTRACTION, DIVISION, MULTIPLICATION, ROOTS AND POWERS. YOU CONTRADICT YOURSELF WHEN YOU CLAIM THAT AN EXPONENT APPLIED TO A NUMBER INDICATES THE NUMBER OF TIMES A NUMBER IS MULTIPLIED BY ITSELF. BY YOUR FAULTY LOGIC, THAT MEANS THAT A NUMBER WITH AN EXPONENT OF ONE IS EQUAL TO THE NUMBER MULTIPLIED BY ITSELF ONCE. YOUR DEFECTIVE ALGEBRA ALSO CLAIMS THAT A NUMBER CAN BE RAISED TO AN EXPONENT OTHER THAN A POSITIVE WHOLE NUMBER FROM 2 TO INFINITY. YOUR DEFECTIVE ALGEBRA CLAIMS THAT A NUMBER CAN BE RAISED TO A FRACTIONAL EXPONENT WHICH REPRESENTS EITHER THE POWER OF A ROOT OR THE ROOT OF A POWER. THERE IS NO SUCH ARITHMETICAL PROCESS OF MULTIPLYING A NUMBER BY ITSELF A NON WHOLE NUMBER OF TIMES FROM 2 TO INFINITY. A SYMBOL FOR A NUMBER IS NOT A NUMBER. A RATIO SUCH AS PI OR PSI IS NOT A NUMBER. A RATIO IS NOT A NUMBER.
    ONE IS NOT A NUMBER BECAUSE A NUMBER IS A MULTITUDE. ZERO IS NOT A NUMBER EITHER. YOUR ALGEBRA IS DEFECTIVE BECAUSE YOU MAKE NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN NUMBERS, RATIOS AND OTHER CONCEPTS.
    THE ETERNAL TRUTHS OF NUMBERS AND RATIOS IS DEMONSTRATED IN THE GEOMETRY OF EUCLID. GEOMETRY IS NOT ALGEBRA OR MATHEMATICS.
    GEOMETRY IS OLDER THAN ALGEBRA OR MATHEMATICS. GEOMETRY TEACHES THE MIND TO RECOGNIZE WHAT CONSTITUTES A COHERENT RATIONAL ARGUMENT. GEOMETRY IS ONLY EUCLID. PEOPLE ARE NOT STUPID. PEOPLE SHOULD NOT BE EXPECTED TO COMPREHEND WHAT IS IN FACT INCOMPREHENSIBLE NONSENSE MISREPRESENTED,BY INCOMPETENT PERSONS SUCH AS YOURSELF, AS GEOMETRY. YOU ARE A PARROT FOR TEXTBOOK COMPANIES THAT PRINT LIES. THE FAKE EDUMACATION SYSTEM THAT EMPLOYS YOU IS PAID FOR WITH FAKE MONEY PRINTED BY TRAITORS, MURDERERS AND HEROIN PUSHERS CALLING THEMSELVES THE PENTAGON AND NATIONAL GUARD. MAKING PEOPLE STUPID IS ACCOMPLISHED BY MISREPRESENTING MEMORIZATION AS LEARNING.
    UNDERSTANDING IS NOT COMPREHENSION. UNDERSTANDING IS MERELY RECOGNIZING THE MEANING OF A SYMBOL. COMPREHENSION IS DEDUCTION, INDUCTION OR A COMBINATION THERE OF. YOU ARE AN ARROGANT TWAT.

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    1. This kind of post is the kind of thing I'm talking. The poor kid (I presume) is...broken. Barely coherent, incapable of expressing a thought in a way worth listening to, and if you do parse the above, you'll see he's clueless in any event. But he still thinks it's worth his while to post that screed, because he's too damaged to realize what his enstupidation has done to him. I delete posts like this regularly...and I'm always amazed by how our system has created so many damaged people.

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    2. (er, kind of thing I'm talking about)

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  10. . With the advent of the industrial era, the strategy of weaponized pollution began in earnest. And as that industrial revolution shifted to the famed "Green Revolution" in agriculture, the war on the brain by the deliberate poisoning of the air, water, land and food supply began in earnest. As for example, we see the advent of water fluoridation touted as an ingenious method of eliminating tooth decay when in fact it's true and obvious purpose pertains to its function as a developmental neurotoxin. One can not discuss this topic without reference to the field of cognitive psychology which organizes this entire discussion around such parameters as "the g-coefficient", "synccometric G", Intelligence Coefficients, and the so called Flynn Effect. With the population now rendered functionally illiterate and those few of us capable of reading dedicating their highly finite leisure time to reading only that segment of the literature as written by the victor, one can be assured that our book-burning overlords are engaging us in this way via a method deployed in numerous other historical contexts which if we were to study properly would provide us with ample insights into our current predicament. The great story of the mass lead-poisoning of Ancient Rome stands as perhaps the most stunning example of this pattern of social control, and yet our doggy-trained minds refuse to even consider the possibility that this outcome was the result of an actual "conspiracy", which is of course yet more an indication of our own "estupidation" as any mentioned above. In this latter instance however it is the stupidity of the high functioning among us that drives the infernal logic of denial and willful stupidity. Because encephalitis is the basis of all social control, and thus it is of the utmost importance in the scheme of oligarchical control that all populations subject to their dominion be properly dumbed down so as to assure that the slaves remain sufficiently docile so as to maintain the hegemonic control of the Master class. The famed play by William Shakespeare (Sir Francis Bacon?) called Romeo and Juliette symbolizes by way of subtle yet pointed allusion to He who is in control: The Master Architect of The Great Work of the builders, the masons, the Freemasons and the cult of G. But who then is this creature, this lineage of infernal royalty that by way of "inFLAMation" of the brain succeeds in activating the change of "cognitive defenses" seen in the magic formula of the cognitive psychologist and his theory of the psychosis of neurosis? Why of course, he's Juliette, or rather Gillette, the BEST a man can get--Gill-Tee as charged. He's the metallurgist, the King of Fire who rules over the stone mason, who forges his tools in the Foundry, and thus is the proverbial Founding Father of all that is wrong in this world today. Hence, Romeo and Juliette refers in coded fashion to Rome as ruled by Gillett, the high priest of fire that forges the weapons, the money and the blade. Well he knows the nature of the strategic utility of burning the brain, by setting it alight with toxic effluent. It's His method. And though madness it may seem, this method of social control via madness and cognitive impairment works like a charm.

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