The Critical Thinking Gap

So, while dinner's in the oven, here's a quick one.


 I set out on Facebook to see where I could find examples of critical thinking skills at work in people's reposts... I sort of found what I was looking for- well, by that I mean I found where critical thinking skills are lacking... which is a lot more common than where they actually, you kow, are.

 The difficulty with critical thinking is that given the impact that Dunning-Kruger theory has (to summarize, the more stupid someone is, the more likely they are to overestimate their intelligence),and how the internet has given a voice to a billion people who really, really should just shut the hell up, critical thinking is hated while groupthink is praised. I've long believed that the results of group thinking is based on the average intelligence of the lowest-intelligence cohort in the group. If you have 10 people working on a project, all pushing for inclusion in leadership, the quality of the output will be based on the intelligence of the 3 least intelligent people in the group.

 Life is hell. And so is the internet.

 Critical thinking, on the other hand, often makes you keep your mouth shut when people are talking, because you have to assess what they're saying, and arguing with an idiot is sometimes not worth the effort. Ever read the comments of a Vox or Mother Jones article?  I could eat scrabble tiles and shit out a more intelligent comment... and at other times, you gain perspective on an issue you really don't like, and having to take in good information that runs against your natural bias is HARD. And that certainly can be a challenge, but to think critically, it has to be done.

  People don't LIKE being told they're wrong. If a bunch of assbags get into a circle jerk of self-support, they get downright hostile when you tell them they're wrong, or misled, or whatever kind way you have of telling them not to be a bunch of fuckin' chumps.  It's like listening to a Reiki practitioner. You think any of them actually believe that shit? Of course they don't, except for the one poor sap who has synesthesia and sees shit when they hear shit. They actually have a reason, however wrong, to believe that they actually do see something. I mean, they really do see colors, it's just that they're seeing shit that doesn't actually exist.
 And fuck, you can do that too if you poison yourself right and cause visual hallucinations. Drink a bottle of whisky after running 5 miles on a summer day. You'll see colors too, before you die I mean.



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 Just to prove a point and provide some fun trivia about the value of critical thinking, and also the disdain for critical thinking that so many posess, Let's look at ancient Chinese medicine... which in reality dates back less than 100 years.
 Yeah, that ancient Chinese medicine shit? It's fake, about 99.8%. Most Chinese remedies available in the west are Asafetida or other strong smelling plant with some sort of other green leaves added and some sort of water-medium protein or chalk added as a binder.  Chicken broth concentrate is popular too (it's Jewish Penicillin!). A few things work ok- not as good as lightning-in-a-bottle discoveries like the value of Willow bark (aspirin) and Foxglove (digitalis), but stuff like St. John' Wort, which sort of helps, some, unless it kills you, of course. I'm sure there are some things that work a bit, but, say, going out and eating all the yarrow off your lawn's weed spots can get you to vomit if you want to vomit, but the western way, sticking your finger down your throat, works better.
Look up Mao's 'Barefoot Doctors' and not the bullshit fanboi Wikipenis entry, but the critical "Give them faith in their weeds and dirt because there's too many to treat with real medicine," of the Mao regime. Greatest scam of the last 500 years.  And it still works! How many people spend $40 on 'Cleanse' or 'Detoxify' pills.  Yeah... Cleansing? Kaolin or an equivalent baby laxative, and maybe some bentonite, a mineral that expands massively and makes a rubbery gel when it gets wet.  So you take your pills, and you get either a touch of diarrhea or take a massive rubbery dump that you spent $40 on but which you could have copied with a couple of tablespoons of mineral oil at about 20 cents, and now you need to go out and buy a new plunger, too.

 Well, at least they're not placebos. Detox and cleansing pills may be a scam, but they really will make you shit yourself empty. I'm not going to get into the detox myth too much, since others have done better already, and if you're a true believer in psuedoscience, you won't like me telling you otherwise anyhow, which is my whole point. 


 Oh, and Acupuncture? Also completely fake, and less than two centuries old, except that like eating dirt and sticks and bugs, the Placebo effect is a thing, so it can work... until you know that it only works via the placebo effect, when it no longer works. Like believing in Santa.

 So, I just ruined acupuncture for you forever. Hahaha. Sorry.
 See? My point is that Critical Thinking is powerful, and people don't like it.

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I've been here too long

I think I'm going to take a little break after this post, recharge my batteries, so to speak.


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Things are good, thanks.


           I'm coming up on 10 years in my current position, a 'temporary' job to make ends meet while I worked on other goals and got used to life after fishing for a living.
      I've got skill and experience at a job that I'm pretty content with... but Tankerman is a specialization within the industry that doesn't utilize all the training I had to do and all the experience I've gained over 30+ years of making a paycheck from working on the water.  It pays, and I provide for my family with it. Many, if not most men would be more than satisfied right there. So, bear in mind, I'm not complaining.

 After 10 years of spending too much time at work to pay for putting my personal life in order, it's getting where I want to be, truly. We work to pay for the things we want out of life, and I've started to collect interest finally on all the ideas and projects that come with finding love and building a family. There's less and less reason to work extra and trade time with family for money in the bank beyond what I am obligated to do. My weight is high, my hair is falling out, and I have bad dreams.

 A few months ago, I finally got off my ass and started updating my working credentials, taking classes, upping the tonnage on my captain's license, and renewing and refreshing some basic skills like advanced firefighting, water survival, and the like. I have to wait to go home and raid my records to submit some more shit to the Coast Guard for an Officer-In-Charge-Of-Navigation-Watch rating, one of the newer bullshit hurdles they throw in the way these days, which wasn't necessary before. I'll take care of that when I can.


 I feel a change coming, and I don't know if it will be small or big or what exactly it will encompass. I do know that it's been a while since I had that excited-to-see-what-is-over-the-horizon feeling. A lifetime of learning and something like 25 of my 44 years where I spent more than 270 days a year on a boat. It's probably time to start trying to devote some time to quality of life changes.

Halfway Day

Well, yesterday was Halfway Day for this voyage. 35 days down, 35 to go. I'm feeling it now, for sure, although I'm also feeling the extra pay, too, which is going to a good cause- my bank account.

 God is celebrating Halfway Day by baking my balls off outside. It's hot. Damn hot. The Chinese ship we were bunkering today sent us down cold water and sodas, which is something that an American ship has NEVER done even once for us, which is kind of dickish, now that I think on it.

 Speaking of, Evergreen Shipping Company is a pleasure to work with. Their ships are uniform, for the most part, efficient, and the crew professional. Much of that impression comes from their expeditor/cargo surveyor, Danny, a Chinese-American kid who handles fueling their ships, acting as go-between between me and the chief engineer, which helps with language issues and safety, quite a bit, and makes all our lives easier. Plus, having a dedicated bunker station mounted low in the hull behind a hydraulically-operated watertight bulkhead makes my life easier. We spend about 1/3 the time at the cargo crane controls compared to other container vessels.

About twice the displacement of an aircraft carrier.

At any rate, it's been a busy week this far. A change in plans gave me a couple hours free tonight, so I'm cooking large quantities of food, so that we won't have to heat the oven during the day while the sun is beating down on the house.

Mulligan

The other night I put up a pretty nasty post about how I was satisfied that John McCain was dead.

       A night's sleep and a reread showed me that I wrote the post a bit too strongly so I deleted it.

 Don't get me wrong- I didn't like McCain and a man being dead doesn't absolve his memory from reproach.  He spend a lifetime working hard to put me and people like me out of work. Lord, he hated the US Merchant marine. He loved him some political contributions, though, and ADM, the largest American ag interest out there, sure loved filling up his pockets along with the defense industry.

     I can justify being critical of the man's warmongering and bloodthirsty global quest for empire, but why rehash it? As the Pakistani cargo surveyor politely told me yesterday "He  spent the Obama years mostly bombing civilians and took away any chance for peace in the middle east."


SO, yeah, that's legitimate criticism. At any rate, rather than rehash it and be (more) classless, I'll just say that I don't wish death on anyone, but there have been some people's obituaries that I have read with contentment.

Check this out: SEA DREAMER PROJECT

      If you look at 'how to' videos on Youtube, and also boatbuilding videos, you're going to come across marine architect George Buehler's work.  

Sadly, Mr. Buehler passed away a few months ago. I spoke with him several times. He took the time to share some techniques with me for boatbuilding fixes after I complemented him on one of his beautiful designs. He was an interesting man, certainly, and one of the coolest things about him was that part of his design lines were made for amateur boatbuilders to make rugged boats out of easily available materials. He was really into helping people get into backyard boatbuilding, and his designs showed that- friendly design like large-radius curves and chines instead of wineglass profiles, things like that, so one could build a boat without spending 6 figures on wood alone. His designs are heavily influenced by Pacific Northwest-style hulls- narrow, high-deadrise hulls,  a vastly different animal from what I'm used to, as an East-Coaster with the big beam and Downeast lines as my comfort zone.  

 Now, if you want to build a wooden or fiberglass-over-wood boat, hardwoods of perfect quality and precision sawing are mostly what is required. You can't get massive white oak for timbers at Home Depot. Hell, you mostly can't get it at any store, and will probably have to go directly to a sawmill and get to know the tree before the cuts you need are sawn out of it, in order to get the right quality and grain orientation, which is also a very important thing. 

    With Buehler's home builder-targeted design, many of the custom cuts can be swapped out with lesser quality wood from big-box stores, laminated and glued to make larger pieces before being bolted together. 

 Modern materials science can be blended with old-school carpenter knowledge to make sandwich-core construction- using the combined strengths of materials to offset the weaknesses of individual components. This is why you can make a nice little skiff out of 2x4's, plywood, some screws and fiberglass for about 20% of the cost of a planked wooden skiff made of long-lasting materials. 


 Longevity is an issue- fir and pine boards and deck screws won't last 100 years like a properly built wooden boat will.  But they don't have to. You can make a boat to last 20-25 years using less-than-ideal materials, if it's built properly and built heavy. So Buehler did exactly that. His boats are built heavy. Where a plank-on-frame hull is sufficient in wood, a double-layered fiberglassed plywood-on-plywood-on-plank-on-frameusing weaker woods and a good knowledge of materials design and marine architecture can be more than strong enough. 

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 So, in the Sea Dreamer Project, Scott, a  cop (and part-time woodworker) who never built a boat before is building a big and heavy cabin cruiser of sufficient size and quality for international travel. He's building it in his backyard. On a budget.  This is not a professional mariner. Guy's in upper-state New York, about as far from the ocean as I've ever been in my life, in fact. 

 I'm enjoying the videos that are being put out on youtube. You should check them out. In the early days of construction, when motivation is discussed, the 'if not now, when?' aspect plays heavily, as does the role of materials selection. For an amateur, being able to (mostly) shop at local, familiar stores helps a lot with comfort and actually getting projects started, and the role of compromise, in materials, design, choices, etc, exists in any marine setting. If I were to set out and build an oak and cedar masterpiece, is that any more practical than a lumberyard-sourced boat? Depends on what it's being used for, of course. We compromise in all things. I wish for all bronze fastenings for my boat, but end up with some copper, brass and stainless steel. I want quarter-sawn white oak, but end up with flat-sawn here and there. I want solid oak beams and natural-grown knees.  I get fir laminated with resourcinal glue binding it, which is just as strong, but ugly as shit, but who cares, as it's being painted anyhow.As you watch these videos, Scott discusses where and why he chooses materials, and how he or the designer must overbuild or otherwise compensate for his compromises. 

    It's impressive, to see something large and complex come together, and to see people risk the loss of time and treasure to pursue such big challenges. 

 

Everyone's doing cool shit but me

Well, I'm in the doldrums now. 6 weeks to go. Another week to the halfway point. Another trainee coming tomorrow, which means forced socialization, which means the next few weeks are going to be a living hell for me, who relies almost entirely on minimizing human contact at work to keep sane. One very positive thing is that we're taking on the same trainee from last time, Two Weiner Peter (everyone gets a nickname) who is a great kid, and pleasant company. The poor bugger has to put up with me, though, which should be good for remission of all sin at least. 


       So, yeah, it's one of those times where it's not so easy to see the silver lining in my clouds. There's much to choose from in terms of unhappy things going on, but the other column is thin on the ground just now, and will continue to be so until I stop wearing shit-colored glasses and can lighten up a bit.

 It's raining. Every day. On the upside, I saw the sun for like 5-10 minutes yesterday between the two rainclouds that dumped water on us. That was the first time I've seen the sun in... 10 days, maybe?

        We had a small cargo to transfer to an oil tanker yesterday, and once we were alongside I went to bed. When I woke up 8 hours later, we were barely halfway through a job that should have taken us 3 hours from first line fast to all lines in. Indian crew. Utterly unable to do anything in a timely manner, officious and inflexible, and, as they always do, enough letters of protest to wallpaper my galley. So a quick and easy job turned into a 12 hour trial of patience. So it goes. I try not to make generalizations, but goddamn sometimes stereotypes are spot on.

 A couple of the tugboat deckhands in my company who are great kids are moving on and moving up, gaining traction career-wise. That's always an exciting time, especially the initial moves, when the juice is still worth the squeeze. I'm watching videos of people making cool shit online, restoring and building boats, working with their hands to create beautiful things, where mine are mostly picking at my nose and such at least until I get home. Oh, I get to do some marlinespike seamanship, which is good and which I like, and we've been getting out-of-town tugboats moving us, so I've been seeing people I haven't seen in a few years, which has been cool. Waiting. A holding pattern. Even reading has become a bit dull.

 It's not all blah, obviously. But it's the doldrums. The long dark and dreary November of the soul. I bought my plane tickets to go home when my relief date comes, which provides a boost, and, 6 weeks out, is cheap, too.

Our Better Angels

It doesn't happen often, but every now and again, I get forced to be serious for a minute about something other than doing my job.


     A former shipmate of mine passed away the other day. It was not a surprise. He had had a stroke on board a manned barge a few years ago, and never really recovered. He was in his 40's, and obese. One of us, though. Part of the gang of us that hung out when we were all rafted up out in anchorages and occasionally had dinners together. He and I weren't close, but cordial, as in we'd sometimes stop by if we were at the same dock and talk for 10 minutes or so, catch up a little.
      It was he who took care of me when I got a particularly nasty case of food poisoning, and my company couldn't be bothered to send me a relief so I could go ashore. I was always so grateful for that. A simple act but supremely kind.


I'm coming up on my relief date here, in a few days. Sadly, I'm staying. But it's progress. Week 4 is almost done. 6 weeks to go. Ugh.  Well, the money will be nice.