re: #97 Charles Johnson

I’ve decided that trying to convince one’s earlier self of something profoundly contrary to the earlier self’s point of view would be futile 100% of the time. Earlier You can’t arrive at the same conclusions Later You comes to without the information and experience that is by definition inaccessible to Earlier You.

For me, life has been a continual series of painful epiphanies, occurring every couple of years or so, wherein I realize that I was really amazingly fucking stupid just a couple of years ago.

It doesn’t take a genius to extrapolate the realization that the aforementioned suggests that I am really amazingly fucking stupid right now, but in ways that I won’t be able to understand for a couple of years or so.

I believe all humans are inherently stupid. We are each born with varying degrees of innate stupidity, and we can never truly become less stupid. We just rearrange our stupidity into new and unfamiliar configurations from time to time.