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One of the most involved members of ChurchOfVirus he is often described as opinionated. VectorTywick
Primary Source: Hermit, "virus: Hermitish thinking & personal motivations", 2002-01-14
Brian Phillips asked: "How did you learn/teach-yourself to think this way"
I don't remember learning formal methods, and although I may have read about them, I think my adoption of them was because I was encouraged to live them. Aspects of how I was brought up made the result as inevitable and as natural as breathing. First the cast of players will help.
Mother: Touchy feely, devout anglican, child psychologist/clinical psychiatrist (today a dispensing homeopath), completely sold on Dr Spock's theories which might have done me more harm if my father had not ameliorated the worst effects. The best manipulator I have ever met. Proof of the pudding, I didn't have a clue how intelligent she was until after I was 28 - and it took my father telling me that she had an higher IQ than him to get me to work it out. Intensely practical, she can learn, or turn her hand to anything (engineer's daughter). She learned to drive trucks at age 9 while her father, built the original du Toit's Kloof pass, and probably learned to manage people at the same time. The Italian prisoners of war who did the work loved her. I still stay with the families of these POWs when visiting Italy. Very poor critical thinking (IMO) but incredibly "intuitive" - she "reads minds" (no, not really - she notices tiny reactions and will make changes to her style on the fly to work out what the patterns mean and having figured it out can play people the way a virtuoso plays a Stradivarius). As an example she will give out her homeopathic remedies to my father and I, and both of us rational, and not easily persuaded of the value of a pseudo-science (which homeopathy is) will take what she gives us - because her remedies work. (NB Few do. The field is pseudo science and rife with frauds). If she offers an explanation for why she chooses a particular remedy, or the supposed reason that it will work, we will decline to listen to it - because if we hear her explanation we would not bother to take it - the "explanations" are worthless rubbish. But, her drug choices are effective. How can this be? I think she notices patterns and changes at a far smaller level of detail than most people and "intuits" appropriate dispensing patterns very quickly at a subliminal level.
Father: gentle genius (engineer, economist, botanist, classicist, astronomer, historian, mountain climber). Total pacifist - in fact, the closest I have come to an argument with him is over some of my military activities. The kindest person I know. Also the best read and most knowledgeable about anything and everything under the sun. Fully eidetic memory and a master of mathematics and language. His range of interests is far wider than mine, and although I have a somewhat more practical bent, his "butchery" tends to be effective. I wish I could show you the cable operated brake system which he designed and built for an ATV he and I collaborated on (as he did not have a lathe to machine appropriate hydraulic ratios). Heath Robinson would be jealous, but it worked and the forces and throws were precisely calculated to work despite the "unusual" appearance based on 16th century marine technology. I suspect that he is a mild atheist or pan-Deist of some sort (the latter being more likely). He does not discuss religion - he holds that this is something that we all have to figure out for ourselves and that discussion about it only muddies the water. I did learn that my mother and father had an agreement that she could bring us up religiously (as she wished) and that he would not interfere (a mistake I think - it cost me a lot of confusion and pain to overcome this). Consciously or unconsciously (the latter I think, he has more integrity than is good for him), he sabotaged this by ensuring that I read the classics and history. Particularly Toynbee. Who put me off Deist religions forever. A lot of what my father is, was chosen by him deliberately so as not to be like his father (who hovers over both him and me as an ideal and a warning) and who I think needs to be understood to really comprehend him (or me) despite the fact that he really didn't have a lot to do with the subject at hand.
Grandfather (paternal): Certainly I hero worshiped my grandfather, which my mother greatly resented. I think she really hated him. The following story, from when before I was born, may illuminate the reason and something about, if not his character, his sense of humor. Mother, father, paternal grandmother and grandfather are eating (formal, very formal, it always was) Sunday dinner together, and the servants have withdrawn. Grandmother: So father is going to France? Father: Yes, I'm going to be lecturing at... Grandmother: And is mother going with you? Grandfather (without any hesitation): "No. You don't take sandwiches to a feast."
He came from a minor Prussian aristocratic family, with a thousand year tradition in the military and literature (and 300 year association with South Africa). His parents moved to South Africa where they owned a vast ostrich farm in the late 1800s and where he was born. He lost both parents and all bar one sibling in his early teens (British concentration camp). Brought up by an uncle (a Jesuit) in Germany. Graduated from Berlin at 14. Became a lecturer at Oxford and later at Berlin and Augsburg. Was in Bismark's privy cabinet in 1932 and argued against appointing Hitler. Wrote a series of articles that angered Hitler enough to want him thrown into a concentration camp, yet managed to get the family out of Germany through occupied Europe (Germany invaded Holland, Belgium and France after they had escaped there, and eventually made his way to through Vichy France to South Africa via Spain in 1942). Academic par excellence. Classics teacher, author, linguist, philosopher, socialist, philanthropist, publisher, farmer, art and book collector and dealer. Museums and archives around the world, Russell, Smuts, Wells, Shaw, van Loon, Toynbee and many other intellectual giants of the 20th century, consulted and collaborated with him. Built one of the first Bauhaus residences outside Germany, a building designed for eternity. Now unfortunately ruined by unsympathetic modifications. An atheist and humanist - but a brutal realist. His humanism was for the mass, not the individual. Never spared friend or enemy the edge of his tongue. A Genius. Witty. Unbelievably dominating personality. When he walked into a room, he absorbed whoever was in it - even Churchill listened to him rather than the other way around (and I wish somebody had written down their discussions as both delighted in the use of the sarcastic epigram). When persuasion didn't work, he had a vile temper which he could and did use to get his own way - every time. He was, I think, in love with South Africa. Certainly he became involved. He formalized Afrikaans and established the foundation which still runs the "source" dictionary for the language. He founded historic preservation in South Africa (which included preserving the Castle from the railways in the 1950s, and saved the Koopmans de Wett house, Mostert's Mill and the old slave quarters, now the Cultural History museum from the demolition ball). Established and endowed many "living museums". His first book collection, sold to put my father and his siblings through University became the centerpiece of the South African Archives and greatly extended the South African Collection of the Hague. His second collection is on permanent loan to UNISA and is the center of their rare books collection.
He drank himself to an early death (87) (we think deliberately, certainly he polished off a 50 year collection of wines and liqueurs and then expired), when South Africa took the apartheid route and it became clear that the United Party (which he was highly involved in and which had ruled the country before the Afrikaners took over) had become irrelevant - that like Germany in the 1930s, and possibly like America today, the system itself was broken. Sad in a way. Had he chosen to live longer, he may well have seen the end of Apartheid - although had he seen what has followed, it might have been worse for him.
Me: Born in Cape Town. Moved to Europe as a child. Raised in Europe and the UK, moving often. One year we moved 7 times (and as my dad would usually go ahead to start work and to arrange housing, this makes my mother some kind of a hero given the four children she managed to keep alive (the youngest only 6 months old at the start of the year)). Home taught, only I don't remember much actual "teaching" (I explain why below), and already thought much as I do now. So the answer is earlier. What could it be?
Stimulation (3 younger siblings didn't hurt as competition for attention was sharp). Any time my dad was not lecturing/studying/working, and he seemed to make a lot of time for us, the family would travel to historic sites and my dad would talk about the societies, environment, geomorphology, art, literature, technologies and culture. He could always explain not just the how and the what, but also the why - even when not asked. I don't ever remember stumping him with a question (and worked out much later that this was a self-imposed challenge for him too, he would study up on things before we went places). No subject was ever taboo, no question ever went unanswered.
We lived in a household surrounded by books (which moved with us - I still have many of my childhood favorites - the ones not stolen by my siblings - grrr). I taught myself to read at four (from the Beatrix Potter books, which have few enough words on each page to be able to work out what the words sound like for comparison with the written patterns) despite my mother's strenuous objections. It wasn't the way Spock said it should be. I was more determined than she was, and after discovering that I had started spending most of the nights under the blankets with book and a torch, she gave up her opposition and started to help. (I think she was not just worried about my eyesight, but also dreaded facing me when I was exhausted and mega-hyper-active in consequence). She was also fascinated by how I learnt to read. My reading was not alphabetic but pattern oriented - I only learned the alphabet latter, when I started to type. Book reading was a reward for doing things from as early as I can remember. Punishment often involved losing reading privileges. To read a book, we had to wash our hands first. The only time I saw my father lose his temper - ever - was when at five or six, I scribbled (in crayon) in a book, and received the thrashing of my life. I realized when I was older that the fact that it was a first edition Robinson Crusoe didn't help matters. Nevertheless, I still remember that beating. It had a very educational effect on me - I still find it difficult to write anything in a book unless very lightly in pencil. And freak at other people doing so. I taught myself Latin, again by word patterns, not alphabetically, by 6 and the content may have had some influence on my thinking, but I think that learning the sentence structure was more important though I hated it when it happened (infra).
Films were rare and television, other than the news once a day, was verboten. Home made entertainment (song, puppet shows, reading) and hobby related activities were "subtly" encouraged - as was chess. When we turned 4, each of us would receive our own library tickets and we were taken to a library every day if we were not traveling. As we turned 8 we got bus/tram tickets and museum/art-gallery access passes to let us "choose" what we did with our time - but as an adult I recognize that this, being without cost, was a deliberate "steering" of our choices. One that I in no way resent. Most evenings we usually had people visiting us, and more often than not were allowed to join in and were treated as adults while we behaved like them. This was a privilege not a right which could be lost if we made a nuisance of ourselves. But it meant that we became used to good conversation and structured discourse (most visitors were academics and researchers).
If we wanted something (e.g. a kite, a book, my own hi-fi) we had to write and defend a paper about it, what it was, how it worked, and what we would get from it, and then, if persuasive enough, and practical, something would be done. Usually, I suspect whenever possible (e.g. kites and hi-fi), we would be taught (and helped (even when that meant learning together)) how to make whatever it was we wanted. Although I didn't realize it at the time, there was undoubtedly a lot of "focusing" built into this process. For example, when I decided I wanted a "railway set", I ended up "choosing" N-scale (we wouldn't have had space to build a permanent layout at a larger scale) although I had wanted a Marklin in HO. Having agreed we would do it, it turned into a three year family project, where we built a model of a section of the Apennines, and would spend weeks researching the buildings, industry, periods, rolling stock etc before building anything. And anything that went onto the diorama (which eventually took up seven 4x8 sheets) had to be justified and researched before becoming a part of it. I rapidly learned how to get my way by doing research which "proved" I was right - at least until my youngest sister (and smartest sibling) started doing the same. The project was important to me, as I learnt electronics by designing (which included building ECAP models) and then building engine controllers for it, and boolean logic and mapping while designing the switching system.
After any of us completed something we had wanted, we used to write reports on our own and each others' efforts and once or twice this ended up in a purchase (A sailing dinghy in the Lake District was bought after we had learned to swim, built canoes and tried (and failed) to add a mast and sail to it and finally succeeded in turning it into a kind of primitive tripod masted catamaran).
There was always wheeler dealing going on, as we had to earn both money and help - usually by doing household chores, babysitting, or work related stuff (sorting punch-cards, filing papers), but also for "intellectual property" - photographs that went into the family collection, puppet shows, singing, researching places to visit, etc. All of which taught us, but in so painless a fashion (aside from the time when I reinvented slavery and my dad eventually worked out what was happening...) that we didn't realize how much we were learning. Payment was market related, but as our competition was usually a guest-worker, the rates were low. We had to pay for adult help, including taking us places and help with learning, at the same rate as we were being paid, which I think fixed a lot of very nasty problems that can happen in large families (we learnt that our parents' time was valuable too) - and taught us a great deal more about self-sufficiency than most kids learn until they are turned loose upon the world to sink or swim.
I do remember being forced, very much against my will (which was strong), to learn Latin grammar, multiplication tables and handwriting. I asserted that I did not need them, that I could look-up what I needed to know and could use the selectric to write. My father asserted that I would benefit from them - and "persuaded" me, but only by applying a leather belt to my gluteus maximus on an almost continuous basis, that he was correct. I think I may have been about 6 to 8. From then on it was much easier to persuade me to do things as it taught me that he could be at least as stubborn as I can (which, speaking genetically should come as no surprise, but which shocked me at the time).
I developed one set of habits I have retained, and one I unfortunately did not. The retained one was a voracious, indiscriminate, insatiable love of reading. A fascination with how - and why - things worked. All the above worked to build a vast general knowledge and collection of trivia. Learning to recognize "the piece that does not fit" including "the dog that did not bark". The one that did not stick, was the keeping of a journal, with notes, photographs, thoughts and sketches of the places we went and things we saw and wanted to learn more about. Each of us would fill a notebook every two or three weeks. Unfortunately this was broken in the military, and I didn't ever resume it.
A musician, antique restorer, reproducer of classic instruments, paederast, logician, photographer and gentleman, Viscount David George Arbuthnot, Knight of the Garter and KBE to boot, who was undoubtedly as interested in getting me into his bed as he was in improving my mind, but who taught me a lot (e.g. Gilbert & Sullivan, Flanders & Swann, Predicate Calculus, inlay restoration, varnishing and building spinets, how to drive) while attempting to seduce me, before I discovered how much fun girls could be and so unfairly robbed him of his objective. If I had the chance to replay my life, I would start fucking (girls that is) earlier, but wouldn't miss out on what I now see as having been a missed opportunity that I might have enjoyed. Who knows? Time goes forward and I was virtuous (or trying to be) back then. Apropos of something, I think he taught my mother something too, as I met him at the Church she insisted I attend - and when she finally discovered that not only was his interest in me, shall we say, not entirely platonic, but that I saw nothing wrong with this - and had a second want-to-be homosexual lover (a schoolteacher) I was thinking about, in the same Choir, and who, at her suggestion I had been camping with - so that it wasn't for lack of opportunity but only my insistence on it being my choice that had prevented any kind of "consummation", I was finally able to avoid any further of her religious enthusiasms.
A mathematician, Professor Skewes (Regius Professor of Mathematics and discoverer of the Skewes number), who tutored me and taught me a lot of the advanced maths I know, in exchange for discussing Modesty Blaise. Later, when his eyes became problematic, I was able to partially repay by reading to him, but I owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
One exceptional lecturer, a Dutchman and a dry SOB, whose skill was designing things that could not possibly work but looked as if they should (which requires an exquisite knowledge of what it takes to make things work), Prof Cornelius (applied mathematics), out of all of them the only one I recall clearly, He refined my analytic and sarcastic capabilities significantly by insisting that I find every fault in anything he taught - or suffer his humor. A sweet girl who taught me a lot - and died too young, leaving me uncaring enough to learn to apply sarcasm like a scalpel, and with Prof Cornelius as my mentor I could hardly fail to perfect it.
A lot of little things which taught me moderation - somewhat. Too much time spent on nasty but necessary jobs in the military. Time spent lecturing kids not all of whom were sure that they wanted to learn. Time spent in faculty lounges engaging in academic repartee (more murderous in intent, even if more refined, and much more significant, than usually happens on the CoV). Time running debating and acting societies. Time spent in debate - often with the religious - on Usenet and IRC. These all helped. But they had a very solid foundation. Which makes a nice conclusion.
So what makes for Hermitish thinking? In my case, exceptional parents. I hope to eventually see all parents being able to function like this - and where the parents can't (which won't happen in generation as they won't have the skills to teach their children in that critical 0-4 year stage, but their children or grand children might have this capability), to see society supply as much as possible of what the kids cannot obtain at home. I think that all children deserve the start I received and would like to think that the CoV might be able to play a role in this process. I know that I am unlikely to make this happen alone. I studied the wrong things, have used to much of my life on other things, and indeed, still have many other things that I wish to accomplish that demand my time and attention. My hope is that if enough like minded people can come up with a "recipe", that it may be persuasive. Even if it doesn't happen, and I fail utterly in this rather vague idea, perhaps some of our children will benefit from these discussions and may have better luck working on the problem in a world which is a little less faith-filled.
But before messing with children, where the cost of errors is potentially very high, we should try to figure out how to persuade adults to be rational. The CoV being filled with consenting (they pressed send to join the list) adults, many of whom have such skills acquired in numerous ways (and others who are more like prototypical two year olds), felt, when I first got here, like the best place I had found to start learning about teaching this.
As I have said before, I am learning a lot from the CoV - including pointers, formal ideas and language which I didn't have before. Hopefully, I am "paying my way" in what I return.
Kind Regards
Hermit