Category Archives: Daily-Ink

New study: ‘Stupidity is Contagious’

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Is this the newest epidemic?

New study: ‘Stupidity is Contagious’

Some very interesting findings have come from a new study:

  • Researchers at the Institute for Cognitive Decay claim stupidity spreads “at rates comparable to the common cold, but with longer-lasting effects.”
  • Dr. Helen Tropp, lead researcher:
    “It turns out stupidity is highly contagious, especially when transmitted through phrases like ‘I did my own research’ or ‘That’s just your opinion.’”
  • Study participants who spent just 10 minutes in a room with someone spouting conspiracy theories lost an average of 12 IQ points, some “permanently.”
  • Exposure is not limited to in-person contact: scrolling through the ‘For you’ section of X (Twitter) carries “a 73% risk of infection.”
  • In rural test sites, researchers noticed “stupidity clusters” forming, which they compared to “wildfires fueled by bad takes, energy drinks, and supplements promoted on ‘Bro Culture’ podcasts.”
  • One experimental group was forced to binge-watch reality TV marathons—nearly half had lowered basic math test results afterward, and 12% struggled to write in complete sentences when asked to summarize episodes in a paragraph.
  • Professor Alan Greaves, epidemiologist:
    “We tried developing a stupidity vaccine, but test subjects refused it, saying they ‘don’t believe in science.’ At that point, we gave up.”

And if these ‘research based’ bullet points weren’t enough ‘evidence’, let me be explicit in saying these were all Chat GPT inspired, following a response to my request for them stating, “Here’s a bundle of fake “facts,” bogus statistics, and ridiculous quotes you can mix into your parody piece.” I tweaked them a little, but none of them were my ideas.

Stupidity travels at the speed of laziness.

Stupidity isn’t contagious, lazy thinking is. We no longer live in a world where information can be taken at face value without some level of fact checking. Our bullshit detectors need to be left in the ‘on’ position. And we need to be sceptical of evidence, be that evidence in favour of or against what we believe.

It can be a quote, an AI generated video, or even a person of influence that you have followed and admired, but who was equally duped (or lazy) in their gathering of information… Misinformation, fake “facts”, and downright intentional falsified data is everywhere these days, and if we are lazy with our diligence, it’s easy to contribute to the spread of information and lies.

So while this study was made up, it seems to me that if we are lazy in the way we consume (and share information), as many people seem to be, this really is leading to the spread of stupidity.

Going beyond ‘Reconnect, Reminisce, and Repeat’.

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I got away with a buddy to go fishing for a couple hours on Wednesday. It was part of a bigger day together, and we didn’t fish for long, or catch anything. But we connected and had an adventurous day. Good food, good company, and good scouting for a future fishing trip.

It’s one of the things he and I talk about, which is the idea of connecting for experiences. When you don’t see a good friend regularly, it might be easy to ‘pick back up where you left off’ and feel connected. But it can also feel like that’s all you do… Reconnect, reminisce, and repeat.

We didn’t plan a whole day of fishing, we took advantage of the resources and time available to us and made the most of it with a new experience. We didn’t just talk about the things we’ve done or hope to do, we had an excursion. Too often we think planing and organizing needs to be a drawn out part of connecting, with an event planned on some distant future date.

Last night another buddy texted to see what I was up to and just over an hour later I was sitting on his balcony. Then we walked to a delicious dinner. This was so refreshing compared to, “What are you doing next week Friday?”

Plans don’t need to be big, and novelty and newness make for great experiences. Also, last minute plans can be so much more fun than the bigger, much more planned events can be. Novelty keeps the experiences new enough that they become the things we talk about years from now.

Extra sauce please

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This is a bit of a rant.

I hate ordering food and it comes with a tiny side of sauce. It’s annoying. Would it really be too expensive to add what would be 5-10 cents more sauce on a $15-25 dish?

When waiters walk by can they not see that I’m on my 2nd of 5 chicken fingers and I’m already scraping the bottom of the puny sauce container? Do I really have to ask for more?

When I’m at the bottom of the salad and I’m eating dressing-less lettuce, do you think I’m enjoying my meal? When I’m scraping the last tiny streaks of raspberry purée from an almost perfectly white plate to add a tiny morsel of the flavour to my last bite of cheesecake, am I thinking about how wonderful my final bite is going to taste?

I’m a saucy guy… give me the sauce, don’t make me ask.

Thank you!

Dream loops

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I will often fall into a dream that I can’t escape. It’s often a stressful dream although rarely related to a stress I’m dealing with. Essentially, I get stuck in the dream dealing with a ridiculous scenario, and even after I wake up I can’t help but to go back into the dream.

I end up in a loop where I go right back into the stressful situation in my dream, can’t come to a resolution, wake up again, realize it’s just a dumb dream, then still go back into it again.

It’s 5am and I left my bedroom half an hour ago because I couldn’t break the loop and was waking up again and again in the same stressful situation. Now I can’t even remember the dream; Don’t know what was so stressful, and can’t think of any stresses I’m currently dealing with. But I think I’d still be in the loop if I didn’t physically get out of bed.

I wonder what underlying stresses cause these kinds of dreams? What unresolved concerns do I carry around to make these dream loops reoccur for me? Because I’m feeling like I’m in a pretty low stress environment, enjoying my holidays, and still I end up in one of these loops. What brings these on? And what strategies do people have to be able to jump out of theses loops without having to physically get out of bed?

Densification and congestion

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Snuck away to Whistler for a couple nights. It’s funny how different parts of the drive can feel longer or shorter depending on if you are heading to a destination or coming home. What’s not funny is how much longer drives like this take these days.

What used to be an under 2 hour drive is now at least 2.5 hours, and longer if you hit bad traffic, like we did coming home. Vancouver roadways were not designed for the current population, and as more people move to the lower mainland, with high rises going up everywhere, it’s only going to get a lot worse.

I’m not sure what the solution is? The public transportation routes are not ideal to go car-less and every time I get on the road I feel like traffic is heavier. It makes me appreciate how lucky I am to have a seven minute commute that only involves three traffic lights. I wouldn’t want to be a regular commuter in the suburbs of Vancouver.

“Oh no, AI is making us dumber!”

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Except it’s not.

People forget that we were worried about the internet and Google. And before that writing utensils:

“Students today depend too much upon ink. They don’t know how to use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never replace the pencil.”
~ National Association of Teachers Journal, 1907


“Students today depend on these expensive fountain pens. They can no longer write with a straight pen and nib. We parents must not allow them to wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in the real business world which is not so extravagant.”
~ From PTA Gazette, 1941

I pulled those quotes from a presentation I did 16 years ago. I did another presentation at that time where I shared a quote from 1842 discussing how books would become useless “when the pupils are furnished with slates”.

We are used to pronouncing ‘the sky is falling‘ when the next advancement comes along. Google was going to make us dumber. It didn’t. Smart phones were going to make us dumber, but they didn’t. They did however change the things we thought and still think about, and remember. For example, I used to carry around a few dozen phone numbers, memorized in my head, now I don’t even know my own daughter’s numbers. They are neatly stored in my phone.

AI will do the same. It will adjust what we remember, fine tune what we think about about and ask, and help direct our thinking… but it won’t make us dumber.

When I was a kid, I thought my dad was the smartest guy in the world. I can’t think of a question I asked him that he didn’t know the answer to. Sometimes he’d even bring me a file on the topic I asked about.

I remember absolutely blowing away a teacher and my fellow students on a project I did on harnessing the ocean for power. I had newspaper clippings, magazine articles, even textbook sources that I shared on the classroom overhead projector. It looked like I spent hours upon hours doing research. I didn’t. I asked my dad what he knew and he gave me a thick file with all the resources I needed. He was my Google long before Google was a thing.

It made me look good. It made my work a lot easier. It didn’t make me dumber.

I’ll admit that there is something fundamentally different with AI compared to advances like the slate, the pen, the internet, Google and other ‘technological advances’. As Artificial Intelligence becomes smarter than us, we can rely on it in ways that we couldn’t with other advances. And it will take a while for us to figure out how to create tasks in schools that utilize AI effectively, rather than having AI do all the work. It was hard but not impossible to ‘Google proof’ an assignment, and that challenge is significantly magnified by AI. But the opportunities are also magnified.

What happens when AI can individualize student learning and what we consider the ‘core curriculum’ can be taught in less than half of a school day? How exciting can school be for the other half of the day? What curiosities can we foster? How student directed (and thus more engaging) can that other half of the day be?

We are only dumber using AI if we decide that we will passively let it do the work for us, but let’s not pretend students were not already using ‘cut-and-paste’ to get assignments done. Let’s not pretend work avoidance wasn’t already a thing. Let’s not pretend that we don’t already spend a lot of time in schools teaching students to be compliant rather than to think for themselves.

AI will only make us dumber if we try to continue doing what we have done before, but allow AI to do the work for us. If we truly use AI in collaborative and inspirational ways, we are opening an exciting new door to what human potential really can be.

Approaching 200

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We didn’t know on a cold, wet, and dark Friday in January of 2021 that we would make this a usual thing. Two friends, feeling isolated with covid restrictions decided to do the Coquitlam Crunch so that we could meet outdoors when indoor meetings were restricted to your family circle. Now, over 4 and a half years later, we’ve completed our 190th Crunch together, averaging more than 40 a year.

We were about 50 in when we decided that 200 would be a great goal to achieve before we retired, and now that is all but guaranteed. Did we fathom this when we had done just one Crunch? No. We didn’t even know if we’d go again. But sure enough we kept going, with a goal of 40 a year to match the amount of school weeks in the year.

Now, I can’t think of anything I’ve been more dedicated to (besides my wife of course). We do everything we can to not to miss a week. We usually go out on Saturdays, but we’ll squeeze in a Thursday after school if one of us is away on the weekend.

Imagine being just over a year into a routine and deciding on a 5-year goal… then sticking to it. Sounds challenging, but it’s something I look forward to every week. I’d never have spent so much time with my buddy, Dave, if we hadn’t made this a goal, and an expectation. And there are more goals to come… stay tuned.

Canadian measurements

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I saw this very funny post on social media:

Americans: I use miles and pounds

Europeans: I use kilometres and kilograms

Canadians: [snorting a line of assorted measuring systems] I’m 5’8, I weigh 150lbs, horses weigh 1000kgs, my house is an hour away and I drive 80 km/h to get there, I need a cup of flour and 1L of milk.

What amazes me is that despite living in 2 worlds, with a mix of pounds and kilograms, miles and kilometres, Fahrenheit and Celsius, I am absolutely useless at converting between these measurements. It’s 20° outside, I have no idea what that is in Fahrenheit. I heat my wife’s latte milk to 170°, I have no idea what that is in Celsius. My wife’s weight scale is in kilograms and no matter how many time I weigh myself on it, I need Siri to convert it to pounds for me.

You’d think that I’d learn, but no, I just blindly choose the system of measurement that I’m used to and am completely oblivious to the conversion to any other system.

Am I the only one?

We are the consumed, not not the customer

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There is so much BS on the internet these days. There are posts that either exaggerate or confabulate research data to sell ideas and products that don’t do anything they promise to do. I look up topics like reducing snoring or tinnitus and then for the next month I’m bombarded with ads for ‘cures’ of these annoyances. I’ll get detailed, directly-marketed-to-me advertisements including things like, “We are looking for males over the age of 55 in Coquitlam” to participate in a tinnitus study”.

I won’t just get pop up windows, and still ads, I’ll get videos embedded in my stream. I’ll get long format ads where it takes 5+ minutes to get to the point, because advertisers know that if they can keep people watching long enough they will feel invested in getting answers.

And here’s the thing, my ad algorithm will be completely different to yours. It’s targeted to our individual interests, our searches, our likes, shares, clicks, and even the things we say. We are not the customer we are consumed based on our interactions. We are data points that provide identifying features to be exploited. Targeted not for our benefit but to the benefit of companies that pay to learn that our data points are relevant to their products.

Click on an ad, even accidentally, and you can expect similar products to be fed to you many more times. Is this to serve you what you need or to serve advertisers what they need? The answer is clear. It’s not about us. We are data points consumed by an advertising machine. We are the target, the product, and not the actual consumer. On the internet of things, on social media platforms, we are just nodes of data sold to advertisers, we are products… And advertisers are the ultimate consumers of the data points (our data points) that they pay for.