First Blog

 

P-sports and E-sports?   There is little difference aside from broken bodies.   From the October 29, 2019 New York Times*, we see the headline, “But Mom, Video Games Are My Job.” Thus we have the current valuation of many millennials and those younger about their future prospects.   To make money by playing games.   Any why not?   Prize money for E-sports contests are in the millions.   Multiple millions of the younger set play these games, generating revenues for producers, often exceeding intake by movie theaters and professional sports. These days fully 170 colleges offer e-sports competition.   It is a mere blink of the sports-clock before full scholarships for e-sports combatants are offered.   Oops, that blink has blinked, and now multiple colleges are offering scholarships to play such games including Overwatch and   League of Legends .   This new cadre of e-sports semi-pros is paying real dollars to watch others play the game, naturally hoping to cash in themselves

If you consider all the knowledge, abilities, skills, and memories people possess, you note enormous knowledge resources contained by society, but maintained by individual agents.   However, when one of these agents passes, this information is abruptly lost forever. Not reclaimable, redeemable, or reconstructible, it is just gone.   For example, the unrecorded thoughts of Socrates, Kant, and others are gone forever. Sir Isaac Newton, on the other hand, wrote thousands of words on his ideas in multiple notebooks (many bizarre). Every day, individual deaths carry vast amounts of lost knowledge, factual, operational, skills, and data.   Over all time, you have wealth and knowledge, but you can’t take either along.   You can leave behind wealth but not your knowledge.   Your mind, with its lifetime of accumulations, is often the more valuable. What you know uniquely is lost and must be rediscovered. So very much of my parents has been lost forever. Such is the tragic loss

Genius is one of those ephemeral items in the human inventory of gifts together with skills and talents, abilities and intelligence, proficiency and cleverness.  Hard to define, genius is both specific and contextual.  It is not generally abstract.  Genius can reveal itself everywhere, in science, business, politics, war, and literature though often along separate channels.   Some of our greatest philosophers were challenged by the concept and addressed it with notably interesting interpretations. Immanuel Kant in Part I of his Critique of Judgment tells us "Genius is a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other." In his Twilight of the Idols , Nietzsche writes, "Great men, like great epochs, are explosive material in whom tremendous energy has been accumulated; their prerequisite has always been, historically and