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Share Your Most Dangerous Idea
GabrielF writes "Every year The Edge asks over 100 top scientists and thinkers a question, and the responses are fascinating and widely quoted. This year, psychologist Steven Pinker suggested they ask "What is your most dangerous idea?" The 117 respondents include Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Daniel Dennett, Jared Diamond -- and that's just the D's! As you might expect, the submissions are brilliant and very controversial."
I shall call it "thought vehicle" or short TV. - Sounds good too.. I should patent this idea.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
I'm sorry for responding to my own post, but no argument about freedom would be complete without mentioning the "war on drugs". God forbid that people actually be "allowed" to act in ways that may not be in their own best interest. Even worse, God forbid that they might be "allowed" to decide what drugs might be in their own best interest. Yeah, if not for the war on drugs "we would have so much crime and violence" .... .... .... hmmmmmmmm.
Perhaps you should just mod me to minus infinity now to save society from the terror that such an outlandish notion would inflict.
It's always nice when someone new walks into a process that's been going on for hundreds of years and gets angry that no one sees his simple solution, even though that's where we started and we've been fixing the problems with it ever since.
In public education - everyone talks about what kind of education the kids need, and noone talks about the financial freedom lost in paying for it, or the very influence that such has on the kids.
They're too busy talking about the financial freedom lost when you have a work force of illiterates who can't add.
In social security and medicade/ medical care - everyones worried about how will we take care of the needy and elderly and noone talks about the people that need to be financially coerced to make these systems work.
And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.
In the genocide of the poor - noone would even dare mention that the best solution would be to arm them and seciure their right to bear arms first.
Genius! How could that possibly go bad? Combine this with your no-free-schooling idea and we've got ourselves a plan that just might solve everybody's problem.
my dangerous idea:
the internet has replaced the encyclopedia
it is replacing want ads, real estate agents, auctions, music companies, publishers, etc.
it will someday replace government
but hold on, there's a catch:
if the internet does this, it will do it the same way it is defeating the music industry: not through any conscience effort, but just a gradual, inevitable, unfightable erosion of relevancy by little efforts made by individuals not even consciously trying to do anything coherent
in other words, if you are actively seeking to defeat government and promote anarchy/ libertarianism/ revolution, or whatever, you are way off
because you are making a conscience effort
because if and when it happens, no one will notice it starting
just like the guys who built the original arpanet in the 1960s didn't say "hey! let's build a radically superior music distribution model that cuts out the middle man and removes the economic incentive!"
except that's exactly what they did
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As one glance at either (or both) Einstein and a person with a typical case of Down's syndrome will tell you, equal mental capacities are not uniformly available.
As one glance at either (or both) Arab women and US feminists will tell you, equal rights are not uniformly available.
As one glance at either Jeffery Dalmer (or both) and Martin Luther King will tell you, equal consideration is not uniformly available.
In summary, the very idea that "we are all created equal" is a mindless, pointless statement that speaks only to turning a blind eye to reality.
I have always thought that we should be saying that we would attempt to afford equal opportunity to our fellows at each set of choices in life, and let them make of it both what they may, and what they are capable of.
But as your premise is trivially demonstrated to be false, you should probably reformulate. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Because I'm sure you're serious, I'll do you the courtesy of taking your assertions at face value, and treat them one by one.
Cats affect their environment. This is obvious and trivial. They exhibit numerous traits that we would consider to be environmentally enlightened, from burying their waste to grooming themselves to rarely killing for sport.
Cats can conserve or destroy. They make choices about this as well. For instance, my couch has been conserved. The doorjamb to the bathroom, however, has not. I think this is amusing, and the cat knows this because I take care to demonstrate it to her. From my point of view, the doorjamb is trivial and inexpensive to replace; consequently, I am delighted with the cat's choice of claw-sharpening targets.
Cats have rules/law. Drag a laser pointer across the floor. The cat will follow and play and pounce. Drag the laser pointer across another cat. The original, playful cat will proceed to ignore the laser, even if it was in the midst of crazed play with the beam. There are rules, and one of them is you don't pounce on things that are on other cats. This, interestingly, is a very good rule. Humans can be distinguished, perhaps, by the number of very bad rules we make, but not by rulemaking itself. Any tribe of monkeys has rules, as do many other types of animals, including, as I have shown, cats.
Cats have technology. They will create nests out of raw materials, they utilize knocking your crap off the dresser in order to get your attention. They understand that burial is good for anything that will reveal their presence, and anything that is dead and rotting. Other animals use sticks to fetch ants from holes, and will fashion tools from rocks and sticks. Beavers build dams. Termites build, arguably, castles.
Cats have morals. Mothers rarely eat their young. Cats rarely eat their owners, unless the owner dies. Even then, some cats cannot overcome that predjudice, though they will eat other animals.
Cats don't have religion, near as I can tell, but that's a point in their favor from where I stand, quite seriously. Cats do, however, exhibit faith. Both at the habituation level (they expect their human to come home to them again, because so far, that's what has happened) and they expect their human to take care of them, again because that's been established; and at the abstract level — once trust has been established, many wary behaviours are discarded. This occurs in cat-cat relationships and cat-human relationships, and more rarely, between cats and other species.
We do have science and science is a very complex product of advanced thinking. I don't expect science from cats for that reason. Doesn't change my point; I specifically said we differ in degree here.
Cats also experience every emotion humans do, as well as numerous behaviours and traits we like to think of as our own. They can be both selfish and generous, loving and hateful, vicious and kind, protective and defensive, careless and careful, clever and witless, and so on for quite a long list.
My position is that when we have established a level of hubris that disallows seeing that we are one of the set of animals, we have taken a step back on the very path most of us wish to tread. I recognize it's a handy mental trick when the task at hand is the consumption of a hamburger, but that makes it no more respectable.
One final point: If most humans behaved as well as my cat does, we'd be a damn sight better off. Your statement, in light of this, is ludicrous.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You assume that government schools are teaching kids literacy and math.
I do. I know it worked in at least one case, as I'm able to read your post. Worked in a bunch of others, too.
You assume that the government is the only institution capable of providing education
I assume it's the only institution capable of doing it on a consistent basis at tiny cost to the people that can't afford it. Unless you know of a few thousand private schools that will take kids for free, we don't have much of an alternative. Homeschooling is the only possible option for people without money, but that counts on the parents being well-educated.
You ignore the terrible social effects public schools have on children (conditioning them to obedience to authority, squeltching individualism and diversity, taking away their privacy, age and skill segregation)
Oh, good heavens!
If that's the point of school, they're really not doing as well as I thought.
We don't all share your absolute faith in government
I have virtually no faith in government. It's inefficient, bloated, and corrupt.
and government is not the only model of social cooperation that we are able to comprehend.
Good for you.
that might be hard for someone to grasp who has been conditioned that the state is everything.
Dick.
[quote]And your constructive solution is then to let thousands and thousands of people either die or turn to crime? Step one, end social security. What's step two? Please answer. If you've got a way to make this work, please tell us. I really, really want to be on your side, because that's a lot of money.[/quote]
Once again, your statement has many assumptions
I made no assumptions. I want to know what happens on the second fucking day. Please fill in the gaping holes so we can properly discuss this.
You assume that Medicare is the only social structure capable of providing health care to those that need it. (In fact, there are any number of models of healthcare that we could use,
I'm listening.
You assume that Medicare somehow makes healthcare more available (instead of, say, pumping money in without increasing supply, and thus raising the price of medical care for everyone
You've calculated this in healthcare units? ("Healthies", I like to call them.)
You're thinking economics, I'm thinking child of poor parents breaks his leg.
You assume that Medicare is a sustainable, viable system.
And, for the thousandth time, I'm waiting for the plan.
"You must all send me $10,000...
The only possible response to that is, "You're an idiot." I'm sorry, but if you can't understand that taking the small amount of survivability that people have away from them is going to have negative affects, at least in the short term, you're just not that bright.
Switzerland has the lowest violent crime rate and murder rate of any industrialized nation, and have the absolute highest private ownership of firearms in the industrialized world (basicly, nearly all able bodied men have full access to military style weapons).
All able-bodied men have access to military style weapons after 17 weeks of mandatory basic training. Let's not pretend we're all nations of soldiers. And let's not compare the US to Switzerland at all, because we're very, very different.
You need to try to convince us that gun ownership is bad, not call people stupid because they don't have absolute faith in your belief system.
I would never try to convince you that gun ownership is bad because I don't think it is. I think arming the poor to combat violence is profoundly stupid. I don't know what argument you're extending to this one, but please don't assume I meant to say bad things I didn't say.
The expression "All men are created equal" comes from the 1st article of the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen", now the basis for the Universal Human Rights Declaration:
"Tous les hommes naissent et demeurent libres et egaux en droits."
"All men are born and remain free and equal in rights."
The sentence is to be understood in the context of the French Revolution, as a rejection of the concept of hereditary aristocracy.
Thomas-
...here the Libertarians have it nailed down: My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins, barring extennuating circumstances residing entirely outside of the act itself.
The Libertarians have it wrong. Swinging your fists around within inches of my nose is an act of agression. I have no way of telling whether you are just posturing or whether you intend to hurt me until after you have hurt me. Therefore, as soon as you start swinging fists close to my face my rights are violated because I have to drop everything I am doing and pay full attention in order to make certain that I don't get hurt in case I move unexpectedly or you decide to go from posturing to fighting.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
How did this get modded up? Did you even read the quote you posted?
He doesn't claim that the universe requires human interaction or observation. He's simply claiming that since humans have limited faculties, the content and scope of human understanding and knowledge is limited. In other words, there may very well be things about the universe that we will never be able to understand. It's an interesting conjecture, although I'm not sure how much I agree with it, since humans are able to aid themselves in their investigations with technology.