Metaphysics and phrenology are both nonsense, hence Rei's rhetorical question.
Metaphysics is not nonsense. It just refers to stuff that we can't explain with (current) physics. For the Ancient Greeks "what is light" would have been a metaphysical question, in the same way you could argue that "what is gravity" is now.
I think the main issue with interpreting the Voyager plates is the usage of the Bohr atomic model for hydrogen atoms.
Great point. By the way, we should stop using that ridiculous and primitive model [more correctly the Rutherford-Bohr model] to teach young people. This introduce an unnecessary noise to the real understanding of atoms. Show them depictions of the electron probability cloud.
Good luck explaining what an electron probability cloud is to ten year olds.
You gave a political position which represents anti-communists, or at least free marketeers, as perhaps having a distorted sense of reality. That was your example.
No, his example was to show that people have been conditioned into unthinkingly accepting that anything labelled "communist" is bad and anything "free market" good. Life is not that simple, regardless of the merits or demerits of communism or the free market.
You should really read more carefully what I wrote. Communism is not the question here, period. The real issue here is the fact that even very intelligent people can make (really) stupid decisions by knowing only a distorted version of reality. I can make a IQ160 passionately support genocide if I control from a very young age everything he knows about genocide, think about that.
Exactly. Not all Nazis (or Khmer Rouge, or whoever) were stupid. There is no connection between intelligence and morality.
You sound remarkably like hardline Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who allow no deviation from their strict and quite possibly inaccurate understanding of their sacred texts.
IQ is certainly not a perfect metric but if we use it only in a simple way it could be used. Less than 100 IQ, can't vote.
Maybe add a simple quiz that tests for knowledge of the Constitution. If you support public officials voting based on religious beliefs you are out. If you don't believe civilians should be able to own any weapon our military is allowed to use, your out. If you believe congress can fund war without declaring it, you are out. If you believe congress or the president can disregard the constitution to fight terrorism, drugs, or "the general welfare" you are out. If you believe courts can't overturn congress your out. If you believe courts can grant themselves the authority to overturn a jury or limit juries to determination of fact without the ability to judge the merit of application of the law on a case by case basis, you are out. And last but not least if you don't understand that individuals is the only group that includes every citizen and therefore any systematic disregard of individual rights by definition cannot be in the interest of "the community", you are out. E.X. The automatic reduction in rights when accused of a wrongdoing by the state in traffic court vs other charges. Don't know that corporations are not people and that everyone with an interest in them is already a person and therefore already has the ability to represent their own rights and interests, you are out.
Note, that is not how things currently work in our process but it is how it's supposed to work and would work if swaying popular opinion couldn't break things.
In other words, anyone who disagrees with what you believe is an idiot and ineligible to vote.
I think you're all idiots for confusing wisdom and knowledge. But, that's just me. Wisdom is the application of knowledge (how one applies their intelligence would be a good way to put it) and there are lots of smart people who are not wise.
Slashdot is living proof of this. There are clearly a fair number of intelligent people who post here, but there's still an awful lot of stupidity, or however you choose to describe un-wisdom.
So remember, when you hear about study results that say 40% of "adults on the street" can't point to Africa on a map, they're talking about a smidgeon of below average people, some of the average people, and even some of the above average people. Be happy that they know what Africa is, a map is, and that either can be on the other, but only in different ways. That they point to the wrong part of the map (or believe a movie to be "based on a true story") shows they know something.
"Idiocracy" was supposed to be a warning, not a motivational poster.
Not likely, as it would reduce road violation to practically 0 overnight.
Then police departments all over the country would shut down (and some towns/small cities would go bankrupt) as it generates A LOT of revenue for them.
Not everywhere is America. Here in the UK, speed cameras actually cost the police or local council money to operate, which is why so many have been turned off in the last five years to save money.
Also, most people are offered a "speed awareness" course rather than just fined for speeding.
Most people who tailgate aren't doing it accidentally, they are driving aggressively to try to force people to move over. A warning would be pointless.
And if you need a warning message to tell you that a car is two metres behind you, you shouldn't really be driving as you're either half blind or not concentrating.
considering most teens learn to drive from their parents
Not where I live. In the UK, if you don't learn to drive with a proper driving instructor, you're very unlikely to pass your driving test, at least without several failed attempts first. A bit of off road practice when they're younger is fine, but you need to be drilled into doing things properly on the road.
Obviously there are exceptions, and no doubt there are the usual slashdot geniuses who passed their test first time after teaching themselves on their custom made driving simulator in their basement.
Once you get the hang of it "jogging" can take little more effort than walking, so you're not going to have the same reaction. I can slowly jog or walk for a couple of hours and just feel pleasantly tired afterwards. I'm not knocking it, it's still good for you, and possibly better in the long term as there's less stress on joints (pun intended).
So, if you go for (say) an hour's hard run, you're burning many hundreds of extra calories. That translates into "burning" (converting to carbon dioxide and water) a hundred or more grams of carbohydrate and protein, and/or tens of grams of fats. Worse, you need to replenish that energy with food-grade material, which most often has been farmed, trucked, and packaged, all of which consumes more energy. That one-hour run ends up cranking out hundreds of grams of carbon dioxide.
If, on the other hand, you simply burn through one medium-sized joint, you're only combusting a few grams of plant material. I'll bet the total CO2 output is less than ten grams.
Admittedly, there are health benefits to running. But at what cost to the health of the planet?
This is the sort of argument which sounds totally logical when you're high.
One time after finishing a strenuous 16 mile hike in the mountains I got back to my car and was driving back on the highway. I was going under the speed limit but not below 45. I was just kind of in a daze and readjusting to city lights. A cop pulled me over thinking that I must be drunk or something because I wasn't driving the speed limit. I told him what was what. Realizing that I wasn't drunk, he let me go and told me to drive carefully.
Just because you weren't drunk doesn't mean you weren't driving dangerously.
Not by any definition of 'designed' I'm aware of. Wikipedia says it best:
"LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. LSD's psychedelic properties were discovered 5 years later when Hofmann himself accidentally ingested an unknown quantity of the chemical."
In other words, it's most noted property was not known at the time it was first synthesized. Not sure how that could be called 'designed'.
Ergot alkaloids were known to produce hallucinations (amongst other less pleasant effects) since the Middle Ages, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no such thing as a useless human.
I beg to differ.
I counter with: Donald Trump.
He's probably an alien struggling to communicate.
Metaphysics and phrenology are both nonsense, hence Rei's rhetorical question.
Metaphysics is not nonsense. It just refers to stuff that we can't explain with (current) physics. For the Ancient Greeks "what is light" would have been a metaphysical question, in the same way you could argue that "what is gravity" is now.
I think the main issue with interpreting the Voyager plates is the usage of the Bohr atomic model for hydrogen atoms.
Great point. By the way, we should stop using that ridiculous and primitive model [more correctly the Rutherford-Bohr model] to teach young people. This introduce an unnecessary noise to the real understanding of atoms. Show them depictions of the electron probability cloud.
Good luck explaining what an electron probability cloud is to ten year olds.
You gave a political position which represents anti-communists, or at least free marketeers, as perhaps having a distorted sense of reality. That was your example.
No, his example was to show that people have been conditioned into unthinkingly accepting that anything labelled "communist" is bad and anything "free market" good. Life is not that simple, regardless of the merits or demerits of communism or the free market.
You should really read more carefully what I wrote. Communism is not the question here, period. The real issue here is the fact that even very intelligent people can make (really) stupid decisions by knowing only a distorted version of reality. I can make a IQ160 passionately support genocide if I control from a very young age everything he knows about genocide, think about that.
Exactly. Not all Nazis (or Khmer Rouge, or whoever) were stupid. There is no connection between intelligence and morality.
Having a 150 vs 115 hasn't been poven to matter at all.
That's NOT what she said.
You sound remarkably like hardline Christian or Islamic fundamentalists, who allow no deviation from their strict and quite possibly inaccurate understanding of their sacred texts.
"IQ is certainly not a perfect metric but if we use it only in a simple way it could be used. Less than 100 IQ, can't vote."
As you don't seem to realize that this would hit _half_ the voters, I'm glad you won't be able to vote with that system.
Actually, slightly less than half will not be able to vote.
To equal it up you could also exclude the people with really high IQs.
IQ is certainly not a perfect metric but if we use it only in a simple way it could be used. Less than 100 IQ, can't vote. Maybe add a simple quiz that tests for knowledge of the Constitution. If you support public officials voting based on religious beliefs you are out. If you don't believe civilians should be able to own any weapon our military is allowed to use, your out. If you believe congress can fund war without declaring it, you are out. If you believe congress or the president can disregard the constitution to fight terrorism, drugs, or "the general welfare" you are out. If you believe courts can't overturn congress your out. If you believe courts can grant themselves the authority to overturn a jury or limit juries to determination of fact without the ability to judge the merit of application of the law on a case by case basis, you are out. And last but not least if you don't understand that individuals is the only group that includes every citizen and therefore any systematic disregard of individual rights by definition cannot be in the interest of "the community", you are out. E.X. The automatic reduction in rights when accused of a wrongdoing by the state in traffic court vs other charges. Don't know that corporations are not people and that everyone with an interest in them is already a person and therefore already has the ability to represent their own rights and interests, you are out. Note, that is not how things currently work in our process but it is how it's supposed to work and would work if swaying popular opinion couldn't break things.
In other words, anyone who disagrees with what you believe is an idiot and ineligible to vote.
The problem here is that you're equating "intelligence" with their mastery of the English language.
Obviously in reality you would have your voting/intelligent test in the official language of whichever country you were talking about.
I think you're all idiots for confusing wisdom and knowledge. But, that's just me. Wisdom is the application of knowledge (how one applies their intelligence would be a good way to put it) and there are lots of smart people who are not wise.
Slashdot is living proof of this. There are clearly a fair number of intelligent people who post here, but there's still an awful lot of stupidity, or however you choose to describe un-wisdom.
Short of a story about supermodels thinking Linux gurus are the best lovers, I can't think of something better designed to appeal to slashdot readers.
Lloyd Christmas: [sees framed newspaper article about moon landing] No, way! That's great.
[chuckles]
Lloyd Christmas: WE'VE LANDED ON THE MOON!
So remember, when you hear about study results that say 40% of "adults on the street" can't point to Africa on a map, they're talking about a smidgeon of below average people, some of the average people, and even some of the above average people. Be happy that they know what Africa is, a map is, and that either can be on the other, but only in different ways. That they point to the wrong part of the map (or believe a movie to be "based on a true story") shows they know something.
"Idiocracy" was supposed to be a warning, not a motivational poster.
I am picturing you whirling chickens right now. Is whirling chickens over your head insulting?
I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'm tempted to steal this for my sig. It has a certain insane poetry to it.
Not likely, as it would reduce road violation to practically 0 overnight.
Then police departments all over the country would shut down (and some towns/small cities would go bankrupt) as it generates A LOT of revenue for them.
Not everywhere is America. Here in the UK, speed cameras actually cost the police or local council money to operate, which is why so many have been turned off in the last five years to save money.
Also, most people are offered a "speed awareness" course rather than just fined for speeding.
In Europe, compulsory tachographs make it impossible for drivers to be forced to work dangerously long shifts.
And if you need a warning message to tell you that a car is two metres behind you, you shouldn't really be driving as you're either half blind or not concentrating.
considering most teens learn to drive from their parents
Not where I live. In the UK, if you don't learn to drive with a proper driving instructor, you're very unlikely to pass your driving test, at least without several failed attempts first. A bit of off road practice when they're younger is fine, but you need to be drilled into doing things properly on the road.
Obviously there are exceptions, and no doubt there are the usual slashdot geniuses who passed their test first time after teaching themselves on their custom made driving simulator in their basement.
I used to jog a lot. I NEVER got a runners high.
Once you get the hang of it "jogging" can take little more effort than walking, so you're not going to have the same reaction. I can slowly jog or walk for a couple of hours and just feel pleasantly tired afterwards. I'm not knocking it, it's still good for you, and possibly better in the long term as there's less stress on joints (pun intended).
So, if you go for (say) an hour's hard run, you're burning many hundreds of extra calories. That translates into "burning" (converting to carbon dioxide and water) a hundred or more grams of carbohydrate and protein, and/or tens of grams of fats. Worse, you need to replenish that energy with food-grade material, which most often has been farmed, trucked, and packaged, all of which consumes more energy. That one-hour run ends up cranking out hundreds of grams of carbon dioxide.
If, on the other hand, you simply burn through one medium-sized joint, you're only combusting a few grams of plant material. I'll bet the total CO2 output is less than ten grams.
Admittedly, there are health benefits to running. But at what cost to the health of the planet?
This is the sort of argument which sounds totally logical when you're high.
One time after finishing a strenuous 16 mile hike in the mountains I got back to my car and was driving back on the highway. I was going under the speed limit but not below 45. I was just kind of in a daze and readjusting to city lights. A cop pulled me over thinking that I must be drunk or something because I wasn't driving the speed limit. I told him what was what. Realizing that I wasn't drunk, he let me go and told me to drive carefully.
Just because you weren't drunk doesn't mean you weren't driving dangerously.
Not by any definition of 'designed' I'm aware of. Wikipedia says it best:
"LSD was first synthesized on November 16, 1938 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. LSD's psychedelic properties were discovered 5 years later when Hofmann himself accidentally ingested an unknown quantity of the chemical."
In other words, it's most noted property was not known at the time it was first synthesized. Not sure how that could be called 'designed'.
Ergot alkaloids were known to produce hallucinations (amongst other less pleasant effects) since the Middle Ages, at least.
Your stomach is hardwired to be filled with hydrochloric acid, but that doesn't mean you should drink it.
Oh, bollocks...