The issue is also whether you allow society to dictate what medical procedures are performed on your body.
Lets not forget the fine history of unethical human medical experimentation in the United States. And people think we should just give the government carte blanche to dictate medical procedures?
Unbelievable. Something about history, and being doomed to repeat it...
Nobody is dictating what medical procedures you can perform on your (childrens') bodies. Rather, the law prevents them from performing medical procedures (i.e. uncontrolled exposure to dangerous diseases) on unsuspecting victims (i.e. those who can't get vaccinated) in public schools. If you want to perform such experiments, you will now have to do it in the privacy of your own home on victims (i.e. children of other anti-vaxxers) who have consented in some form (i.e. by being ignorant.)
Somehow I find your willingness to subject innocents to known dangers via your private medical experimentation far more disturbing than a slippery slope argument about the government possibly doing so in the future.
"Someone else's land?" I have to believe they own the land there. Whether the natives recognize that or not, however...
You know, the natives might have some legitimate disagreements about land ownership. Just because the traditional religion is used to block projects like this doesn't mean that it is the root cause. Religion may just have been legally expedient at first and then grew into a self-perpetuating thing.
Another poster was referring to the "corruption" in Hawaii, but a brief read of the link above would suggest that US financial interests have been corrupting Hawaii for a long time. And its funny how some of the descriptions of Hawaiians on this thread sound just like descriptions of Native Americans, African Americans, and just about any ethnic group that has been traumatised by rich white people over the last few centuries...
Your comment has nothing to do with the original claim, that rapid changes does not happen. They do - and the cause is completely irrelevant when it comes to how those changes affect vegetation, animal life or humans. Neither is the paper limited to volcanic cooling events, which you claim, which makes me wonder if you've read it. If you didn't read it - then what is the point in writing a reply?
Additionally, if you claim that there's newer research the last 20 years which disproves the paper then please cite that research.
Sorry, I have read all of it now and poked around a bit. A recent RealClimate summary notes that there is a "well-known tipping point" in the North Atlantic overturning, which is consistent with the findings in the summary paper you linked, but published in 2008. So it looks like we still aren't any less screwed...
Your comment has nothing to do with the original claim, that rapid changes does not happen. They do - and the cause is completely irrelevant when it comes to how those changes affect vegetation, animal life or humans. Neither is the paper limited to volcanic cooling events, which you claim, which makes me wonder if you've read it. If you didn't read it - then what is the point in writing a reply?
Additionally, if you claim that there's newer research the last 20 years which disproves the paper then please cite that research.
It is not completely irrelevant because the events described are cooling events, not heating. And I was looking for more recent research when work called...
The current temperate change is between 0.01 and 0.02 degrees/year, two orders of magnitude greater than when the ice age ended. The problem isn't so much that temperature is changing but that it's changing so fast. The greater the rate of temperature change the harder adaption will be for both human and natural systems.
I've never been able to figure out the original of those claims - do you know? I can't find any scientific sources for it - on the contrary:
Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise)
This is mildly interesting, but note that the paper has no citations later than 1998, and the paper itself is dated that year if you go up a level, so the research is not at all recent, but nearly 20 years old.
Also, there is a clarification at the top which reads:
This represents an earlier version of our text. Some changes have been made since we stopped modifying this web version: e.g. we have added a discussion of the role of volcanic aerosols in sudden climate changes...evidence suggests the rapid cooling at the end of the Eemian interglacial was due to a big explosive volcanic event. Other 'volcanic' cooling events occurred during the Holocene.
In other words, they are talking about abrupt (and transitory) volcanic events, not Milankovitch cycles. Moreover, volcanoes produce cooling, not heating (think of the various "years without summers")
I'm sure it's the same down in Washington State as it is up here in coastal British Columbia. Low snow pack means lower river levels, which means potential problems for irrigation in areas under cultivation, harm to fish stocks, and the potential for severe water restrictions in some areas.
Yes it is. I bike to work every day in Seattle and this winter was stunningly different from the last 25 years. From November to February I usually wear closed-toed shoes, but I only did that for about 1 week in December. I was out of town for the other cold week, so it seemed even warmer to me than it maybe should have.
If your theory is so wonderfully complete, why can't you create a computer model that can start with conditions twenty years ago and work out a correct description of the present? Please note, I'm not denying that it's getting warmer. I simply don't subscribe to the current hubris that makes humanity responsible for all of it.
This is called "hindcasting" and is a standard part of the validation of all climate models. See here for more information.
If you can't see the individual starlings, and can only see the flock, the flock behaves in a quantum manner. It jumps around, it can appear in two places at once, apparently traveling faster than light, it has probabilistic properties.
So the tipping point, depends on our detection technologies. If we can't zoom in to see the individual starling then quantum behavior is "flock of bird" sized!
Quantum physics does scale, you just need to realize that the 'flock' is the size that you can detect, and the reason you think it is one thing is because you can't detect half a thing. It's a function of the detector not the thing.
Nope. You are suggesting a hidden variables theory where each starling is a variable. Bell's Theorem says that you can only have this if you give up locality, realism (counterfactual definiteness) or that the universe isn't just making it up as it goes along (conspiracy).
TSA is a place where money goes to be spent on the premise that spending money on things which do nothing is better than doing nothing, even if the outcomes are the same.
They have a blank check to spend money on stuff with no proof it has any value.
Other than harassing everybody, the TSA has accomplished very little. It's become a money pit which pretends to be keeping us safe.
The TSA can point to very few incidents where they've actually stopped anything related to terrorism. Mostly they just serve to annoy everybody else.
Meanwhile, the baggage handlers are the ones who keep getting caught smuggling stuff.
The TSA is a pathetic joke, beefed up by reactionary politicians, and which utterly has failed to make anybody "safer" by any objective measure. In fact, everything they do seems to be devoid of "objective measure".
I submit to TSA screening because it is the only kind of stimulus money one can get out of Republicans.
You're missing anti-GMO, anti-economic-reality, anti-free-markets, and other lunacy of the left.
You have provided no data on anti-GMO political persuasions, just hearsay, so this claim has as much credibility as claims that "anti-vaxers are libruls". I personally suspect that the anti-GMO crowd tend conservative because there is a strong "purity" angle here that meshes well with prevalent conservative religious views.
The rest of your "lunacy" list is not supported by data at any scale. Kansas, Europe and the Great Depression all demonstrate that free markets do not magically work without serious amounts of regulation and stimulation, whereas recent results in Minnesota and the US as a whole provide support for Keynesian economics. And please don't reply with a "No True Scotsman" fallacy - I don't accept it from the left for communism and I don't accept them from the right for unregulated markets.
And yes, libertarians are right wing. Get over it.
I think I saw some research somewhere showing that the same people who believed this also bought thousand dollar specialty speaker cables, HDMI cables, and specially crafted wooden volume control knobs for their home stereos, 'because it improves sound quality'.
I recently bought some very nice speakers (protip: that is where 90% of your money should go. Any fool can make linear amplifiers, but coupling to air is hard.) Anyway, I don't have a lot of free time these days, so I decided to get some speaker cables while I was there. I could have bought some gold banana plugs and wired them up to heavy lamp cord myself, but my house is in pieces and my tools are in storage, etc. so it was really just a time saver. The cheapest cables I could find were USD250 each and the main reason I got them was not for the woo factor but simply because they were well manufactured and looked good (got to appease the wife when buying those boy toys!)
What the heck would cause 1m audio cables to cost more than that? How about silver plating on the plugs because silver has slightly better conductivity! And don't worry about tarnishing because they will also sell you a cleaning kit! Then there was the powered grounding/capacitance/alien mind control dampeners you could get.
What was that P.T.Barnum quote? "It is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money." True dat.
Feel free to rant about this. Or to try and change it. Individually you are pretty powerless, though. But if indulgence in a false sense of self importance is what keeps you going to your job every day, they sure won't go out of their way to shut you down.
Ranting is the first step to changing anything. As you point out, we are all pretty powerless as individuals, but collectively we can change a lot, if history is any judge. After all, Democracy itself didn't just happen. It wasn't a gift from the powers that be, but taken from them, very much against their will.
Right now, the largest threat to democracy in the US (where I live) is the atomisation (thank you Hannah Arendt) of society. We have all been broken down - not into the disconnected individuals of early 20th century totalitarian systems (of both the left and the right BTW) but into slightly larger groups of ideologically uniform members that can be manipulated in large chunks. This little subthread has already seen several different chunks bumping into each other and having to deal with each other, so in that sense I think my "rant" was very constructive. Not to mention my sig quote.
The summary did call the person in question the robot's owner.
I think the robot should obey the owner's wishes and get them the drink. But it should sigh audibly when asked to and mumble under its breath while giving it to them. Maybe occasionally snipe at them in a passive-aggressive manner. "Should I cancel all productive activities that you had scheduled on your calendar for today?" "Would you like vodka in a glass or should I set it up as an IV drip into your arm?" "Would you like me to make a bunch of regrettable drunken Facebook posts for you, or would you rather do it yourself?"
Well, you've got to stretch the definition of Religion pretty far to encompass Buddhism. It offers no God, nor any Commandments (though lots of guidelines for monks and others seeking enlightenment). Hardly a religion by most definitions.
Which definitions are you referring to? Mine is Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern". By that definition, Buddhism is certainly a religion in the sense that it provides a path to meaning (i.e. enlightenment.)
One thing I've noticed about software engineers is that too many of them are lacking the critical statistics skills they need to function effectively. Perhaps it's because we tend to think in Boolean terms of true and false. Thus, "I have a 1:450,000,000 chance of winning the lottery" turns into "I have a chance of winning the lottery", which is a different wording that is remarkably easy to misinterpret as a "50:50" chance, even though both outcomes are statistically equal to false. They apply that same lack of understanding to any risk, including vaccination (a 1:3,000,000 chance of a serious adverse reaction becomes "a chance of a serious adverse reaction".)
The ways of making and keeping friends that come naturally to everyone else don't come naturally to him. He *wants* friends, but just doesn't know how to make them.
They don't come naturally. Those are skills you have to learn. Most end up being naturally taught, but some people miss it.
Without proper supports*, he quickly winds up socially isolating himself with his actions
Which he will always do until you teach him better social skills. Don't look at it as some medical disorder, look at it as a skill gap. I have the same problems and I'm 28. There's no one to help me now and no one ever tried. The older you get with poor social skills the worse it gets. People don't fault kids for social awkwardness, but you're a creepy crazy guy if you're socially awkward after being a teenager. People don't give you any benefit of doubt. You exist to kidnap or harass people as any mistake you made was on purpose and for some specific reason. 'Why does this person not have any friends? He must be dangerous, lets stay away from him.' Social awkwardness is a self perpetuating problem that can quickly spiral out of control into deep depression and suicide.
You won't help him by teaching others how to behave around him. You can't teach everyone he'll meet in his life. You have to teach him how to interact with others.
Worse, he will interpret any sign of kindness as friendship and follow this person.
Because everyone else ignores (or hates) him or at least that's how he sees it. When no one talks to you, that one person who does must be really interested in you. Why else would they talk to you? No one else does.
Please don't let him end up like me. Teach him social skills like you might teach someone math. Read about some specific type of communication or behavior and then practice and practice and practice it. You might have to deal with anxiety issues as well.
Please don't assume that a) your experience is universal (anecdotes are not data) and b) that those of us with kids on the spectrum are lazy, ignorant twits. We have spent YEARS doing all of the stuff that you "suggest" and all the stuff that you deride as "useless" and guess what? Our kid STILL has a real set of problems. Is he much better at social interaction now that we have spent all this time teaching him skills and getting him therapy? Yes! Can he pass as neurotypical? Not for more than about 30 minutes on a good day. And that is never going to change, no matter how much willpower, time and money we throw at him because there is a real physical problem here.
Would you tell a blind kid that they just need to work on the skill of seeing? Of course not! And ASD kids have real, measurable, neurological deficits. The brain is a wonderful thing and can route around a lot of damage, but it is no substitute for dedicated hardware, which he clearly lacks. And quite frankly getting guilt from pseudo-experts like you does not make life easier. My wife has a masters in this field, which required actual lab work and clinical experience, so please keep your ignorant, holier-than-thou, superior attitude to yourself. You are causing a lot more damage than you realise.
That could indeed be at the heart of one of the solutions to the paradox. As a civilization becomes more individualistic and inward focusing, breeding might drop off to the point of extinction. Think about it, if you could live 10,000+ years and have all of your needs (including emotional) met by synthetic means, would you bother having children? How many people would give any thought to the species as a whole continuing if we were not forced to deal with each other?
This sounds remarkably like C.S.Lewis' description of hell in The Great Divorce.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue is also whether you allow society to dictate what medical procedures are performed on your body.
Lets not forget the fine history of unethical human medical experimentation in the United States. And people think we should just give the government carte blanche to dictate medical procedures?
Unbelievable. Something about history, and being doomed to repeat it...
Nice false dichotomy there.
Nobody is dictating what medical procedures you can perform on your (childrens') bodies. Rather, the law prevents them from performing medical procedures (i.e. uncontrolled exposure to dangerous diseases) on unsuspecting victims (i.e. those who can't get vaccinated) in public schools. If you want to perform such experiments, you will now have to do it in the privacy of your own home on victims (i.e. children of other anti-vaxxers) who have consented in some form (i.e. by being ignorant.)
Somehow I find your willingness to subject innocents to known dangers via your private medical experimentation far more disturbing than a slippery slope argument about the government possibly doing so in the future.
and then the worker comp attorneys come out of wood work and sue when some in a job uses drugs like this and things go bad and they end up in rehab
Indeed. Which sounds like a horribly inefficient (not to mention downright dangerous) way to run a society.
"Someone else's land?" I have to believe they own the land there. Whether the natives recognize that or not, however...
You know, the natives might have some legitimate disagreements about land ownership. Just because the traditional religion is used to block projects like this doesn't mean that it is the root cause. Religion may just have been legally expedient at first and then grew into a self-perpetuating thing.
Another poster was referring to the "corruption" in Hawaii, but a brief read of the link above would suggest that US financial interests have been corrupting Hawaii for a long time. And its funny how some of the descriptions of Hawaiians on this thread sound just like descriptions of Native Americans, African Americans, and just about any ethnic group that has been traumatised by rich white people over the last few centuries...
Your comment has nothing to do with the original claim, that rapid changes does not happen. They do - and the cause is completely irrelevant when it comes to how those changes affect vegetation, animal life or humans. Neither is the paper limited to volcanic cooling events, which you claim, which makes me wonder if you've read it. If you didn't read it - then what is the point in writing a reply?
Additionally, if you claim that there's newer research the last 20 years which disproves the paper then please cite that research.
Sorry, I have read all of it now and poked around a bit. A recent RealClimate summary notes that there is a "well-known tipping point" in the North Atlantic overturning, which is consistent with the findings in the summary paper you linked, but published in 2008. So it looks like we still aren't any less screwed...
Total government expenditures in the US were around 10% of GDP in 1930. Was the US a lawless hellhole at 10%?
Cause it's around 40% today.
No it isn't. More like 16% according to the World Bank
Your comment has nothing to do with the original claim, that rapid changes does not happen. They do - and the cause is completely irrelevant when it comes to how those changes affect vegetation, animal life or humans. Neither is the paper limited to volcanic cooling events, which you claim, which makes me wonder if you've read it. If you didn't read it - then what is the point in writing a reply?
Additionally, if you claim that there's newer research the last 20 years which disproves the paper then please cite that research.
It is not completely irrelevant because the events described are cooling events, not heating. And I was looking for more recent research when work called...
The current temperate change is between 0.01 and 0.02 degrees/year, two orders of magnitude greater than when the ice age ended. The problem isn't so much that temperature is changing but that it's changing so fast. The greater the rate of temperature change the harder adaption will be for both human and natural systems.
I've never been able to figure out the original of those claims - do you know? I can't find any scientific sources for it - on the contrary:
Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise)
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projec...
This is mildly interesting, but note that the paper has no citations later than 1998, and the paper itself is dated that year if you go up a level, so the research is not at all recent, but nearly 20 years old.
Also, there is a clarification at the top which reads:
This represents an earlier version of our text. Some changes have been made since we stopped modifying this web version: e.g. we have added a discussion of the role of volcanic aerosols in sudden climate changes...evidence suggests the rapid cooling at the end of the Eemian interglacial was due to a big explosive volcanic event. Other 'volcanic' cooling events occurred during the Holocene.
In other words, they are talking about abrupt (and transitory) volcanic events, not Milankovitch cycles. Moreover, volcanoes produce cooling, not heating (think of the various "years without summers")
I'm sure it's the same down in Washington State as it is up here in coastal British Columbia. Low snow pack means lower river levels, which means potential problems for irrigation in areas under cultivation, harm to fish stocks, and the potential for severe water restrictions in some areas.
Yes it is. I bike to work every day in Seattle and this winter was stunningly different from the last 25 years. From November to February I usually wear closed-toed shoes, but I only did that for about 1 week in December. I was out of town for the other cold week, so it seemed even warmer to me than it maybe should have.
If your theory is so wonderfully complete, why can't you create a computer model that can start with conditions twenty years ago and work out a correct description of the present? Please note, I'm not denying that it's getting warmer. I simply don't subscribe to the current hubris that makes humanity responsible for all of it.
This is called "hindcasting" and is a standard part of the validation of all climate models. See here for more information.
If you can't see the individual starlings, and can only see the flock, the flock behaves in a quantum manner. It jumps around, it can appear in two places at once, apparently traveling faster than light, it has probabilistic properties.
So the tipping point, depends on our detection technologies. If we can't zoom in to see the individual starling then quantum behavior is "flock of bird" sized!
Quantum physics does scale, you just need to realize that the 'flock' is the size that you can detect, and the reason you think it is one thing is because you can't detect half a thing. It's a function of the detector not the thing.
Nope. You are suggesting a hidden variables theory where each starling is a variable. Bell's Theorem says that you can only have this if you give up locality, realism (counterfactual definiteness) or that the universe isn't just making it up as it goes along (conspiracy).
TSA is a place where money goes to be spent on the premise that spending money on things which do nothing is better than doing nothing, even if the outcomes are the same.
They have a blank check to spend money on stuff with no proof it has any value.
Other than harassing everybody, the TSA has accomplished very little. It's become a money pit which pretends to be keeping us safe.
The TSA can point to very few incidents where they've actually stopped anything related to terrorism. Mostly they just serve to annoy everybody else.
Meanwhile, the baggage handlers are the ones who keep getting caught smuggling stuff.
The TSA is a pathetic joke, beefed up by reactionary politicians, and which utterly has failed to make anybody "safer" by any objective measure. In fact, everything they do seems to be devoid of "objective measure".
I submit to TSA screening because it is the only kind of stimulus money one can get out of Republicans.
You're missing anti-GMO, anti-economic-reality, anti-free-markets, and other lunacy of the left.
You have provided no data on anti-GMO political persuasions, just hearsay, so this claim has as much credibility as claims that "anti-vaxers are libruls". I personally suspect that the anti-GMO crowd tend conservative because there is a strong "purity" angle here that meshes well with prevalent conservative religious views.
The rest of your "lunacy" list is not supported by data at any scale. Kansas, Europe and the Great Depression all demonstrate that free markets do not magically work without serious amounts of regulation and stimulation, whereas recent results in Minnesota and the US as a whole provide support for Keynesian economics. And please don't reply with a "No True Scotsman" fallacy - I don't accept it from the left for communism and I don't accept them from the right for unregulated markets.
And yes, libertarians are right wing. Get over it.
I think I saw some research somewhere showing that the same people who believed this also bought thousand dollar specialty speaker cables, HDMI cables, and specially crafted wooden volume control knobs for their home stereos, 'because it improves sound quality'.
I recently bought some very nice speakers (protip: that is where 90% of your money should go. Any fool can make linear amplifiers, but coupling to air is hard.) Anyway, I don't have a lot of free time these days, so I decided to get some speaker cables while I was there. I could have bought some gold banana plugs and wired them up to heavy lamp cord myself, but my house is in pieces and my tools are in storage, etc. so it was really just a time saver. The cheapest cables I could find were USD250 each and the main reason I got them was not for the woo factor but simply because they were well manufactured and looked good (got to appease the wife when buying those boy toys!)
What the heck would cause 1m audio cables to cost more than that? How about silver plating on the plugs because silver has slightly better conductivity! And don't worry about tarnishing because they will also sell you a cleaning kit! Then there was the powered grounding/capacitance/alien mind control dampeners you could get.
What was that P.T.Barnum quote? "It is morally wrong to allow suckers to keep their money." True dat.
Well, "Learned" is absolutely a cute name for a professor.
I'll see you and raise.
How can you know I didn't just guess?
Maybe you did - my text editor says 152!
Feel free to rant about this. Or to try and change it. Individually you are pretty powerless, though. But if indulgence in a false sense of self importance is what keeps you going to your job every day, they sure won't go out of their way to shut you down.
Ranting is the first step to changing anything. As you point out, we are all pretty powerless as individuals, but collectively we can change a lot, if history is any judge. After all, Democracy itself didn't just happen. It wasn't a gift from the powers that be, but taken from them, very much against their will.
Right now, the largest threat to democracy in the US (where I live) is the atomisation (thank you Hannah Arendt) of society. We have all been broken down - not into the disconnected individuals of early 20th century totalitarian systems (of both the left and the right BTW) but into slightly larger groups of ideologically uniform members that can be manipulated in large chunks. This little subthread has already seen several different chunks bumping into each other and having to deal with each other, so in that sense I think my "rant" was very constructive. Not to mention my sig quote.
If antibiotic development wanes long enough, eventually some rich people will be threatened by new infections for which there are no cures.
Once that happens, antibiotic development will instantly become a top priority for governance and major industry players.
And how many of us proles have to die before our lords and masters decide to piss some new antibiotics into our water supplies for us to use?
The summary did call the person in question the robot's owner.
I think the robot should obey the owner's wishes and get them the drink. But it should sigh audibly when asked to and mumble under its breath while giving it to them. Maybe occasionally snipe at them in a passive-aggressive manner. "Should I cancel all productive activities that you had scheduled on your calendar for today?" "Would you like vodka in a glass or should I set it up as an IV drip into your arm?" "Would you like me to make a bunch of regrettable drunken Facebook posts for you, or would you rather do it yourself?"
"Here I am, brain the size of a planet..."
This is UK, they don't really count as European (true Scotsmen usually do, but this MP isn't)
"Heavy Fog In Channel. Continent Cut Off"
-- Headline in The Times, October 22, 1957
Well, you've got to stretch the definition of Religion pretty far to encompass Buddhism. It offers no God, nor any Commandments (though lots of guidelines for monks and others seeking enlightenment). Hardly a religion by most definitions.
Which definitions are you referring to? Mine is Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern". By that definition, Buddhism is certainly a religion in the sense that it provides a path to meaning (i.e. enlightenment.)
It takes practically zero performance to rotate an image.
You must be a web programmer...
"Of 12 day care facilities affiliated with tech companies, six—that’s half—have below-average vaccination rates, according to the state’s data."
So half of the sample is below average? Hmmm!
+5 Insightful? Really??
Not the average of the sample, the nationwide average. Sheesh!
One thing I've noticed about software engineers is that too many of them are lacking the critical statistics skills they need to function effectively. Perhaps it's because we tend to think in Boolean terms of true and false. Thus, "I have a 1:450,000,000 chance of winning the lottery" turns into "I have a chance of winning the lottery", which is a different wording that is remarkably easy to misinterpret as a "50:50" chance, even though both outcomes are statistically equal to false. They apply that same lack of understanding to any risk, including vaccination (a 1:3,000,000 chance of a serious adverse reaction becomes "a chance of a serious adverse reaction".)
This says it all.
The ways of making and keeping friends that come naturally to everyone else don't come naturally to him. He *wants* friends, but just doesn't know how to make them.
They don't come naturally. Those are skills you have to learn. Most end up being naturally taught, but some people miss it.
Without proper supports*, he quickly winds up socially isolating himself with his actions
Which he will always do until you teach him better social skills. Don't look at it as some medical disorder, look at it as a skill gap. I have the same problems and I'm 28. There's no one to help me now and no one ever tried. The older you get with poor social skills the worse it gets. People don't fault kids for social awkwardness, but you're a creepy crazy guy if you're socially awkward after being a teenager. People don't give you any benefit of doubt. You exist to kidnap or harass people as any mistake you made was on purpose and for some specific reason. 'Why does this person not have any friends? He must be dangerous, lets stay away from him.' Social awkwardness is a self perpetuating problem that can quickly spiral out of control into deep depression and suicide.
You won't help him by teaching others how to behave around him. You can't teach everyone he'll meet in his life. You have to teach him how to interact with others.
Worse, he will interpret any sign of kindness as friendship and follow this person.
Because everyone else ignores (or hates) him or at least that's how he sees it. When no one talks to you, that one person who does must be really interested in you. Why else would they talk to you? No one else does.
Please don't let him end up like me. Teach him social skills like you might teach someone math. Read about some specific type of communication or behavior and then practice and practice and practice it. You might have to deal with anxiety issues as well.
Please don't assume that a) your experience is universal (anecdotes are not data) and b) that those of us with kids on the spectrum are lazy, ignorant twits. We have spent YEARS doing all of the stuff that you "suggest" and all the stuff that you deride as "useless" and guess what? Our kid STILL has a real set of problems. Is he much better at social interaction now that we have spent all this time teaching him skills and getting him therapy? Yes! Can he pass as neurotypical? Not for more than about 30 minutes on a good day. And that is never going to change, no matter how much willpower, time and money we throw at him because there is a real physical problem here.
Would you tell a blind kid that they just need to work on the skill of seeing? Of course not! And ASD kids have real, measurable, neurological deficits. The brain is a wonderful thing and can route around a lot of damage, but it is no substitute for dedicated hardware, which he clearly lacks. And quite frankly getting guilt from pseudo-experts like you does not make life easier. My wife has a masters in this field, which required actual lab work and clinical experience, so please keep your ignorant, holier-than-thou, superior attitude to yourself. You are causing a lot more damage than you realise.
That could indeed be at the heart of one of the solutions to the paradox. As a civilization becomes more individualistic and inward focusing, breeding might drop off to the point of extinction. Think about it, if you could live 10,000+ years and have all of your needs (including emotional) met by synthetic means, would you bother having children? How many people would give any thought to the species as a whole continuing if we were not forced to deal with each other?
This sounds remarkably like C.S.Lewis' description of hell in The Great Divorce.