Congratulations on having been an exceptionally bright and ambitious kid. However, your advice is approximately as useful to the 99.9% of humanity who don't share your particular combination of brilliance, cojones, and luck as saying "high school isn't needed; just win the lottery instead."
Smith's specific discussion in "Wealth of Nations" concerned university level education, not sixth grade, though the same general class of arguments apply at basically every level (the more educated the populace, to whatever level they are capable of rising to though perhaps not paying for on the private market, the better overall for society).
I suggest you read Adam Smith's commentary on the value of publicly funded education in "The Wealth of Nations." After noting the higher "efficiencies" of privatizing education, Adam Smith still concludes that a more broadly educated public through public education (even at the expense of wasting a bit more money on less-motivated students) is ultimately for the public good. Of course, more modern free-marketeers who don't give a fuck about the public good (only maximizing profits) come to different conclusions.
I don't have high expectations for any institution that's over 10% Scalia, but once in a while the government does manage to do the right thing, at least for the wrong reasons.
I really hate how the "ignorant public" assumes that every time a scientist is really excited about the obscure details of the topic she's devoted years of his life to studying, that she's trying to "blow up details" in some sinister immoral conspiracy. Yes, scientists are nerds who derive great joy and excitement from delving deeply into the finest minutiae of obscure, technical subjects. They will get excited about things you won't understand. They're not trying to take over the world, and will likely be fine with you being passionate about whatever your own interests are, too.
I never said there was a purple wavelength (and what wavelength is "magenta," which is the color produced by mixing red and blue light, and which you say "does exist"?). The AC's statement was not simply that "red" and "blue" wavelengths exist, but that "red" and "blue" exist "as" something ("red" and "blue" wavelengths of light) that they correspond to. But "red and blue photons together" (=magenta) is something equally existent to "red" or "blue" photons alone. Do you think that feathers exist, and beaks exist, but refuse to think that birds exist because they are made of both feathers and a beak? Why does a thing composed of two things, that you think exist, not exist? If you want to be consistent, then also deny that "red" and "blue" exist (because they are only subjective human perceptions of a variety of pure or mixed photon wavelengths).
WTF, Mods? I know my posts might not be worthy of a +1 for anything, but would anyone please respond to explain why my post above is "Redundant" and "Overrated"? I'm honestly baffled --- perhaps because I'm a complete idiot; someone please enlighten (or cleverly insult) me.
Fair enough. I'm not personally opposed to the concept that intellectual expansion for its own sake is a worthy pursuit --- after all, I'm making a career out of abso-fucking-lutely useless fundamental particle physics (just because understanding the universe better is nifty); I've personally got no ground to stand on to pull the "you should be feeding hungry children in Africa instead" argument. On the other hand, if I was remotely certain that by giving up my research job, the resources I expend would be diverted to feeding displaced refugees, I'd have a lot harder time justifying what I do. I think there is a balance to be struck between "advancing Intelligent Life (abstract)," and "advancing Intelligent Lives (actual living individuals)," and that the latter takes ultimate moral precedence over the former. Thus, in considering long term policies --- "don't worry about global warming screwing over billions on earth; figure out how to seed a new colony on mars" --- I will prioritize goals that protect human lives over Human (Intelligent) Life.
Predicting a direct path of influence is difficult or impossible. However, based on past history, rather "vague" shifts in philosophical understanding can have dramatic effects. For example, many current religious sects have major influence over national-level policies. Small shifts in the public credibility of these sects claims to have a "True" description of the universe might have major state policy effects, impacting the treatment of illiteracy/hunger/etc. Even without direct impact from, e.g., medical technology advancements from improved understanding of basic cellular function, the "secondary" impact of societal philosophical shifts can be quite large (and hard to predict). For a concrete example, consider the (usually negative) impacts of "Social Darwinism" in the 20th century --- nothing to do directly with technically correct interpretations of Darwin's theory, but the (misunderstood) implications of "advancement by competition and survival of the fittest" justified all sorts of really horrible social agendas.
A related consideration to the observation that primitive life (... based on an unfortunately small sample size of 1) appeared very rapidly once the thermodynamic conditions for stable organic chemistry arose, is that "advanced" life (starting from multicellular organisms) took several billion more years to appear (though once it did, further development was relatively rapid). This indicates that, while the universe may be teeming with single-cell life, that more "advanced" life forms might be much more rare (with development timescales on the same order of magnitude as world-destroying events that would wipe them out, including stellar death). Given the number of stars in the universe (a large portion of which appear to have planetary systems), there are still plenty of other chances for "advanced" life, but possibly so far away from us that convincing evidence for such a hypothesis cannot be gathered.
Rejecting magic meat essentially means that you rejected the idea of having a soul.
One could easily retain (rather than reject) the idea of a soul by positing that a sufficiently good meat-clone would have one too. Assuming the existence of souls does not require assuming the existence of magic meat, though the two propositions are often co-joined in many belief systems.
By that logic, nothing at all has ever mattered. Your mistake is taking medium to large social impact events, dividing by the huge number of people on the earth, and rounding down the small impact per person to 0 impact per person. Yes, compared to everything else in the world combined, no one thing looks particularly significant. But some changes/discoveries/viewpoints do have a bigger impact than others, and contribute their small but non-negligible effect to the sum total of human society. The number of illiterate, poor, homeless, hungry, warring, and criminal folks does actually vary as a function of historical changes; assuming this is an immutable constant is a great way to produce more illiterate, poor, homeless, hungry, warring, and criminal folks.
Since when did things not exist because they can be described as having two parts instead of one? I'll assume that by "purple" you technically mean "magenta," and not the purple/violet appearance of wavelengths slightly shorter than blue. Some wavelengths of light appear red or blue to the human eye; they are themselves no more "red" or "blue" than some combination of photons is "purple." If you accept that red and blue exist, then purple does too (it's just a thing consisting of two photons, or the capability to reflect two wavelengths of photons, instead of one).
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Not necessarily. If we discover that the "secret mechanism" to creating life is spending a few billion years randomly slamming every combination of rocks and sludge together until you get the particular combination of self-replicating macromolecules that lead to all later life, then you haven't helped lab efforts much. The mechanism might be reliably reproducible: e.g., "every time you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life." On the other hand, it might be a hard-to-reproduce fluke: e.g., "once in a trillion times you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life; usually, you just get foul-smelling goop."
Have you checked out U-Haul while shopping around? It's really easy to get delivery devices that will park your neighborhood nuke near enough to whatever target you want; no drones required. And, at $19.95 for the day rate, not likely to break your budget (though you may have trouble getting your security deposit back).
The difference that it makes is that the success of a few model schools (backed by infusing huge amounts of cash, providing excellent facilities and top-notch staff) will be trumpeted to influence national policy decisions to roll out a new generation of privatized, for-profit schools (with plenty of tax money help pad investors' pockets). The mass-produced "copies" will be miserable corporate factories to churn out low-wage worker drones, without any of the advantages that the few super-subsidized model schools have.
A big question to me, though, is why we should "care about the continuity of humanity." I care a lot about the lives of actual living humans; but often see concern for the abstract class of "humanity" getting seriously in the way of caring for humans. History is littered with corpses from the hubris of tyrants who decided "who cares if a few thousand/million need to suffer and die, for the greater advancement of Humanity!". Concerns about preserving humanity in the abstract seem similar to ultra-conservative religious opposition to birth control: "how dare you wear a condom and thereby destroy potential future human life! Condoms are murder (never mind the existing human lives saved from suffering and disease)!". In the end, were billions to perish on this planet because of ecological catastrophe, I'd feel no more comforted if there were some other human-filled planet light-years away; until/unless we're able to transplant populations of whole planets, so space travel is not just for colonists leaving everyone else behind to die, I don't see its development (to "save humanity" in the abstract) as a moral imperative.
Unfortunately, living on Earth under a rain of poison flaming gas and ash is still a heck of a lot easier than living in space (or the Moon or Mars). If you can't survive and thrive in the very worst conditions this planet has to offer, then you won't do better off outside the atmosphere.
"Bad laws" are one potential way a "justice system" can operate unjustly. However, the US justice system shows other systematic failings. For example, what if everyone who was rich enough could afford a lawyer to get them off the hook for weekly bear-fucking on a technicality, so only the poor got bear-fucked every week? What if roughly equal proportions of light-skinned and dark-skinned people avoided bear-fucking, but police arrested a much higher proportion of dark-skinned people (even higher than the total number of light-skinned people arrested), and then darker skin also correlated with a higher probability of conviction and harsher sentencing? Even if you replace the "bear-fucking requirement" in the above examples with whatever you might consider a "good" law, they're still examples of injustice (systematic class and race biases), and there is ample evidence that the US "Justice" system has those flaws in addition to "bad laws."
Plus in the future, in the case that reanimation is made possible I can have my stuff again
“Good morning sir, and welcome to the future. Technology has advanced to the point where we can revive a corpse that was embalmed and stuffed in a box for centuries. Unfortunately, it seems that we can't read the Office 2083 files that all your data are stored in, so we're just going to have to kill and re-bury you now in hope of future research advances.”
Unfortunately, the "fool" hasn't lost much (unlike the suckers he scams into buying his magic beans): he's got the medal, which he could presumably sell for nearly what he paid to the runner-up in the auction. In the meantime, the "fool" gets free advertizing for his medical scams. The Crick estate should give the Wang a cheesy gold-plated cast-lead knockoff of the medal, in honor of the authenticity of Wang's own "medical products".
Considering that current cosmological theories indicate that the mass-energy in the universe is ~5% ordinary matter, ~25% dark matter, and the other ~70% is Dark Energy, in one sense space is quite massive (about fourteen times more massive than all the "stars, planets, moons, dust, and the like" combined).
For anyone else following this discussion thread: do check the parent poster's "Here's some statistics for you" link. It's absolutely hilarious! I didn't see any actual statistics in it (math is hard! scary innuendo is so much better!), but it's got everything else:
- Relying on FOX News and far-right talk radio for sources? Check! - Claiming Obama "stole" the election thanks to things like "black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio"? Check! - George Soros conspiracy? Check! - Gratuitous picture of Sarah Palin, that has *absolutely nothing to do* with the rest of the article text? Check!
Hard-hitting investigative journalism at its best! Clearly not the product of a conspiracy-believing propaganda-soaked "echo chamber"!
Slashdot Mirror
Congratulations on having been an exceptionally bright and ambitious kid. However, your advice is approximately as useful to the 99.9% of humanity who don't share your particular combination of brilliance, cojones, and luck as saying "high school isn't needed; just win the lottery instead."
Smith's specific discussion in "Wealth of Nations" concerned university level education, not sixth grade, though the same general class of arguments apply at basically every level (the more educated the populace, to whatever level they are capable of rising to though perhaps not paying for on the private market, the better overall for society).
I suggest you read Adam Smith's commentary on the value of publicly funded education in "The Wealth of Nations." After noting the higher "efficiencies" of privatizing education, Adam Smith still concludes that a more broadly educated public through public education (even at the expense of wasting a bit more money on less-motivated students) is ultimately for the public good. Of course, more modern free-marketeers who don't give a fuck about the public good (only maximizing profits) come to different conclusions.
Some dumb fucks of kids grow out of it, to become smart and productive adults. Others become Slashdot AC trolls.
I don't have high expectations for any institution that's over 10% Scalia, but once in a while the government does manage to do the right thing, at least for the wrong reasons.
I really hate how the "ignorant public" assumes that every time a scientist is really excited about the obscure details of the topic she's devoted years of his life to studying, that she's trying to "blow up details" in some sinister immoral conspiracy. Yes, scientists are nerds who derive great joy and excitement from delving deeply into the finest minutiae of obscure, technical subjects. They will get excited about things you won't understand. They're not trying to take over the world, and will likely be fine with you being passionate about whatever your own interests are, too.
I never said there was a purple wavelength (and what wavelength is "magenta," which is the color produced by mixing red and blue light, and which you say "does exist"?). The AC's statement was not simply that "red" and "blue" wavelengths exist, but that "red" and "blue" exist "as" something ("red" and "blue" wavelengths of light) that they correspond to. But "red and blue photons together" (=magenta) is something equally existent to "red" or "blue" photons alone. Do you think that feathers exist, and beaks exist, but refuse to think that birds exist because they are made of both feathers and a beak? Why does a thing composed of two things, that you think exist, not exist? If you want to be consistent, then also deny that "red" and "blue" exist (because they are only subjective human perceptions of a variety of pure or mixed photon wavelengths).
WTF, Mods? I know my posts might not be worthy of a +1 for anything, but would anyone please respond to explain why my post above is "Redundant" and "Overrated"? I'm honestly baffled --- perhaps because I'm a complete idiot; someone please enlighten (or cleverly insult) me.
Fair enough. I'm not personally opposed to the concept that intellectual expansion for its own sake is a worthy pursuit --- after all, I'm making a career out of abso-fucking-lutely useless fundamental particle physics (just because understanding the universe better is nifty); I've personally got no ground to stand on to pull the "you should be feeding hungry children in Africa instead" argument. On the other hand, if I was remotely certain that by giving up my research job, the resources I expend would be diverted to feeding displaced refugees, I'd have a lot harder time justifying what I do. I think there is a balance to be struck between "advancing Intelligent Life (abstract)," and "advancing Intelligent Lives (actual living individuals)," and that the latter takes ultimate moral precedence over the former. Thus, in considering long term policies --- "don't worry about global warming screwing over billions on earth; figure out how to seed a new colony on mars" --- I will prioritize goals that protect human lives over Human (Intelligent) Life.
Predicting a direct path of influence is difficult or impossible. However, based on past history, rather "vague" shifts in philosophical understanding can have dramatic effects. For example, many current religious sects have major influence over national-level policies. Small shifts in the public credibility of these sects claims to have a "True" description of the universe might have major state policy effects, impacting the treatment of illiteracy/hunger/etc. Even without direct impact from, e.g., medical technology advancements from improved understanding of basic cellular function, the "secondary" impact of societal philosophical shifts can be quite large (and hard to predict). For a concrete example, consider the (usually negative) impacts of "Social Darwinism" in the 20th century --- nothing to do directly with technically correct interpretations of Darwin's theory, but the (misunderstood) implications of "advancement by competition and survival of the fittest" justified all sorts of really horrible social agendas.
A related consideration to the observation that primitive life (... based on an unfortunately small sample size of 1) appeared very rapidly once the thermodynamic conditions for stable organic chemistry arose, is that "advanced" life (starting from multicellular organisms) took several billion more years to appear (though once it did, further development was relatively rapid). This indicates that, while the universe may be teeming with single-cell life, that more "advanced" life forms might be much more rare (with development timescales on the same order of magnitude as world-destroying events that would wipe them out, including stellar death). Given the number of stars in the universe (a large portion of which appear to have planetary systems), there are still plenty of other chances for "advanced" life, but possibly so far away from us that convincing evidence for such a hypothesis cannot be gathered.
Rejecting magic meat essentially means that you rejected the idea of having a soul.
One could easily retain (rather than reject) the idea of a soul by positing that a sufficiently good meat-clone would have one too. Assuming the existence of souls does not require assuming the existence of magic meat, though the two propositions are often co-joined in many belief systems.
By that logic, nothing at all has ever mattered. Your mistake is taking medium to large social impact events, dividing by the huge number of people on the earth, and rounding down the small impact per person to 0 impact per person. Yes, compared to everything else in the world combined, no one thing looks particularly significant. But some changes/discoveries/viewpoints do have a bigger impact than others, and contribute their small but non-negligible effect to the sum total of human society. The number of illiterate, poor, homeless, hungry, warring, and criminal folks does actually vary as a function of historical changes; assuming this is an immutable constant is a great way to produce more illiterate, poor, homeless, hungry, warring, and criminal folks.
Since when did things not exist because they can be described as having two parts instead of one? I'll assume that by "purple" you technically mean "magenta," and not the purple/violet appearance of wavelengths slightly shorter than blue. Some wavelengths of light appear red or blue to the human eye; they are themselves no more "red" or "blue" than some combination of photons is "purple." If you accept that red and blue exist, then purple does too (it's just a thing consisting of two photons, or the capability to reflect two wavelengths of photons, instead of one).
Oh yeah it does, if we can figure out how life was created, we can create more life. And THAT opens the door to a lot.....
Not necessarily. If we discover that the "secret mechanism" to creating life is spending a few billion years randomly slamming every combination of rocks and sludge together until you get the particular combination of self-replicating macromolecules that lead to all later life, then you haven't helped lab efforts much. The mechanism might be reliably reproducible: e.g., "every time you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life." On the other hand, it might be a hard-to-reproduce fluke: e.g., "once in a trillion times you mix a sludge of precursors X, Y, Z, bake for 15 minutes at 325F, then zap with lightning, you'll get life; usually, you just get foul-smelling goop."
Have you checked out U-Haul while shopping around? It's really easy to get delivery devices that will park your neighborhood nuke near enough to whatever target you want; no drones required. And, at $19.95 for the day rate, not likely to break your budget (though you may have trouble getting your security deposit back).
What difference does it make?
The difference that it makes is that the success of a few model schools (backed by infusing huge amounts of cash, providing excellent facilities and top-notch staff) will be trumpeted to influence national policy decisions to roll out a new generation of privatized, for-profit schools (with plenty of tax money help pad investors' pockets). The mass-produced "copies" will be miserable corporate factories to churn out low-wage worker drones, without any of the advantages that the few super-subsidized model schools have.
A big question to me, though, is why we should "care about the continuity of humanity." I care a lot about the lives of actual living humans; but often see concern for the abstract class of "humanity" getting seriously in the way of caring for humans. History is littered with corpses from the hubris of tyrants who decided "who cares if a few thousand/million need to suffer and die, for the greater advancement of Humanity!". Concerns about preserving humanity in the abstract seem similar to ultra-conservative religious opposition to birth control: "how dare you wear a condom and thereby destroy potential future human life! Condoms are murder (never mind the existing human lives saved from suffering and disease)!". In the end, were billions to perish on this planet because of ecological catastrophe, I'd feel no more comforted if there were some other human-filled planet light-years away; until/unless we're able to transplant populations of whole planets, so space travel is not just for colonists leaving everyone else behind to die, I don't see its development (to "save humanity" in the abstract) as a moral imperative.
Unfortunately, living on Earth under a rain of poison flaming gas and ash is still a heck of a lot easier than living in space (or the Moon or Mars). If you can't survive and thrive in the very worst conditions this planet has to offer, then you won't do better off outside the atmosphere.
"Bad laws" are one potential way a "justice system" can operate unjustly. However, the US justice system shows other systematic failings. For example, what if everyone who was rich enough could afford a lawyer to get them off the hook for weekly bear-fucking on a technicality, so only the poor got bear-fucked every week? What if roughly equal proportions of light-skinned and dark-skinned people avoided bear-fucking, but police arrested a much higher proportion of dark-skinned people (even higher than the total number of light-skinned people arrested), and then darker skin also correlated with a higher probability of conviction and harsher sentencing? Even if you replace the "bear-fucking requirement" in the above examples with whatever you might consider a "good" law, they're still examples of injustice (systematic class and race biases), and there is ample evidence that the US "Justice" system has those flaws in addition to "bad laws."
Only once it demonstrates the ability to carry out justice systematically, rather than just isolated accidents of sensibility.
Plus in the future, in the case that reanimation is made possible I can have my stuff again
“Good morning sir, and welcome to the future. Technology has advanced to the point where we can revive a corpse that was embalmed and stuffed in a box for centuries. Unfortunately, it seems that we can't read the Office 2083 files that all your data are stored in, so we're just going to have to kill and re-bury you now in hope of future research advances.”
Unfortunately, the "fool" hasn't lost much (unlike the suckers he scams into buying his magic beans): he's got the medal, which he could presumably sell for nearly what he paid to the runner-up in the auction. In the meantime, the "fool" gets free advertizing for his medical scams. The Crick estate should give the Wang a cheesy gold-plated cast-lead knockoff of the medal, in honor of the authenticity of Wang's own "medical products".
Considering that current cosmological theories indicate that the mass-energy in the universe is ~5% ordinary matter, ~25% dark matter, and the other ~70% is Dark Energy, in one sense space is quite massive (about fourteen times more massive than all the "stars, planets, moons, dust, and the like" combined).
For anyone else following this discussion thread: do check the parent poster's "Here's some statistics for you" link. It's absolutely hilarious! I didn't see any actual statistics in it (math is hard! scary innuendo is so much better!), but it's got everything else:
- Relying on FOX News and far-right talk radio for sources? Check!
- Claiming Obama "stole" the election thanks to things like "black Dems were caught stuffing the ballot boxes in Philly and Ohio"? Check!
- George Soros conspiracy? Check!
- Gratuitous picture of Sarah Palin, that has *absolutely nothing to do* with the rest of the article text? Check!
Hard-hitting investigative journalism at its best! Clearly not the product of a conspiracy-believing propaganda-soaked "echo chamber"!