Wednesday 7 July 1999
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Pic of the day: Screenshot from Civ2 Fantastic Worlds Dinosaur scenario.
It's been a few years, but good old Civ2 is still among the best
strategy games out there. The scenario editor tools allow the game to
be rejuvenated again and again, but dedicated fans as well as by the
publisher. (Speaking of which, clicking the picture should take you
to good old MicroProse, who will probably be delighted to help you buy a
copy of the game if you don't have one.)
Tonight I dreamt that I went to an alternate timeline or some such and found myself and my brother Arnar, who both were ca 30 years younger than we now are. Naturally, they were both somewhat sceptical of my story.
It has been a quiet day at the office, as it ought to be, with the network server down. And I have been thinking, as usual. Thinking about thinking, thinking about money, thinking about diamonds. Oh, and occasionally about work too. (I know that some of my coworkers will drop by my site once in a blue moon...) On my way to work, I reflected on my impression that the positive correlation between cognitive abilities and maturity seem to break down at higher levels. Or, in plain English: Just because you are smarter, you are not necessarily more grown-up. (Hmm, wonder if I should start to write everything in plain English? Instead of just converting it into a roughly anglicized form and leave the rest as an exercise for the reader. Good language takes a LOT of time, though. And my readers are highly intelligent people.) Anyway, intelligence and maturity: At lower levels, there is a clear connection. People with low IQ tend to come across as immature. It is quite easy to think of many retarded people as "big children", even when their bodies are grown up. It seems that a mature psyche is hard to achieve without the extra resources of a near normal IQ. But just because the flower doesn't grow without water, you still cannot just throw more and more water on it to make it grow faster. There may be a marked difference from IQ 60 to IQ 80, but from 120 to 140 it may well seem that the smarter ones get more and more childish.
I tentatively think that there are two types of childishness here.
The childishness of the retarded is the spontanity that comes from
forgetting the past and not being able to guess the future. And its
dark side, the inability to see the consequences of one's actions.
Which goes to show that children are actually both stupid and smart. Puberty is not just a change in the visible body: There is also a mass extinction of brain cells, the like of which is never else seen in a remotely healthy individual. To grow up is, indeed, to die a bit.
I guess space constraint and common decency require that I postpone my fabulations about money and the mature society, as well as diamonds and friendly atoms. God (or your equivalent) willing, I shall be here tomorrow with more philosophy and immaturity. Perhaps I will even be able to tell you how much water that refrigerator has managed to stow away: It is still flowing, liter after liter. With such a stress to defrost it, you can bet it will be long till next time! |