Citation needed. Please show me a study where someone who becomes curious about something becomes more intelligent.
Given that we're talking about development from an extremely early age, that would be illegal, but I will do my best to explain this.
Conventional thinking right now is that intelligence is primarily genetic, and while it can be influenced by environment, it is largely fixed from birth.
This is the primary reason given for the class bias seen in IQ testing. That is not, at all, conventional thinking. Read this and this. If intelligence were genetic to the extent you suggest, the children of immigrants would be incapable of integrating at the most fundamental cultural level.
Curiousity is a personality trait. Intelligence is an ability. You can be curious and stupid, or disinterested yet intelligent. One has no bearing on the other.
If you are curious about how something works, you will be more likely to figure out how it works. Once you understand how things work, you can use that understanding to interpret more situations. This includes abstract concepts. Pattern matching, abstract reasoning, and creativity all depend on the fruits of a mind knowledgeable in such things. The brain cannot function in a vacuum (as learned from Genie, along with observations of animals in factory farms), and it cannot derive new ideas from absolute nothingness, only recombine what it has experienced (this is a central hypothesis of computational creativity).
The genetic element you're identifying is a person's potential to be intelligent. That potential is meaningless until some force motivates the person to learn to use it, whether that's curiosity, school, or parenting, because we are not born with an understanding of any axioms that we can derive new concepts or thinking strategies from. These last two don't cause self-sustaining intellectual growth, leaving curiosity as the only reliable driving force for a person's development of their intelligence.
Tsk. Curiosity generates intelligence. There are other ways, of course (meeting parents' expectations, in particular), but they're not as reliable or resilient. I would argue that the developedness of Einstein's corpus callosum (which does seem to be a congenital trait) simply meant that he was better able to benefit from his curiosity and to be more satisfied and captivated by its fruits.
By moderation I don't mean being moderate in all things, only in monetary matters. Unlike the pursuit of knowledge of the universe, the accumulation of material and monetary wealth deprives others. The more extreme the wealth of one individual, the more deprivation others must suffer.
And history is full of people who realized there was nothing to stop them from enforcing a monopoly on wealth by depriving others of the opportunity to even consider its pursuit. If you're willing to impoverish others to enrich yourself, why wouldn't you take the next step and make sure it stays that way?
"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
This is otherwise known as an argument from authority. I could just as easily quote a Stoic saying Hedonists live empty, meaingless lives and accomplish nothing. But I'm not really opposed to Epicureanism as a philosophical goal, and I doubt you really hate monks all that much, so instead of citing someone else's opinion, I highly recommend you articulate your own reasoning.
I don't think that really follows from the Shaw quote; all that is required to make a change is to demand one and to have ambitions for specific improvements. The pursuit of extreme wealth isn't necessary; that's like saying you need to get a high score to complete a game; depending on the method, the two objectives may not even be both completable in a single lifetime.
I'd be wary of (a) agreeing with Marx on more than anything but the most basic notions (and even then, given that he copied a lot of garbage wholesale from Hegel, only a handful of notions are really valid) or (b) regarding the Soviet Union as an echo in any meaningful way of Marxism. In many ways the USSR was the exact opposite of what I believe needs to happen, as its power structure was completely corrupt from the beginning. (And, perhaps more to the point, it never actually achieved communism; it was really just a dysfunctional command economy.)
For what it's worth, though, a lot of these assertions can be backed up with evidence from countries with successful social welfare programs, particularly places like Denmark and Sweden. Even other English-speaking democracies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have a better track record with corruption than the United States, and I really believe this is because of a culture that values selfishness and competition to a lesser extent.
Prior to a post-scarcity society, though, I don't really think it's possible to eliminate money entirely.
I wasn't actually suggesting I did, merely that you'd missed the point of the original comment.
But it's a fun topic to ponder, so let's see. So far all I'm really sure about is:
(a) More altruism is better for the health of a society, even if it impedes technological and resource development—not absolute altruism necessarily, just more. Rapid expansion should not be a primary goal of a civilization anyway, as it risks stability.
(b) There are a lot of obstacles to altruistic behaviour in most countries currently, which can probably be improved by the availability of services that make money (and hence competition) less essential.
(c) Altruism-vs-selfishness is a deep cultural issue and is hard to reverse, but it has been accomplished before over a timespan of decades through political action and subsequent reforms.
(d) The biggest barrier to effecting such a change is, and always will be, detraction, particularly on the part of people unwilling to give up their selfishness, such as economic libertarians, but also on the part of cynics.
And yet, in Moscow, that might be a reasonable city planning decision. The workability of comments deeply depends on the signal-to-noise ratio. Incidentally, some journals have curated comments sections that are quite excellent; I don't think they're in danger like Popular Science's. Remember, today's story was prompted by fears of promoting inflation of conflict, not just worthless posts.
You missed it, the assumption in need of proof is that it is of no merit to attempt to abolish currency and that we should just worry about the necessities of our immediate survival given the current system.
Proposal: start tagging political stories with the informal fallacies they use in order to create spin. This one, for example, is a fairly clear-cut case of misleading vividness, or perhaps someone very unfamiliar with the budget jumping to conclusions.
If you didn't hear, the surveillance state is considered an essential service and is largely unaffected by the shutdown. It and the military are the bone that will be left when the rest of the government has emaciated away.
The new site changes layouts depending on the width of your browser window, actually. (And the truncation of news stories on it is much worse—about 300 characters; short enough so that about half of all summaries get cut off. And no autoloading Javascript was present in the alpha version; to read the rest of the paragraph you'd have to go to the article page. At the moment it looks like summaries are getting cut off in the laziest way possible, with a fixed vertical height that doesn't even match the line height.)
...actually that was kind of my point; that even if the legislatures are filled (by voters) with new parties, the bureaucracies will still be loyal to the Democrat and Republican parties, and moreso to each other than to any other party campaigning on a platform of breaking away from the two-party system. I agree with you that the first problem is that the legislatures are self-defending, but even if they weren't, nothing would get accomplished anyway.
Suppose, in 2016, by freak chance, the vast majority of jurisdictions in the United States elected representatives from non-mainstream parties—Libertarians, Greens, whatever else you guys have these days. Enough variety to represent every likely perspective, of course.
What do you think would happen to the president when he or she tried to fix the intelligence community? Or the military? Or, heck, even something relatively compact like the FDA? Simple: just ask Jimmy Carter. (And, I would contend, Obama five years ago, just after his first election.) Nothing would get done. The agencies, the companies, and their collective lobbyists would do all they could to undermine the elected representatives, because they themselves are partisan, right down to the core—partisan to anyone who protects or could protect their paycheques and opportunities for advancement, that is.
You cannot vote them out. You cannot even try, but even if you succeeded in voting away the names you know about, the rest would remain and stage coups. Even appointed agency directors have been defeated by the momentum, culture, and job-security-fearing mobs in these places. The rot goes all the way through, and it doesn't want to leave.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed. Please show me a study where someone who becomes curious about something becomes more intelligent.
Given that we're talking about development from an extremely early age, that would be illegal, but I will do my best to explain this.
Conventional thinking right now is that intelligence is primarily genetic, and while it can be influenced by environment, it is largely fixed from birth.
This is the primary reason given for the class bias seen in IQ testing. That is not, at all, conventional thinking. Read this and this. If intelligence were genetic to the extent you suggest, the children of immigrants would be incapable of integrating at the most fundamental cultural level.
Curiousity is a personality trait. Intelligence is an ability. You can be curious and stupid, or disinterested yet intelligent. One has no bearing on the other.
If you are curious about how something works, you will be more likely to figure out how it works. Once you understand how things work, you can use that understanding to interpret more situations. This includes abstract concepts. Pattern matching, abstract reasoning, and creativity all depend on the fruits of a mind knowledgeable in such things. The brain cannot function in a vacuum (as learned from Genie, along with observations of animals in factory farms), and it cannot derive new ideas from absolute nothingness, only recombine what it has experienced (this is a central hypothesis of computational creativity).
The genetic element you're identifying is a person's potential to be intelligent. That potential is meaningless until some force motivates the person to learn to use it, whether that's curiosity, school, or parenting, because we are not born with an understanding of any axioms that we can derive new concepts or thinking strategies from. These last two don't cause self-sustaining intellectual growth, leaving curiosity as the only reliable driving force for a person's development of their intelligence.
Tsk. Curiosity generates intelligence. There are other ways, of course (meeting parents' expectations, in particular), but they're not as reliable or resilient. I would argue that the developedness of Einstein's corpus callosum (which does seem to be a congenital trait) simply meant that he was better able to benefit from his curiosity and to be more satisfied and captivated by its fruits.
By moderation I don't mean being moderate in all things, only in monetary matters. Unlike the pursuit of knowledge of the universe, the accumulation of material and monetary wealth deprives others. The more extreme the wealth of one individual, the more deprivation others must suffer.
And history is full of people who realized there was nothing to stop them from enforcing a monopoly on wealth by depriving others of the opportunity to even consider its pursuit. If you're willing to impoverish others to enrich yourself, why wouldn't you take the next step and make sure it stays that way?
"Quotation, n: The act of repeating erroneously the words of another."
-- Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
This is otherwise known as an argument from authority. I could just as easily quote a Stoic saying Hedonists live empty, meaingless lives and accomplish nothing. But I'm not really opposed to Epicureanism as a philosophical goal, and I doubt you really hate monks all that much, so instead of citing someone else's opinion, I highly recommend you articulate your own reasoning.
I don't think that really follows from the Shaw quote; all that is required to make a change is to demand one and to have ambitions for specific improvements. The pursuit of extreme wealth isn't necessary; that's like saying you need to get a high score to complete a game; depending on the method, the two objectives may not even be both completable in a single lifetime.
I'd be wary of (a) agreeing with Marx on more than anything but the most basic notions (and even then, given that he copied a lot of garbage wholesale from Hegel, only a handful of notions are really valid) or (b) regarding the Soviet Union as an echo in any meaningful way of Marxism. In many ways the USSR was the exact opposite of what I believe needs to happen, as its power structure was completely corrupt from the beginning. (And, perhaps more to the point, it never actually achieved communism; it was really just a dysfunctional command economy.)
For what it's worth, though, a lot of these assertions can be backed up with evidence from countries with successful social welfare programs, particularly places like Denmark and Sweden. Even other English-speaking democracies like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have a better track record with corruption than the United States, and I really believe this is because of a culture that values selfishness and competition to a lesser extent.
Prior to a post-scarcity society, though, I don't really think it's possible to eliminate money entirely.
I wasn't actually suggesting I did, merely that you'd missed the point of the original comment.
But it's a fun topic to ponder, so let's see. So far all I'm really sure about is:
(a) More altruism is better for the health of a society, even if it impedes technological and resource development—not absolute altruism necessarily, just more. Rapid expansion should not be a primary goal of a civilization anyway, as it risks stability.
(b) There are a lot of obstacles to altruistic behaviour in most countries currently, which can probably be improved by the availability of services that make money (and hence competition) less essential.
(c) Altruism-vs-selfishness is a deep cultural issue and is hard to reverse, but it has been accomplished before over a timespan of decades through political action and subsequent reforms.
(d) The biggest barrier to effecting such a change is, and always will be, detraction, particularly on the part of people unwilling to give up their selfishness, such as economic libertarians, but also on the part of cynics.
Actually, conifers aren't angiosperms, so the standard modern Christmas tree doesn't qualify. (It's a narrower category than I first assumed.)
I don't think so, given that angiosperms are (all?) flowering plants. Fruits tend to require flowers first.
And yet, in Moscow, that might be a reasonable city planning decision. The workability of comments deeply depends on the signal-to-noise ratio. Incidentally, some journals have curated comments sections that are quite excellent; I don't think they're in danger like Popular Science's. Remember, today's story was prompted by fears of promoting inflation of conflict, not just worthless posts.
...and as another commenter noted, the tree was probably meant to be read as a pomegranate tree anyway. Still an angiosperm!
You missed it, the assumption in need of proof is that it is of no merit to attempt to abolish currency and that we should just worry about the necessities of our immediate survival given the current system.
Eexaa endorsed moderation as a philosophical goal, not poverty as an immediate action. Do you not understand the concept of moderation?
Proposal: start tagging political stories with the informal fallacies they use in order to create spin. This one, for example, is a fairly clear-cut case of misleading vividness, or perhaps someone very unfamiliar with the budget jumping to conclusions.
Given that the GP suggested the abolishment of currency, I'm pretty sure you're begging the question.
Note to self: take actual taxonomy course.
I think I heard that once! Oh well. Still an angiosperm.
That remains entirely open to debate.
If you didn't hear, the surveillance state is considered an essential service and is largely unaffected by the shutdown. It and the military are the bone that will be left when the rest of the government has emaciated away.
The new site changes layouts depending on the width of your browser window, actually. (And the truncation of news stories on it is much worse—about 300 characters; short enough so that about half of all summaries get cut off. And no autoloading Javascript was present in the alpha version; to read the rest of the paragraph you'd have to go to the article page. At the moment it looks like summaries are getting cut off in the laziest way possible, with a fixed vertical height that doesn't even match the line height.)
Apple trees are angiosperms.
The Tree of Knowledge is an apple tree.
Eris throws an apple in the central Discordian myth.
And outside of that, other trees feature prominently in various myths (Yggdrasil is a yew tree, tree roots resemble the FSM's noodly appendages...)
I think we have a pretty healthy respect for certain angiosperms, even if they're not outright worshipped as a group.
...actually that was kind of my point; that even if the legislatures are filled (by voters) with new parties, the bureaucracies will still be loyal to the Democrat and Republican parties, and moreso to each other than to any other party campaigning on a platform of breaking away from the two-party system. I agree with you that the first problem is that the legislatures are self-defending, but even if they weren't, nothing would get accomplished anyway.
I'm more thinking about the whole Guantanamo promise.
Suppose, in 2016, by freak chance, the vast majority of jurisdictions in the United States elected representatives from non-mainstream parties—Libertarians, Greens, whatever else you guys have these days. Enough variety to represent every likely perspective, of course.
What do you think would happen to the president when he or she tried to fix the intelligence community? Or the military? Or, heck, even something relatively compact like the FDA? Simple: just ask Jimmy Carter. (And, I would contend, Obama five years ago, just after his first election.) Nothing would get done. The agencies, the companies, and their collective lobbyists would do all they could to undermine the elected representatives, because they themselves are partisan, right down to the core—partisan to anyone who protects or could protect their paycheques and opportunities for advancement, that is.
You cannot vote them out. You cannot even try, but even if you succeeded in voting away the names you know about, the rest would remain and stage coups. Even appointed agency directors have been defeated by the momentum, culture, and job-security-fearing mobs in these places. The rot goes all the way through, and it doesn't want to leave.
Well, this sort of jives with that. Massively.