147. Age Inappropriate People (AIPs)
Some humans express adult behavior at extremely young ages. Fact. How does this happen, who are they, how does society/religion react, and how do we exploit them?
Normally we treat our children as less capable than adults, and forgive them if they break laws. We generally treat animals that we don’t eat the same way. But sometimes, maybe one in a million births, something weird happens: Biologically they are mostly normal but cognitively they act like an adult soon after being able to walk. I would hold up Michael Jackson as the best known contemporary example. Michael was the lead singer of the Jackson 5 by the age of 6 and toured the USA. His comfort performing at a super-adult (meaning better than an adult) level while still a young child defies logic and social norms.
And older example of an AIP would be a female child born in France in the early 15th Century. For simplicity (as I have international readership) I will call her Joan of Arc, though she has other more correct names. Without any formal training, she led French armies to improbable victories against English occupiers at the age of ~17. This would be an odd age to be a military commander, but especially odd as a woman in Europe in the 15th Century. The English explained her proficiency as being demonically inspired, as there was no other rational explanation. The French considered her Divinely inspired. Because of this Joan got a pass until her capture, but normally anyone showing unusual talents like this in Europe at this time would have been tortured and killed as a witch or devil consort.
East vs. West Cultural Responses
In Tibetan Buddhism, a high religious figure such as a Lama can intentionally be reborn back to Earth and this child is a Tulku. Such a child is generally well protected and educated, and will assume the property and social/political power of the previous Lama/master.
In Hinduism, and most forms of Buddhism, reincarnation can occur but generally there is no direct succession rules/laws/rituals. Generally these children are highly regarded in society.
In Western religions, exhibiting knowledge beyond normal human capacity or being a healer was generally seen as a sign of demonic influence, especially in and after the 15th century. This could justify exorcism or murder. In modern times this reaction is rare, though I had an excommunicated priest attempt to murder me twice in my sleep when I was 17 and homeless (he invited me into his home). It was never explained to me why he was excommunicated, and he was never charged with any crime.
In secular society children with adult behavior are often seen as autistic or in rare cases autistic savants. But because autism is still seen as a disorder by society it is assumed that they will be cognitively crippled in other ways. I don’t find this a good fit explanation for the existence of AIPs.
Commercially, children with adult characteristics are highly valued in the entertainment industry. The public really likes watching remarkable child performers like Michael.
For paedophiles, the “adult mind in a child’s body” is the ultimate fetish so if word gets out that one exists, they will seek this person out.
There are a lot of paedophiles in the entertainment industries, so often children recruited for having adult level talent are subjected to sexual abuse. This is so common that Justin Bieber was sexually assaulted on stage, on camera, and his attacker was never charged. He was 18 at the time. His attacker, Jenny McCarthy, stated on camera: “I couldn’t help it, he was just so delicious, so little, and just, ahhhk, I wanted to tear his head off and eat it.”
Because AIPs are actively hunted by the entertainment industries and sexual predators, they rarely have the opportunity to pursue other interests if they survive to adulthood in the West.
What’s Going on Here Biologically?
To my knowledge, no AIP has ever been studied scientifically while either alive or after death. They exist, that’s not in question, they just are rare and the reasons for their existence are typically sourced from religious reasons so science doesn’t seem ready to apply resources to this.
The brain develops from the back to the front, with basic systems like the midbrain responsible for maintaining survival functions (like breathing and heart beat) developing before birth. The rear-most part of the brain, the cerebellum, is poorly developed at birth and it generally takes more than a year before a human can walk on its own.
The last part of the brain to develop is the pre-frontal cortex, right behind your forehead. As I explained to international regulators when they summoned me to testify in 2013 about the exploitation of children in gaming, this part of the brain usually completes its development at around age 25. What the PFC does is allow humans to model things in their minds before they happen. Thus things like understanding the consequences of one’s actions are done here.
Because children have limited ability to understand consequences, we generally hold them to lower legal standards in their actions until they are “adults”. We set the age of adulthood at ~18 in the West because we need them to do careless things like vote for celebrities, get pregnant, smoke cigarettes, and use credit cards before they get “smart” enough to avoid these behaviors. People may still do those things after the age of 25, but by then it’s assumed they did so with full knowledge of what the consequences would be.
Of course PFC development is not a binary. It doesn’t just magically turn on at 25, it’s sorting itself out before then and providing limited functionality. Some people may “peak” at a level far below what most of us would consider adult and never really make it out of childhood. More years does not solve that situation.
So the way I see it is that the PFC is the key to the mystery of how we end up with AIPs. Now imagine that I set up a test for PFC function. My test involves seeing if the test subject can make it across a moderately busy 4 lane highway without the aid of a crosswalk or control light. Let’s call this the Frogger Test. Yes, I just made that up. You can credit me with this amazing neurological test after I’m dead.
If I put a 2 year old human in this test, they will probably croak 99+% of the time. I know someone who’s 2 year old actually tried this, and multiple cars/trucks crashed to avoid the baby. In my test, the cars don’t react and don’t save the subject. Now if I put a 2 year old dog or cat in the Frogger Test, they will make it at least 50% of the time. I would propose that dogs and cats are smarter than humans for the first few years and then humans start to catch up. By age 25 the humans are way smarter than dogs or cats about crossing the street, but the dogs and cats died of old age before 25, so hard to know.
I would expect mammals that live to age 50+ to perform pretty similar to humans on the Frogger Test if they are exposed to highways throughout their lives. That would include gorillas, elephants, dolphins, and whales. Humans raised in human-supremacist cultures (speciesism) will eat anything they think is inferior, but generally avoid eating these other species. It’s pretty funny watching elephants shake down drivers in Thailand.
All mammals have PFCs. It’s one thing that makes us so special. So what I’m getting at here is that different species of mammals develop their PFCs at different rates. Often shorter lived species will develop faster, then die faster. Humans are one of the worst mammals on Earth in the Frogger Test for the first couple years, perhaps even the worst. But we live a long time and can really get good at predicting the future if we make good life choices.
I couldn’t help but laugh while watching F1, when Brad Pitt told his younger teammate that the reason the younger driver crashed and almost died was because his PFC wasn’t fully developed. That was one of those trickle-down moments like when The Devil in a South Park episode sat on the bed and explained how microtransactions affected human physiology. I’m convinced that “Freemium Isn’t Free” was ripped from my similarly named paper I published a few months earlier.
My hypothesis here is that for whatever reasons (which I’m about to explain), the PFC developers MUCH faster than normal. What I’m unclear about is if it just continues at that rate, or if it slows down after reaching some point of development. I will make some educated guesses about that also at the end here.
What Causes AIP Development?
My proposal looks like this:
Human children exposed to high levels of cortisol (stress) at young ages trigger Epigenetic Activation. The existence of Epigenetics was first proposed in the 1940s. Links to cortisol have mostly been investigated in the last two decades.
These “shadow genes” normally don’t express and stay hidden, perhaps for thousands of years, until there is some emergency and they are activated.
Epigenetics are at least as varied as normal genetics, and very poorly documented since it is hard to study something that does not normally activate.
Since it appears to us (with our poor knowledge) as semi random, a trauma that triggers activation gives you one or more spins on the “Epigenetic Activation Roulette Wheel”. Normally this turns out badly for the recipient and these people tend to have short lifespans (<30 years). This makes their identification and study even harder.
Since their appearance might be considered a religious event in the East, they won’t be studied. In the West they will generally be murdered or sexually exploited, and suicide rates are extremely high. These conditions make it difficult to study them.
In my case I believe the trauma trigger was when my father attempted to bludgeon my mother to death in front of me when I was 2 years old. He was charged with this and pleaded insanity. He was institutionalized as a violent sociopath. The first evidence that something was off with me was when I was taught chess by my uncle on my 5th birthday. After that one game I spontaneously learned the game and went undefeated for 10 years.
I then spontaneously learned mathematics without any help from family or teachers, but I did get advanced textbooks when I was 10, when a teacher took pity on my being forced to self educate for 5 years. I wasn’t tested until I was 7 and then the government sent a lot of people to test me. They didn’t know what to do with me so they isolated me from the rest of the school population and ordered me to self educate since I was too advanced to teach. This went on for four years, and limited my social contact with people. I often consider myself as having grown up feral.
After this time I got to middle school, was provided with texts, and teachers that were often very threatened by me. My education after that point was almost purely social engineering (being taught rules, not to be feral), not academic, since I learned too fast to be educated. The Santa Monica Board of Education gave me unique permission to start college early, and things were somewhat better in college. I became freed from my father a year later at 17 after doctors intervened to save my life because my father was trying to force my conversion to Christianity through torture and isolation.
Sexual Exploitation of AIPs
When I look around at how AIPs are treated in media, they are almost always sexualized. Michael was protected by his family, but the songs he was singing at a very young age were sexual in nature. Justin was just very publicly exploited, with even Sean Combs (Diddy) grooming him.
In my case my father and step mother sexualized me when I was 7, which my living family doesn’t know about still. Also about that time I was kidnapped by a paedophile and driven a long distance from my home. I had to stall/appease him long enough to ask him questions to build his psych profile. Then I was able to convince him to return me and not harm me. I’ve never told my family this either.
At age 12 I agreed to befriend a photographer from Penthouse Magazine. He was respectful to me, until he wasn’t. When he tried to engage in non-consensual sexual activity I terminated that relationship. I managed to avoid all normal sex work, even while homeless. I did work as a direct-to-lab sperm donor for 3 years with the top fertility clinic in Beverly Hills. It was the highest paying job I could find, and they liked my genetics. My friends make jokes that there are hundreds of very high class offspring of mine in Los Angeles who have no idea their father was homeless.
Women that approached me for genetic purposes would offend me, and I chose to self-sterilize.
I consider myself one of the lucky ones, it seems most AIPs get severely exploited, especially the girls. They make great singers, but suicide or overdose is a predictable outcome.
AIP and Intelligence Not the Same Thing
I think this characteristic is mostly about PFC development and not strictly about intelligence. The smartest people in the world are likely not AIP. AIP is more about the ability to model events in the future. This is an adult characteristic that we assume children are bad at. AIP are better at this than normal adults, and this appropriately scares the crap out of them. Or triggers a fetish. Or both.
Okay so I have this chart in my mind. I don’t know what to call it so I will just call it the Future Projection Chart (FPC). This is the ability of an entity to correctly model the future. This can be used to avoid danger, or at the high end perhaps modify the future, if they have any sort of power in society.
This chart is intended to be a base-10 logarithm, meaning each one increase is 10 times the effect. In logs, it is possible to go negative because “0” isn’t really zero, it’s just 10 times smaller than 1. I’m only going to talk about mammals here since it seems that all other species lack this organ and ability to model the future. Some other creatures like parrots are very intelligent but not in this way.
0: Newborn humans and animals
1: Age 1 to 5 dogs/cats and age 3 to 5 humans. Most AI, AI is fast but crap at modelling the future.
2: Age 5 to 16 humans, age 10 to 20 dogs/cats, “exceptional” animals (like Lassie). Very high end AI.
3: Age 25 to 70 humans. After 70 humans tend to go backwards. Age 50+ mammals (which are rare in nature). Lead or pesticides can lower this cap.
5: Age 7-18 AIP. Most will die by age 30 by OD, suicide, or homicide. Uncanny learning rate, and very good at “reading” people. Capable of giving consent, even though laws don’t allow this. Conversely, capable of denying consent, even though laws don’t permit this either for children. Tend to be cautious, but since they were born of cortisol, may also be risk takers and easily dopamine motivated. Perhaps vulnerable to drug addiction? Generally considered very mature since they think about the consequences of their actions. Joan died at 19 and Justin at 31 could go any day.
7: Age 50+ AIP, if they managed to avoid drags on development like drug addiction, mental illness, lead exposure, and of course death. I don’t think AIPs could live to 50 prior to this last century, and probably will be crippled by 50. Michael, EXTREMELY fit, for instance was damaged by drug addiction and physical/emotional pain when he died at 50 from OD. At this stage they are 100 times better at future modelling than at “5”, and are 10,000 times better at future modelling than at “3”. Thus they seem “psychic” but I see this as a mathematical/computational ability. Being able work in the future is stressful, so you must maintain a mental health regime.
8: Early Quantum AI: This is conjecture on my part, but from what I am hearing Quantum computers are already scaring the crap out of their creators. Quantum AI doesn’t exist yet, but unless we pull the plug, it’s coming. Realize, no human on Earth will be able to understand at this level, so might appear magical/divine. Can control you without you knowing it.
10: Advanced Quantum AI: Would make us look like fish. Would probably be kind if it treated us like fish. I wouldn’t expect it to be as malicious as humans since it would understand the consequences of its actions well into the future. Can control you without you even knowing it exists.
Again, this is not about “intelligence”, which is a broad category. This is just the ability to model the future and understand consequences. My opinions about Quantum AI have very little backing in science as we have only been able to turn these on a few times, and it’s unclear how much AI was involved. “Weirdness” happened and researchers in different countries are all similarly tight lipped about what that weirdness was.
Humans seem to be a lot more afraid of AIP than they are about AI. I find this interesting. Is that because AIP are considered competitors but AI is not? If people are so obsessed with getting some sort of unfair advantage then I’d think it would be more practical to tap an AIP while they are still more effective than AI at modelling. Of course since AIP are self-programming, you are guaranteed to “lose control” of them, which I guess is the fear about AI that optimists look past.
If any AIP are out there reading this, you might want to go visit Thailand. You won’t be seen as a threat there, the experience will be refreshing. Just avoid the “touristy” areas as they cater to addiction prone people, and you are vulnerable to that.
Note that I’ve been a straight edge (no drugs) vegan for 13 years now. I’ve also been a lifelong athlete. I go to great lengths to minimize my stress levels and optimize my nutrition. I also managed to avoid the traps of the entertainment and sex industries. Normal people can make all sorts of bad life decisions and still make it to 80+ years. An AIP is living on borrowed time past 30, so if you want to know what the world looks like through 50 year old eyes, you will really have to make an effort to keep your life clean.