Friday, March 3, 2017

Mirror mirror on the wall, we are the fairest of them all

Patent cases expose a number of embarrassing attributes about we human creatures.

First we tend to be very vane. Ninety percent (90%) of us think we place in at least the top 50% of our population if not in the top 10% or top 1%.

Second we are incompetently blind to almost all the things we are incompetently blind to. (How many of you are picking up the IR wavelengths now coming off your screen or hearing the ultrasonic vibrations?)

Third we crave social admiration. (Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the most admired of us all?).

Supreme Court Justices are susceptible to all these vices (shallowness, vanity, narcissism, ...) and succumb to them on a regular basis.

Yes. They all have very high IQ’s and are among the top 10% smartest people in our population.

But so too are all the young among our population who pursue advanced studies in the hard sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, electronics, …). Why does it take our young ones (those with super high IQs) so many years to “get it”? Answer: because it’s hard hard stuff and our biological brains can only do so much and not much more.

If you were a Justice sitting on the SCOTUS and all your “friends” (amici curie) complemented you on how smart and clever you are and convinced you that molecular biology is no more complicated than plucking a leaf off a tree, wouldn’t you believe them?

And if some non-“friends” tried to explain to you that molecular biology is hard and that is why our high IQ youths take so long to earn their PhDs and that is why you, one of the “Supremes” may never understand it; wouldn’t you discount everything they argue?

So sure. At the end of the day all the complex stuff reduces to “generic” computers doing no more than conventional and routine operations, ones that 2nd year coders do every weekend without breaking a sweat. All those so-called smarty pants inventors out there and their devious scriveners cannot possibly be smarter than we the Supreme SCOTeti. They are merely trying to hoodwink us with their voodoo witchcraft and obfuscating language.

Aha. We can see right past them by devising a simple framework for witchcraft detection. First we dangle an oblong magic shard at the end of a string, slowly move it over the claim and give it a twirl. If it points in almost any direction but one secret one, the claim is clearly “directed to” skullduggery.

But just to be fair (because after all, our mirror tells us we are the fairest of them all) we will apply a second test. We submerge the claim in holy witch water to see if it has that elusive “something more”. You see, witches are made of wood and thus they float. Only those that have that “something more” stay under.

So after all that, why are all those cry baby inventors complaining? We have been imminently fair. After all, “we” are Supreme and in that top 1% number. Clearly they are not. Sigh.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're not kidding. I've been tested genius; seldom ever have any trouble recognizing concepts across a variety of disciplines; yet, physics is sometimes difficult to understand; biology can have layers of complexity that are realms in their own right; astronomy can have observations where new evidence takes centuries to update - the list goes on.

And, this does not even address the essential complexities of mathematics, linguistics, philosophy and law; that underpin the operations of the intellectual disciplines.

So I get a "genius" idea, one day. Then, it takes me the better part of two years to figure out how to engineer that concept into something that works correctly, in the real world. That's most of two years racking my so-called "genuis" head much of the time playing 'brainiac', just trying to conceive all the aspects needed to make it work. And, 'newsflash' here, for those who are naive or ignorant: for all this ingenious effort, there's no assurance of success.

Justice Breyer's recent pejorative nonsense, something about coding a major software innovation "by a couple of second year CS students over a couple of weekends at a Starbucks"; as found in his remarks in oral arguments to cases heard before the SCOTUS; reveals the Supremes' fundamental contempt for those engaged in intellectual avocations other than their own; particularly, "science based" inventors - and, this includes computer science.

And this, is but one example of the contempt and derision facing earnest petitioners seeking certiorari, in this area of law.

With such fundamental breakdowns in governance, as the casual abrogation of Constitutional separation-of-powers is seen more and more frequently; and political divisions rending the U.S. are exploited by the more mendaciously ruthless power interests; is it any wonder, that such critical components of the overall system, are broken?