Q & A 2017 10 October

Hi there! I guess I'm on. My son isn't here tonight, so I'm doing this in my relatively technologically clueless manner. There's one thing I've noticed about getting older: I have kept up with computer technology pretty well, I would say. But I do find, maybe because of the demands on me in the last year, maybe I'm not stupider—it's possible.

So anyways, hi everyone! Nice to see you here. Looks like I've got the chat working. Is everything working? Looks like it! All right, so I'm going to start with some questions that people sent me.

Anyways, thank you all for being here, by the way. It's very much appreciated. It's quite remarkable, as far as I'm concerned, that you tuned in to listen to me talk with you. I definitely do appreciate it.

So I'm going to start with some of the questions that people sent me earlier, and I'll keep an eye on the YouTube chat as well. So hopefully the audio is good. What about that? How's the audio there, guys?

So now Adam W. Patterson asked me a question that got 410 votes: "I am a web software developer. Are you hiring or can I volunteer for anything? I can build anything. I can automate things. I could simply be an assistant of sorts. Thank you for your time."

Well, what I would like to say about that is, first, thank you Adam! It's much appreciated. A lot of people have volunteered their time to me and their technological expertise. As much as I'd like to make use of it, the simple truth of the matter is that I'm sufficiently overwhelmed by the complexity of my life at the moment that it's very difficult to undertake a new collaborative project with anyone.

I mean, generally speaking, before all this political—what would you call it?—before all these political events overtook my life, I was already scheduled probably about six months to a year. You know, all my time was already eaten up. And of course, the addition of everything that's happened in the last year has occupied my time to a degree that is really somewhat unimaginable.

So I just can't take on additional help, which is so strange because you think that help is help and that it would save time. But you know, it's very difficult to enter into a collaborative relationship with someone, especially if you want to give them credit and do things properly. So at the moment, I'm afraid that I can't entertain any such offers, even though I'd like to.

There may come a time in the future, especially when I'm hopefully starting to work more on this online university project. I've got a few projects to finish up before that—the new personality test, which we've just about dawdled bugs worked out of, and also the high school version of the Future Authoring program are all set up long before any of this happened.

So I have to clear them out before I can concentrate on a new project. I finished a book over the last couple of years called "Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos," which is now available, by the way, if you're interested, on Amazon for pre-order.

So anyways, this is my roundabout way of saying thank you very much, but I can't accept more help at the moment because my time is too restricted to make proper use of it.

So, um, plays Noren—how to use the results in the new personality test for progress in life? Try to compensate some sites that received fewer points. Well, at the risk of sounding self-serving, that's actually why we developed the Self Authoring Suite: to help people improve their, let's say, performance and mental health.

Now, we don't have direct evidence that it will improve personality, but I suspect that that evidence would take a very long time to accumulate. What we do know is that the Self Authoring Suite, especially the Future Authoring Suite, helps people—helps university students, for example—stay enrolled in university, increases the probability of that by about 25%, and increases grade point average by about the same.

And there's good theoretical reasons for assuming that writing is a good way of writing about yourself and about your past and about your future is a good way of catalyzing...