Willingness to learn or willingness to jump through meaningless hoops?
I disagree with earlier posts about boys being smarter though. Girls are smart too, but their motivations are often a little bit different. The AC at the top seems like someone who tries to measure everyone else in terms of his own self-image and can't recognize other types of intelligence.
I cannot imagine how this guys boss is ok with checkins like what the poster is describing..
If you write code that nobody else can deal with, you gain more leverage in a project, and so does your manager by extension. True it hurts the product, but it doesn't hurt your team relative to other teams if there is more than one. In theory there should be a manager higher up who cares, but in practice his time is more effectively spent in PowerPoint competitions with other managers, not enforcing coding standards. From what I've seen, this is a prevalent pattern at most companies, not just at a few dysfunctional outliers.
Reminds me of a picture I saw in The Economist a few years ago of Buddhist monks in Korea rioting with clubs.
Despite the Dali Lama's successful Holywood PR compaign, Tibetan Buddhism was a corrupt theocratic protection racket before the Chinese invaded.
Paganism is harder to compare, because it's more of a vaguely defined counter-culture style than a religion with an organization or a theology. But if we count historic so-called 'pagan' religions then I'd say that human sacrifice is a pretty serious skeleton, if a few hundred years is 'recent' enough. Most of Christianity's worst abuses stopped that log ago also.
Animism is messed up also. And of course Hinduism had the caste system, among other evils, many still persistent. And atheism had the genocides in Cambodia, China, and Ukraine, if we want to include anti-theistic thought systems.
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are bad too, but putting other more 'exotic' religions on a higher plane seems to me to require unfamiliarity of their actual features, or at least selective unfamiliarity.
I think if you want to learn anything definite about god/providence/spirit you have to fixate less on the fact that all religions and all 'alternative' religious teachings are mostly nonsense. Yeah I know it's maddening that people would just make all that shit up and call it 'truth', but we can't fix them. In my experience you can find out something for yourself though, if you are patient and work at it.
I think it's worth drawing addition attention to the predatory nature of the Christian Science theology. It's not just that they believe in 'mind over matter', which can be a defensible position if sensibly qualified. They set it up so that top church members grow rich from the fear and suffering that their theology causes among their followers. When you're seriously sick, believing that the cause of your sickness is your faith in doctors, they'll pray for you, but for a fee. Ostensibly the fee is a 'gift', but the church even has standard rates per prayer 'treatment'. Becoming wealthy through faith is also a core part of their teaching though - belief in limitation is what stands between you and 'abundance'. So through that lens, the I'll-gotten wealth of top members is evidence of their righteousness.
Christian Science is deeply anti-science. To quote their founder, 'matter is error'. She taught that the only thing that stands between what you and you want is the belief that nature is anything other than a mistake. With that outlook it makes no sense to study how nature works, the only thing that matters is holy will.
Nobody can embrace a theology that is that deeply and starkly at odds with reality without being conflicted. So of course there will be Christian Scientists who are not wholly against science. But their teaching is diametrically against science, as well as being immoral. I think the fact that they choose to call their outlook 'scientific' says more about how dishonest or brainwashed they are than it says about their regard for science. But then L. Ron Hubbard used the word science a lot also.
Though I suppose the decoy idea makes sense for avoiding being eaten by birds. In which case this isn't the only species of spider that does that, there is at least one more in North America.
How do they know that's a decoy? I've seen other spiders that put stuff in their web. I remember a big black and yellow spider in the garden when I was a kid that had something similar. I speculated that it was there to help prevent birds from flying into it and destroying the web. In this case, the spidery appearance of the junk in the web appears to follow from the fact that the junk has been stuck to the strands of the web, which radiate out from the center much like the legs of a spider.
OK. I mean both, and can give different kinds of examples.
In Patanjali's yoga sutras, we're told that we can obtain definite knowledge on subjects through contemplation. This contrasts to the modern method of reasoning about sensate experience, performing experiments, and checking results. As I see it, that belief amounts to a kind of appeal to authority, an 'inner' authority, corroborated by the authority historically accepted religious teachers. So its a self-reinforcing belief system, and when they're wrong about stuff they're not very good about recognizing it and correcting it. So I'd write it all off as bullshit. Trouble is, I thought about this stuff with an open mind for about five years before I recognized it was largely bullshit, and it changed me somehow. Section III of the sutras describe mystic powers that a person can supposedly obtain through mental control. I have some of that now, not enough that I can prove it in a rigorous, publishable scientific sense, but enough to produce sufficiently objective results to know that I'm not delusional or seeing patterns where there aren't any. One aspect of this involves some kind of extra-sensory information about things that will happen, and its not information that can be extrapolated from past experience. One example I sometimes give is I dreamed of the airplane bird-strike and landing on the Hudson river during a nap a few hours before it happened, and I e-mailed the dream to someone before the event occurred. For the past several years this kind of thing happens to me almost daily, but usually not in relation to public events. And often the subjective or metaphorical aspect is strong enough that it doesn't sound very convincing to a skeptic. For example, on the morning of the school massacre last week, I woke up with the words "I hunt, therefore I am" in my head, from the song "Of Wolf and Man" from ~1990. At that moment I felt that I'm unhappy in life because I'm not true to my nature, which is to kill. Later in the day I recoiled from the predatory feeling after finding out what happened in Connecticut. That experience, having felt that aggression first, then its consequence, changed me a little bit in a way that I would not have changed otherwise. This subjective aspect of the experience is more valuable to me than something more objective like predicting a train wreck, because I can do something with it that makes a small difference. You can look at yourself and believe that you should be better than you are, but that only goes so far. When you feel and understand what something is in the same part of yourself that is that way, then you can move something.
I know that many other people have these kinds of experiences also. But usually they're prone to partially fabricating their experiences, or drawing unsupportable conclusions from them, and so are viewed as untrustworthy. Or they're more scientific and objective and keep their mouths shut because they don't want to be considered crazy. And a lot of people just ignore stuff that they don't know how to process, and don't explore such subjects enough to open the door very much to start with.
Second example: Gospel of Thomas, which the next poster quoted from. It contains a lot of cryptic stuff about reconciling and integrating the masculine and feminine parts of one's psyche. And it states that very radical results follow. The 'experts' mostly interpret this as advocating some kind of asceticism, and maybe that's even what it meant to the people who wrote it. But that's not what it means to me at all. I guess this is similar to the jnana yoga example. I think that the vision of escaping nature, which is central to Buddhism and similar Vedic doctrines, is wrong, and that the standard doctrine of karma is largely wrong. But if you do this thing of developing the capacity to feel, and relating that capacity to your will and other aspects of your mind, and not shrinking away from the difficult things you find out about yourself, it does do something significant
It might be worth at least skimming a translation of the scrolls before forming a strong opinion about their content and value.
Yeah I know what site this is, and I'm not new here.
Something I think is worth keeping in mind....Just as there is ignorance now that rivals ancient ignorance, there was also intelligence in ancient times that rivals the best the modern world has to offer. Though its true that religious writings are largely fiction, a lot of very intelligent people worked on them, and there is significant understanding mixed in unevenly with the nonsense.
Modern academics are very good at understanding subjects where the same observations consistently yield the same statistical distribution of results. They're even better at studying things that can be perturbed in a controlled way, and dynamics that can be modeled well mathematically. They're generally very bad at understanding anything else. Many go so far as to assert that if a phenomena can't be modeled in a predictive way then for practical purposes it doesn't even exist. In this manner they ignore everything they're not good at solving. In my experience some ancient scriptures describe discoverably real aspects of life that modern experts are mostly ignorant of.
I didn't find much of interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but a lot of that is just me personally, it doesn't mean there's nothing there for anyone. Other old writings such as in the Nag Hammadi discovery have a lot of interesting content though, notwithstanding that they're not trustworthy as standards of truth. And I don't mean interesting from a historical perspective, I mean there is insight there that can not be found elsewhere.
I think the demographic and economic differences between the two countries dwarf the differences in laws relating to firearms.
I'm not saying this pro or against gun control laws, just pointing out how misleading it is to compare the two countries without attempting to account for that.
I'm not a global warming skeptic. But having done grant research for many years, I can say that yes, the imperative to keep the money flowing tremendously skews science. Its not a conspiracy so much as thousands of individual choices about what to look at and what not to look at for the sake of the next grant cycle. But the end result is much the same. A science illiterate person who understands this can't tell who to trust. Similar situation with evolution. The science is really, really solid, and the counter-arguments are complete bunk. But a non-expert can't always evaluate that. And although its true that a person can't make much of a living as a scientist, its usually easier to win government research money than to find funding from a private company. Private companies just aren't spending money on research in most fields, and where they are its often not being spread around as widely.
Its true of course that skeptics' views on this sort of thing are skewed by dishonest selfishness and stupidity: its OK to trash the planet because Jesus will come fix it all for us. Global warming aside, it astounds me that a valuable resource has been accumulating for a half billion years and 'conservatives' want to pump it all out and burn it in a couple hundred. And pumping water and toxic chemicals into the ground to shatter the rock is to me twice again as stupid. That's what's going to happen though, no matter who is in charge. Oil companies have done pretty well under Obama. Best case scenario for people on the left is to use global warming as a pretext for steering investment money in a healthier direction. But its also true that some of that amounts to a power grab. Its not as if anything is actually going to be done about the global warming problem, the problem is too big. Its kind of like bailing out a flooded ship with a teaspoon. Unlike with other easier kinds of pollutant problems, a little bit of effort doesn't help much.
Physicists tend not to speculate about things that can't be rigorously pinned down with math or in a lab experiment. At least not publicly. Non-physicists generally don't know what they're talking about when they discuss physics. And all people tend to overlook or dismiss experiential data points that lie outside of their existing mental models of how the world works - they don't know what to do with it.
Attempts I've seen to explain or lend credibility to religious or paranormal phenomena in terms of 'modern physics' are clearly mostly nonsense. I have unusual but recurring and objectively verifiable experiences that I've been trying to make sense of, and I'd sort of concluded that they are completely outside of what can be accounted for by existing scientific theories. More recently I'm not so sure though. If this doesn't sound too vague and flaky to you, and you're interested in kicking around some ideas offline, I'm interested in doing that.
When you force someone to work in support of an evil system, you set him at war with himself. He wants to work hard, love the fruit of his labor, and care for his family. But he also hates what he's supporting, and consequently hates what he's doing, and eventually hates himself. How can he not? Every day it takes an honorable and capable man, already imperfect like everyone else, and drives him toward becoming someone just a little bit more insolent and slothful. Of course he is responsible to fight against the evil in his heart. But its not a fair fight, his very ability to fight for what is right is what has been assaulted. Then after you've worn him down this way for 400 years, or for a half billion, in one way or another (we're all human), its his fault if he can't instantly spring into angelic perfection as if it never happened? Suddenly its all a "choice"? This is bullshit. I've experienced both sides of this, and its bullshit. Yes the first thing he needs back is his strength of character, and bankrolling his life or making excuses for him isn't going to give him that. He has to pull himself up, nobody else can do it for him. But at the same time, pretending that his condition is primarily his doing because there is no longer significant white racism, that its his moral failure, is just wrong.
If it looks to you like black culture is doing more damage than white racism, I won't argue with that. I'm not going to deny the reality of what someone else can see, and I'm not in a good position to judge which of two diseases is worse. I was just trying to point out this other side too, what I see.
I recognize that we are all the same, even though every individual is also a little bit unique, and even though there are relationships between groups of individuals. I agree that everyone deserves a chance to aspire to what they want to aspire to, without being told that they can't because they belong to the wrong group.
I do feel some anti-black hatred in my heart, and emote some of it by reflex. Where it comes from I don't know. I wasn't taught it by my parents or my peers, and I haven't been significantly harmed by black people in my life. Maybe I'm psychically picking it up from other people, or maybe its an instinct for 'us' to survive at the expense of 'them'. Maybe I've created it myself in response to other analogous experiences, trying to do to others what has been done to me.
I won't apologize for the honesty of my perceptions. But certainly my perceptions are not perfect, not complete. If I've harmed anyone by a 'soft bigotry of low expectations', I am sincerely sorry, just as I'm sorry for where I've expected too much. And where I've done real harm by being too open and honest, I'm sorry for that also.
Identity is a subtle and fluid thing to me, like a big ever-changing fractal, not defined in terms of any group that I'm a part of, but not defined exclusively by my own 'personaI' collection of nerve responses either. I am an individual, but at the same time tribe is not nothing to me, spirit is not nothing to me. I take some responsibility for the racial hatred I feel, irrespective of its origin. And its utterly wrong and unjustified, however great or little it may be.
To whatever extent I have wronged you, or 'disliked' you rather than giving you the respect and love that all people deserve, I am truly sorry. Someday I will atone for it if I can, I swear. Maybe words like love and atonement are too personally intimate, too presumptuous, or too pretentiously dramatic. But I can't think of another way to say what I really feel.
Cultures are voluntary, not racial, and can be changed.
Of course cultures are to a very large extent not racial. As stated, your position though is that genetics have absolutely no impact on human characteristics aside from outward appearance. Or else that non-superficial hereditary differences between individuals always perfectly average out between groups which developed substantially in isolation from each other under different conditions. Maintaining either proposition requires denying almost everything that is scientifically known about biology.
You say our economics are built around the values of 'non-black' people. Other than racism, there is no basis to that statement.
Aside from things like skin color and hair curliness, I don't presume to know what characteristics of black people are passed down genetically and which are passed down or imposed socially. Certainly there is a complex and subtle interaction. Since I can't completely separate the two, and neither can anyone else, when most people say 'black' they mean something that includes both genetic and cultural heritage. Of course its an over-generalization, there being huge differences between different groups of black people, and huge differences between individuals within any particular group. And a downside of course is that the use of the word 'black' this way seems to imply that differences are immutably tied to skin color, even when they are mostly historical and cultural. Though its also an imperfect phrase, I'll call them African Americans, since this is the context of the discussion of black and white racism, and I want to be clear that I'm including all kinds of cultural differences including those which are not connected in any direct way to skin color.
Suppose that all African American characteristics are entirely a matter of nurture and have absolutely nothing to do with genetics. Its remains true that culture is not entirely a matter of choice. It is shaped by the demands of circumstance, and there is a huge amount of experiential inertia that can't just be indoctrinated away. If someone uses where they came from and who they have been so far as an excuse, then they're not being fair to themselves or to their alleged persecutors. But its not being fair to them to say that its entirely a matter of 'choice' either. I am who I am, for a multiplicity of interrelated reasons, and I want a fair chance. And no, your 'cultural' values do not give me a fair chance. To a large extent they are hurdles designed for other kinds of people to be able to clear them. They do not look to who I am and see what I can contribute, and do not give me a fair chance to prove it in 'the market' either. If someone is especially good at organizing and memorizing facts, they equate this with intelligence and competence, and design tests to identify and reward people who are like themselves. Or if they're not good at these things, they make a fetish of creativity and problem solving instead, and issue and respect credentials based on that. Add up this kind of behavior across a large group, and you get a systematic bias against other groups, whether you admit its there or not. Calling the recognition of this 'racism' doesn't make it less true.
Indians, asians, etc, have no problems, but black people do?
Indians in America are mostly from relatively privileged (upper caste) families, and came to America for graduate school or other professional pursuits. They suffer racism, but you can't reasonably compare them to African Americans who are descended from slaves. Transport an Indian slum intact to America and then you'll have a better comparison. Ethnic neighborhoods populated substantially by refugees, such as the one I live in, are in many ways a lot more like African American neighborhoods.
Native American's have arguably been wronged even worse than African Americans, and in many ways have equal or worse problems. Those p
When white people hate black people, the people who are harmed the most by it are black people.
When black people hate white people, the people who are harmed the most by it are black people.
In the US there are more white people than black people and the white people have more power. The situation is not symmetric.
For now, the 'specific type' of racism that was measured is still important in a way that the others aren't, even if the others are important also. Soon white people will be a minority, but then black racism still won't be a large threat to white people, it will be asian and hispanic racism, or the absence of it, that affects them primarily.
I agree that racism is a better term than reverse racism. But its BS when people (not necessarily you) bemoan the fact that black racism isn't treated like white racism. Likewise for when people complain of "class warfare" when rich people are criticized for abusing the power that money gives them. (When a poor person thinks that rich people should pay more taxes, and politicians pander to that, it doesn't harm the rich person in anything like the way the poor person is harmed by the self serving actions of the rich person. Getting laid off to increase the quarterly earnings of an already profitable company, for instance, is a lot worse than a multi-millionaire having to pay 20% capital gains tax instead of 15%. The argument is made that higher capital gains taxes would hurt poor people because it discourages investment. This ignores the fact that 'investment' activity is often more parasitic in nature rather than economically constructive. But even supposing the argument is valid, it still illustrates the asymmetry - its the poor person who suffers in both cases. This doesn't imply that rich people are 'worse' than poor people, or that poor people would be any kinder if their roles were reversed. But it does mean that when you're successful, the wealth you acquire gives you more power to affect other people, and you're responsible for what you do with that.)
I consider myself to be racist, and its something I'm not entirely ashamed of. I don't think that cultures are in every sense equivalent, and I don't think that all kinds of intelligence are uniformly distributed across genetic groups. Its BS when black people act like their worst stereotypes then complain of racism when they get criticized for it. But its worse to use even real weaknesses and shortcomings of other people as an excuse to unjustly abuse and exploit them when you have the power to do that. From where I stand, white people who try to draw an equivalence between black and white racism generally don't see anything like the truth about how grievously black people have been fucked over by white people. And I'm not just talking about Jim Crow, that affected many still-living black people. Our entire social and economic order is still to a very large extent built around the values and strengths of non-black people. Its not being 'fair' when you define virtue in terms of your own best advantages then punish others for falling short by that standard.
I hate when bullshit like this gets modded up. Do you also take the Religious Right's culture into context, and implore others to sympathize? Do you also take the racist rural white culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?
I think these are both good examples. Americans outside the religious right mostly do not understand the religious right, and see only a caricature of it. Likewise for rural racists. I'm strongly against both the religious right and against white racists. However, I still think its worth trying to see them for what they are, so as to deal with them more realistically, rather than attributing characteristics to them that they don't actually have.
Of course people who try to 'explain' China are going to be annoyingly wrong about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean its not worth trying to understand better anyway.
I used to work in the drone/surveillance/defense industry. I left it, at some sacrifice, because it became clear to me that it was wrong. My Chinese friends and family had no arguments against my views about what that industry is, but all argued against my actually doing something about my part in it. To them, financial advantages for one's own family always trump all other considerations. I realize that Chinese people I know are not a representative sample of Chinese people in China. And I see Americans of European descent to be self-serving, amoral, and cowardly in a similar sort of way. But a significant minority of white Americans at least understand what I did, whereas I haven't interacted with a Chinese person who seems to understand at all.
There's a difference between resenting censorship and actually being willing to do what it takes to change it. And it appears to me that Chinese reflexes about harmony and pragmatism do partially account for why there is censorship, even though there are a lot of other reasons also.
Sadly, I don't think modern American's have enough of what it takes to fight for certain kinds of civil liberties either. I think we're where we are mostly for historical reasons, and as we do loose our freedom there isn't much will to get it back.
My understanding has been that axis of rotation being almost in the elliptic plane is more stable, for a planet with those parameters, and it would have slowly moved into that orientation itself. The earth would do this also but its stabilized by the moon. The moon is slowly getting further away though, and the earth is expected to eventually enter a chaotic period where the axis of rotation wanders around chaotically before finally settling in the elliptic plane. By then we'll already be toast from the increased luminosity of the sun though.
From what I've seen there are significant cultural differences among Asians also. My neighborhood is almost 100% Vietnamese, mostly people who came over after the war. Academics are valued, but not anything like it is in Chinese neighborhoods populated largely by people who came here for graduate school.
I know this is racist, so I'll get flamed for this for sure if anyone even reads it, but I also think genetic differences account for some differences between Asians and white Americans. From infancy my kids, who are half white, behave differently from their Chinese peers, even though they speak Chinese and are raised very similarly. I think most of these differences have to do with the specific genes of my family, and won't hold true across populations in general, but I expect some of it will a little bit. I think part of the reason parenting methods are different is they are adapted to the children, not the other way around. Its true that if you take a person of any race and put them in another culture, they will adapt that culture. I used to have a cat that would meow at cars and crap in the lawn, because it was raised with dogs. But that doesn't mean that the cultures of large populations don't drift in the directions they do partially for genetic reasons, even if those reasons are small compared to other factors.
My house is built on layers of rock containing some amazingly well preserved ~400M year old fossils, and there appears to be very little water because the iron in the clay is not rusted, making it bright blue instead of brown. It is brown however where the rocks have been cracked and water can get through.
How long before the citizens of the world wake up to the way in which their governments are colluding with certain big business interests to disadvantage the majority of people?
As I see it, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of people are as selfish and inclined to abuse power as those who currently have power. They can't successfully resist the abuse because they're quick to sell each other out and grab rewards for themselves as soon as they get enough power to do anything. Or they just don't bother to follow through, because they're not actually willing to risk their own position and advantage in order to do anything, notwithstanding their talk and posturing.
Surely, in this age of technology, we can do more than simply voice our disgust on forums like this?
I don't think we can. To create a more moral political and economic order, people would have to start by being honest about their own behavior, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Willingness to learn or willingness to jump through meaningless hoops?
I disagree with earlier posts about boys being smarter though. Girls are smart too, but their motivations are often a little bit different. The AC at the top seems like someone who tries to measure everyone else in terms of his own self-image and can't recognize other types of intelligence.
I cannot imagine how this guys boss is ok with checkins like what the poster is describing..
If you write code that nobody else can deal with, you gain more leverage in a project, and so does your manager by extension. True it hurts the product, but it doesn't hurt your team relative to other teams if there is more than one. In theory there should be a manager higher up who cares, but in practice his time is more effectively spent in PowerPoint competitions with other managers, not enforcing coding standards. From what I've seen, this is a prevalent pattern at most companies, not just at a few dysfunctional outliers.
Reminds me of a picture I saw in The Economist a few years ago of Buddhist monks in Korea rioting with clubs.
Despite the Dali Lama's successful Holywood PR compaign, Tibetan Buddhism was a corrupt theocratic protection racket before the Chinese invaded.
Paganism is harder to compare, because it's more of a vaguely defined counter-culture style than a religion with an organization or a theology. But if we count historic so-called 'pagan' religions then I'd say that human sacrifice is a pretty serious skeleton, if a few hundred years is 'recent' enough. Most of Christianity's worst abuses stopped that log ago also.
Animism is messed up also. And of course Hinduism had the caste system, among other evils, many still persistent. And atheism had the genocides in Cambodia, China, and Ukraine, if we want to include anti-theistic thought systems.
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are bad too, but putting other more 'exotic' religions on a higher plane seems to me to require unfamiliarity of their actual features, or at least selective unfamiliarity.
I think if you want to learn anything definite about god/providence/spirit you have to fixate less on the fact that all religions and all 'alternative' religious teachings are mostly nonsense. Yeah I know it's maddening that people would just make all that shit up and call it 'truth', but we can't fix them. In my experience you can find out something for yourself though, if you are patient and work at it.
I think it's worth drawing addition attention to the predatory nature of the Christian Science theology. It's not just that they believe in 'mind over matter', which can be a defensible position if sensibly qualified. They set it up so that top church members grow rich from the fear and suffering that their theology causes among their followers. When you're seriously sick, believing that the cause of your sickness is your faith in doctors, they'll pray for you, but for a fee. Ostensibly the fee is a 'gift', but the church even has standard rates per prayer 'treatment'. Becoming wealthy through faith is also a core part of their teaching though - belief in limitation is what stands between you and 'abundance'. So through that lens, the I'll-gotten wealth of top members is evidence of their righteousness.
Christian Science is deeply anti-science. To quote their founder, 'matter is error'. She taught that the only thing that stands between what you and you want is the belief that nature is anything other than a mistake. With that outlook it makes no sense to study how nature works, the only thing that matters is holy will.
Nobody can embrace a theology that is that deeply and starkly at odds with reality without being conflicted. So of course there will be Christian Scientists who are not wholly against science. But their teaching is diametrically against science, as well as being immoral. I think the fact that they choose to call their outlook 'scientific' says more about how dishonest or brainwashed they are than it says about their regard for science. But then L. Ron Hubbard used the word science a lot also.
His parents were rich.
Though I suppose the decoy idea makes sense for avoiding being eaten by birds. In which case this isn't the only species of spider that does that, there is at least one more in North America.
How do they know that's a decoy? I've seen other spiders that put stuff in their web. I remember a big black and yellow spider in the garden when I was a kid that had something similar. I speculated that it was there to help prevent birds from flying into it and destroying the web. In this case, the spidery appearance of the junk in the web appears to follow from the fact that the junk has been stuck to the strands of the web, which radiate out from the center much like the legs of a spider.
OK. I mean both, and can give different kinds of examples.
In Patanjali's yoga sutras, we're told that we can obtain definite knowledge on subjects through contemplation. This contrasts to the modern method of reasoning about sensate experience, performing experiments, and checking results. As I see it, that belief amounts to a kind of appeal to authority, an 'inner' authority, corroborated by the authority historically accepted religious teachers. So its a self-reinforcing belief system, and when they're wrong about stuff they're not very good about recognizing it and correcting it. So I'd write it all off as bullshit. Trouble is, I thought about this stuff with an open mind for about five years before I recognized it was largely bullshit, and it changed me somehow. Section III of the sutras describe mystic powers that a person can supposedly obtain through mental control. I have some of that now, not enough that I can prove it in a rigorous, publishable scientific sense, but enough to produce sufficiently objective results to know that I'm not delusional or seeing patterns where there aren't any. One aspect of this involves some kind of extra-sensory information about things that will happen, and its not information that can be extrapolated from past experience. One example I sometimes give is I dreamed of the airplane bird-strike and landing on the Hudson river during a nap a few hours before it happened, and I e-mailed the dream to someone before the event occurred. For the past several years this kind of thing happens to me almost daily, but usually not in relation to public events. And often the subjective or metaphorical aspect is strong enough that it doesn't sound very convincing to a skeptic. For example, on the morning of the school massacre last week, I woke up with the words "I hunt, therefore I am" in my head, from the song "Of Wolf and Man" from ~1990. At that moment I felt that I'm unhappy in life because I'm not true to my nature, which is to kill. Later in the day I recoiled from the predatory feeling after finding out what happened in Connecticut. That experience, having felt that aggression first, then its consequence, changed me a little bit in a way that I would not have changed otherwise. This subjective aspect of the experience is more valuable to me than something more objective like predicting a train wreck, because I can do something with it that makes a small difference. You can look at yourself and believe that you should be better than you are, but that only goes so far. When you feel and understand what something is in the same part of yourself that is that way, then you can move something.
I know that many other people have these kinds of experiences also. But usually they're prone to partially fabricating their experiences, or drawing unsupportable conclusions from them, and so are viewed as untrustworthy. Or they're more scientific and objective and keep their mouths shut because they don't want to be considered crazy. And a lot of people just ignore stuff that they don't know how to process, and don't explore such subjects enough to open the door very much to start with.
Second example: Gospel of Thomas, which the next poster quoted from. It contains a lot of cryptic stuff about reconciling and integrating the masculine and feminine parts of one's psyche. And it states that very radical results follow. The 'experts' mostly interpret this as advocating some kind of asceticism, and maybe that's even what it meant to the people who wrote it. But that's not what it means to me at all. I guess this is similar to the jnana yoga example. I think that the vision of escaping nature, which is central to Buddhism and similar Vedic doctrines, is wrong, and that the standard doctrine of karma is largely wrong. But if you do this thing of developing the capacity to feel, and relating that capacity to your will and other aspects of your mind, and not shrinking away from the difficult things you find out about yourself, it does do something significant
It might be worth at least skimming a translation of the scrolls before forming a strong opinion about their content and value.
Yeah I know what site this is, and I'm not new here.
Something I think is worth keeping in mind....Just as there is ignorance now that rivals ancient ignorance, there was also intelligence in ancient times that rivals the best the modern world has to offer. Though its true that religious writings are largely fiction, a lot of very intelligent people worked on them, and there is significant understanding mixed in unevenly with the nonsense.
Modern academics are very good at understanding subjects where the same observations consistently yield the same statistical distribution of results. They're even better at studying things that can be perturbed in a controlled way, and dynamics that can be modeled well mathematically. They're generally very bad at understanding anything else. Many go so far as to assert that if a phenomena can't be modeled in a predictive way then for practical purposes it doesn't even exist. In this manner they ignore everything they're not good at solving. In my experience some ancient scriptures describe discoverably real aspects of life that modern experts are mostly ignorant of.
I didn't find much of interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but a lot of that is just me personally, it doesn't mean there's nothing there for anyone. Other old writings such as in the Nag Hammadi discovery have a lot of interesting content though, notwithstanding that they're not trustworthy as standards of truth. And I don't mean interesting from a historical perspective, I mean there is insight there that can not be found elsewhere.
US rate is 75 times higher according to your numbers, not 7.5.
I think the demographic and economic differences between the two countries dwarf the differences in laws relating to firearms.
I'm not saying this pro or against gun control laws, just pointing out how misleading it is to compare the two countries without attempting to account for that.
I'm not a global warming skeptic. But having done grant research for many years, I can say that yes, the imperative to keep the money flowing tremendously skews science. Its not a conspiracy so much as thousands of individual choices about what to look at and what not to look at for the sake of the next grant cycle. But the end result is much the same. A science illiterate person who understands this can't tell who to trust. Similar situation with evolution. The science is really, really solid, and the counter-arguments are complete bunk. But a non-expert can't always evaluate that. And although its true that a person can't make much of a living as a scientist, its usually easier to win government research money than to find funding from a private company. Private companies just aren't spending money on research in most fields, and where they are its often not being spread around as widely.
Its true of course that skeptics' views on this sort of thing are skewed by dishonest selfishness and stupidity: its OK to trash the planet because Jesus will come fix it all for us. Global warming aside, it astounds me that a valuable resource has been accumulating for a half billion years and 'conservatives' want to pump it all out and burn it in a couple hundred. And pumping water and toxic chemicals into the ground to shatter the rock is to me twice again as stupid. That's what's going to happen though, no matter who is in charge. Oil companies have done pretty well under Obama. Best case scenario for people on the left is to use global warming as a pretext for steering investment money in a healthier direction. But its also true that some of that amounts to a power grab. Its not as if anything is actually going to be done about the global warming problem, the problem is too big. Its kind of like bailing out a flooded ship with a teaspoon. Unlike with other easier kinds of pollutant problems, a little bit of effort doesn't help much.
I've bought new Dover books within the past 10 years.
Off topic comment and question:
Physicists tend not to speculate about things that can't be rigorously pinned down with math or in a lab experiment. At least not publicly. Non-physicists generally don't know what they're talking about when they discuss physics. And all people tend to overlook or dismiss experiential data points that lie outside of their existing mental models of how the world works - they don't know what to do with it.
Attempts I've seen to explain or lend credibility to religious or paranormal phenomena in terms of 'modern physics' are clearly mostly nonsense. I have unusual but recurring and objectively verifiable experiences that I've been trying to make sense of, and I'd sort of concluded that they are completely outside of what can be accounted for by existing scientific theories. More recently I'm not so sure though. If this doesn't sound too vague and flaky to you, and you're interested in kicking around some ideas offline, I'm interested in doing that.
One other thing....
When you force someone to work in support of an evil system, you set him at war with himself. He wants to work hard, love the fruit of his labor, and care for his family. But he also hates what he's supporting, and consequently hates what he's doing, and eventually hates himself. How can he not? Every day it takes an honorable and capable man, already imperfect like everyone else, and drives him toward becoming someone just a little bit more insolent and slothful. Of course he is responsible to fight against the evil in his heart. But its not a fair fight, his very ability to fight for what is right is what has been assaulted. Then after you've worn him down this way for 400 years, or for a half billion, in one way or another (we're all human), its his fault if he can't instantly spring into angelic perfection as if it never happened? Suddenly its all a "choice"? This is bullshit. I've experienced both sides of this, and its bullshit. Yes the first thing he needs back is his strength of character, and bankrolling his life or making excuses for him isn't going to give him that. He has to pull himself up, nobody else can do it for him. But at the same time, pretending that his condition is primarily his doing because there is no longer significant white racism, that its his moral failure, is just wrong.
If it looks to you like black culture is doing more damage than white racism, I won't argue with that. I'm not going to deny the reality of what someone else can see, and I'm not in a good position to judge which of two diseases is worse. I was just trying to point out this other side too, what I see.
I recognize that we are all the same, even though every individual is also a little bit unique, and even though there are relationships between groups of individuals. I agree that everyone deserves a chance to aspire to what they want to aspire to, without being told that they can't because they belong to the wrong group.
I do feel some anti-black hatred in my heart, and emote some of it by reflex. Where it comes from I don't know. I wasn't taught it by my parents or my peers, and I haven't been significantly harmed by black people in my life. Maybe I'm psychically picking it up from other people, or maybe its an instinct for 'us' to survive at the expense of 'them'. Maybe I've created it myself in response to other analogous experiences, trying to do to others what has been done to me.
I won't apologize for the honesty of my perceptions. But certainly my perceptions are not perfect, not complete. If I've harmed anyone by a 'soft bigotry of low expectations', I am sincerely sorry, just as I'm sorry for where I've expected too much. And where I've done real harm by being too open and honest, I'm sorry for that also.
Identity is a subtle and fluid thing to me, like a big ever-changing fractal, not defined in terms of any group that I'm a part of, but not defined exclusively by my own 'personaI' collection of nerve responses either. I am an individual, but at the same time tribe is not nothing to me, spirit is not nothing to me. I take some responsibility for the racial hatred I feel, irrespective of its origin. And its utterly wrong and unjustified, however great or little it may be.
To whatever extent I have wronged you, or 'disliked' you rather than giving you the respect and love that all people deserve, I am truly sorry. Someday I will atone for it if I can, I swear. Maybe words like love and atonement are too personally intimate, too presumptuous, or too pretentiously dramatic. But I can't think of another way to say what I really feel.
Cultures are voluntary, not racial, and can be changed.
Of course cultures are to a very large extent not racial. As stated, your position though is that genetics have absolutely no impact on human characteristics aside from outward appearance. Or else that non-superficial hereditary differences between individuals always perfectly average out between groups which developed substantially in isolation from each other under different conditions. Maintaining either proposition requires denying almost everything that is scientifically known about biology.
You say our economics are built around the values of 'non-black' people. Other than racism, there is no basis to that statement.
Aside from things like skin color and hair curliness, I don't presume to know what characteristics of black people are passed down genetically and which are passed down or imposed socially. Certainly there is a complex and subtle interaction. Since I can't completely separate the two, and neither can anyone else, when most people say 'black' they mean something that includes both genetic and cultural heritage. Of course its an over-generalization, there being huge differences between different groups of black people, and huge differences between individuals within any particular group. And a downside of course is that the use of the word 'black' this way seems to imply that differences are immutably tied to skin color, even when they are mostly historical and cultural. Though its also an imperfect phrase, I'll call them African Americans, since this is the context of the discussion of black and white racism, and I want to be clear that I'm including all kinds of cultural differences including those which are not connected in any direct way to skin color.
Suppose that all African American characteristics are entirely a matter of nurture and have absolutely nothing to do with genetics. Its remains true that culture is not entirely a matter of choice. It is shaped by the demands of circumstance, and there is a huge amount of experiential inertia that can't just be indoctrinated away. If someone uses where they came from and who they have been so far as an excuse, then they're not being fair to themselves or to their alleged persecutors. But its not being fair to them to say that its entirely a matter of 'choice' either. I am who I am, for a multiplicity of interrelated reasons, and I want a fair chance. And no, your 'cultural' values do not give me a fair chance. To a large extent they are hurdles designed for other kinds of people to be able to clear them. They do not look to who I am and see what I can contribute, and do not give me a fair chance to prove it in 'the market' either. If someone is especially good at organizing and memorizing facts, they equate this with intelligence and competence, and design tests to identify and reward people who are like themselves. Or if they're not good at these things, they make a fetish of creativity and problem solving instead, and issue and respect credentials based on that. Add up this kind of behavior across a large group, and you get a systematic bias against other groups, whether you admit its there or not. Calling the recognition of this 'racism' doesn't make it less true.
Indians, asians, etc, have no problems, but black people do?
Indians in America are mostly from relatively privileged (upper caste) families, and came to America for graduate school or other professional pursuits. They suffer racism, but you can't reasonably compare them to African Americans who are descended from slaves. Transport an Indian slum intact to America and then you'll have a better comparison. Ethnic neighborhoods populated substantially by refugees, such as the one I live in, are in many ways a lot more like African American neighborhoods.
Native American's have arguably been wronged even worse than African Americans, and in many ways have equal or worse problems. Those p
When white people hate black people, the people who are harmed the most by it are black people.
When black people hate white people, the people who are harmed the most by it are black people.
In the US there are more white people than black people and the white people have more power. The situation is not symmetric.
For now, the 'specific type' of racism that was measured is still important in a way that the others aren't, even if the others are important also. Soon white people will be a minority, but then black racism still won't be a large threat to white people, it will be asian and hispanic racism, or the absence of it, that affects them primarily.
I agree that racism is a better term than reverse racism. But its BS when people (not necessarily you) bemoan the fact that black racism isn't treated like white racism. Likewise for when people complain of "class warfare" when rich people are criticized for abusing the power that money gives them. (When a poor person thinks that rich people should pay more taxes, and politicians pander to that, it doesn't harm the rich person in anything like the way the poor person is harmed by the self serving actions of the rich person. Getting laid off to increase the quarterly earnings of an already profitable company, for instance, is a lot worse than a multi-millionaire having to pay 20% capital gains tax instead of 15%. The argument is made that higher capital gains taxes would hurt poor people because it discourages investment. This ignores the fact that 'investment' activity is often more parasitic in nature rather than economically constructive. But even supposing the argument is valid, it still illustrates the asymmetry - its the poor person who suffers in both cases. This doesn't imply that rich people are 'worse' than poor people, or that poor people would be any kinder if their roles were reversed. But it does mean that when you're successful, the wealth you acquire gives you more power to affect other people, and you're responsible for what you do with that.)
I consider myself to be racist, and its something I'm not entirely ashamed of. I don't think that cultures are in every sense equivalent, and I don't think that all kinds of intelligence are uniformly distributed across genetic groups. Its BS when black people act like their worst stereotypes then complain of racism when they get criticized for it. But its worse to use even real weaknesses and shortcomings of other people as an excuse to unjustly abuse and exploit them when you have the power to do that. From where I stand, white people who try to draw an equivalence between black and white racism generally don't see anything like the truth about how grievously black people have been fucked over by white people. And I'm not just talking about Jim Crow, that affected many still-living black people. Our entire social and economic order is still to a very large extent built around the values and strengths of non-black people. Its not being 'fair' when you define virtue in terms of your own best advantages then punish others for falling short by that standard.
I hate when bullshit like this gets modded up.
Do you also take the Religious Right's culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?
Do you also take the racist rural white culture into context, and implore others to sympathize?
I think these are both good examples. Americans outside the religious right mostly do not understand the religious right, and see only a caricature of it. Likewise for rural racists. I'm strongly against both the religious right and against white racists. However, I still think its worth trying to see them for what they are, so as to deal with them more realistically, rather than attributing characteristics to them that they don't actually have.
Of course people who try to 'explain' China are going to be annoyingly wrong about a lot of things, but that doesn't mean its not worth trying to understand better anyway.
I used to work in the drone/surveillance/defense industry. I left it, at some sacrifice, because it became clear to me that it was wrong. My Chinese friends and family had no arguments against my views about what that industry is, but all argued against my actually doing something about my part in it. To them, financial advantages for one's own family always trump all other considerations. I realize that Chinese people I know are not a representative sample of Chinese people in China. And I see Americans of European descent to be self-serving, amoral, and cowardly in a similar sort of way. But a significant minority of white Americans at least understand what I did, whereas I haven't interacted with a Chinese person who seems to understand at all.
There's a difference between resenting censorship and actually being willing to do what it takes to change it. And it appears to me that Chinese reflexes about harmony and pragmatism do partially account for why there is censorship, even though there are a lot of other reasons also.
Sadly, I don't think modern American's have enough of what it takes to fight for certain kinds of civil liberties either. I think we're where we are mostly for historical reasons, and as we do loose our freedom there isn't much will to get it back.
My understanding has been that axis of rotation being almost in the elliptic plane is more stable, for a planet with those parameters, and it would have slowly moved into that orientation itself. The earth would do this also but its stabilized by the moon. The moon is slowly getting further away though, and the earth is expected to eventually enter a chaotic period where the axis of rotation wanders around chaotically before finally settling in the elliptic plane. By then we'll already be toast from the increased luminosity of the sun though.
From what I've seen there are significant cultural differences among Asians also. My neighborhood is almost 100% Vietnamese, mostly people who came over after the war. Academics are valued, but not anything like it is in Chinese neighborhoods populated largely by people who came here for graduate school.
I know this is racist, so I'll get flamed for this for sure if anyone even reads it, but I also think genetic differences account for some differences between Asians and white Americans. From infancy my kids, who are half white, behave differently from their Chinese peers, even though they speak Chinese and are raised very similarly. I think most of these differences have to do with the specific genes of my family, and won't hold true across populations in general, but I expect some of it will a little bit. I think part of the reason parenting methods are different is they are adapted to the children, not the other way around. Its true that if you take a person of any race and put them in another culture, they will adapt that culture. I used to have a cat that would meow at cars and crap in the lawn, because it was raised with dogs. But that doesn't mean that the cultures of large populations don't drift in the directions they do partially for genetic reasons, even if those reasons are small compared to other factors.
That's my favorite besides Jonah, which has the additional virtue of being very short.
Not that either is going to be of interest to someone looking to enhance their career.
My house is built on layers of rock containing some amazingly well preserved ~400M year old fossils, and there appears to be very little water because the iron in the clay is not rusted, making it bright blue instead of brown. It is brown however where the rocks have been cracked and water can get through.
How long before the citizens of the world wake up to the way in which their governments are colluding with certain big business interests to disadvantage the majority of people?
As I see it, the problem is that the overwhelming majority of people are as selfish and inclined to abuse power as those who currently have power. They can't successfully resist the abuse because they're quick to sell each other out and grab rewards for themselves as soon as they get enough power to do anything. Or they just don't bother to follow through, because they're not actually willing to risk their own position and advantage in order to do anything, notwithstanding their talk and posturing.
Surely, in this age of technology, we can do more than simply voice our disgust on forums like this?
I don't think we can. To create a more moral political and economic order, people would have to start by being honest about their own behavior, and I don't see that happening any time soon.