The Proficiologist

The Tale of the Generics

An intro­duc­tion to a strange mind and how its sci­en­tific way of think­ing cre­ated a model world pop­u­lated by generic sen­tient beings, or “gener­ics”.

My mind tries very hard to make me think like a sci­en­tist. On the one hand, sub­con­scious processes con­stantly scan my thoughts for claims to prove or dis­prove. After spend­ing a brief moment ana­lyz­ing, my mind would either reward me with a stamp of approval, or it would play devil’s advo­cate and make a coun­ter­ar­gu­ment of some kind. I can’t con­fi­dently make a state­ment until it passes a bat­tery of qual­ity assur­ance tests. Even then, the words would come out of my mouth with a gen­er­ous amount of uncer­tainty mixed in. On the other hand, my mind pre­vents me from tak­ing any­thing at face value. It believes that every event has a cause; that every action has motives; that every belief has ratio­nale behind it. Like a curi­ous child, it would stop me in my tracks, point to some­thing and ask why?. If I couldn’t keep up with this per­pet­ual stream of why?‘s, I would be pun­ished with a nag­ging sense of dis­sat­is­fac­tion last­ing for weeks.

For the most part, this quirk of mine didn’t bother me too much. I sup­pose it made me a weirder per­son by forc­ing me to spend an unusual amount of time read­ing text­books, watch­ing edu­ca­tional YouTube videos, and aim­lessly pac­ing around the neigh­bor­hood in deep thought. It prob­a­bly also played a part in devel­op­ing my affin­ity toward research papers and com­puter source code as opposed to news arti­cles, essays or nov­els. But soon enough, I found a more seri­ous prob­lem. When I find myself in front of other peo­ple, I’d feel an uncom­fort­able urge to ques­tion the motives behind their every action. What did his words really mean? What is he try­ing to get out of this meet­ing? If I was unlucky, my wor­ries over a friendly con­ver­sa­tion would snow­ball into a fran­tic analy­sis of sev­eral imag­ined per­son­al­i­ties, anno­tated by the solu­tions to var­i­ous zero-sum games.

Against my bet­ter judg­ment, my mind decided to study some psy­chol­ogy and soci­ol­ogy in order to under­stand peo­ple bet­ter. My inten­sive study­ing brought me close to many great ideas, but as mean­ing­ful as the two sub­jects were I knew they couldn’t cap­ture the intri­cate details of how a per­son thinks and acts. Besides, aca­d­e­mic study clearly wouldn’t make me feel less uncom­fort­able in front of another per­son. In a stroke of luck, my mind one day decided to stop over-com­pli­cat­ing every inter­ac­tion I had with other peo­ple. It hadn’t given up its quest for answers; it instead chose to tackle the prob­lem from a dif­fer­ent angle. It was going to design a grossly sim­pli­fied model of human soci­ety, and study that model instead. I was a lit­tle shocked by how bizarre this idea was, but I mostly just felt thank­ful for being able to talk to other peo­ple with­out hav­ing to ana­lyze their every word.

From that point on, my mind would pull out an imag­i­nary note­book and silently scrib­ble away when­ever I watched a movie, met another per­son, or sat idly in front of my com­puter lis­ten­ing to a nearby group of peo­ple hav­ing a pas­sion­ate con­ver­sa­tion. In my dreams, my mind would take out the note­book and sum­mon the var­i­ous crea­tures described in its pages. I later jok­ingly decided to call these crea­tures generic sen­tient beings (or gener­ics for short). As my mind tire­lessly worked on improv­ing its model, I watched the gener­ics grad­u­ally trans­form from mind­less logi­cians to lively beings full of dreams and aspi­ra­tions. They ini­tially ignored each other and lived soli­tary lives, but even­tu­ally they started to share their expe­ri­ences and iden­tify them­selves as mem­bers of a generic soci­ety. The more con­fused I felt with the real world and its ambigu­ous catch-all terms like equal­ity, intel­li­gence and love, the closer my mind grew to its world of generic sen­tient beings.

In a strange way, this model world lacked struc­ture. Generics often thought or acted in alien ways that defied com­mon sense. No two gener­ics held the same beliefs, felt the same emo­tions or inter­preted events in the same way. The generic soci­ety always wavered in its core val­ues, never set­tling on a uni­ver­sal code of ethics. Nonetheless, this world fas­ci­nated my mind. Despite the unpre­dictabil­ity of the race as a whole, there were clear rea­sons behind every choice a generic made. There was always a motive behind a con­scious act; a set of hopes and dreams explain­ing every moment of frus­tra­tion and burst of excite­ment. It’s some­times impos­si­ble to find and truly appre­ci­ate these rea­sons with­out an omni­scient point of view; from the eyes of another generic, the truth tends to feel incom­plete, super­fi­cial even. Still, this model world offered more clar­ity than one could ever hope to glean from the real world.

More impor­tantly, my mind saw great poten­tial hid­ing within the generic sen­tient beings. Their soci­ety func­tioned remark­ably smoothly con­sid­er­ing how dis­sim­i­lar its mem­bers were. Though the gener­ics always felt frus­trated and mis­un­der­stood, they could still form mean­ing­ful friend­ships and coop­er­ate toward big­ger goals (albeit inef­fi­ciently). My mind was con­vinced that with very min­i­mal out­side influ­ence, the gener­ics can learn to dras­ti­cally improve their own lives. A pair of gener­ics could hold friendly con­ver­sa­tions about their lives even if they fun­da­men­tally dif­fered in their core val­ues and beliefs. A closely knit group of gener­ics would be sen­si­tive enough to lift each other’s spir­its in times of need, and dar­ing enough to argue against each other when any mem­ber goes too far. When faced with a large prob­lem, the generic soci­ety can feel rea­son­ably con­fi­dent that its minds will coop­er­ate and even­tu­ally offer a solu­tion. The gener­ics would then agree to carry out the solu­tion even if half of them believed in a rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent approach. I felt my mind shift gears as it began to search for the strate­gies needed to help the gener­ics live up to their full poten­tial. After spend­ing all its time cre­at­ing the model, my mind’s work had really just begun. Feeling a bit play­ful at the time, I coined a new word to describe my mind’s bud­ding research into its model world: Proficiology.

At this point, my mind has taken so many notes that it’s start­ing to run low on imag­i­nary note­books. I think the time is ripe to tran­si­tion to a dig­i­tal note­book and intro­duce the generic sen­tient beings to other minds. I hope you’ll find generic lives just as fas­ci­nat­ing as I did. Maybe you too will come up with great ways to improve the generic soci­ety. If I’m lucky, one of you might even cre­ate your own world of generic sen­tient beings, mak­ing gen­er­ickind a truly inter­plan­e­tary civ­i­liza­tion. You don’t nec­es­sar­ily have to do any­thing though; my only goal here is to keep the tale of the gener­ics alive and to keep our minds spinning.