Fine, well if you'll go with the constance of human behaviour, how about you stop with the cherry-picking of historical events? The Chinese back in the 14th century would go all around the world as they knew it in peace, even in places where they could have easily dominated and conquered such as Africa. To use Colombus' example as if it was what always happens when civilisations meet is just bullshit. Maybe that's far from obvious if your knowledge of history is centred on the Americas.
Furthermore, while basic human behaviour remains the same, civilisation and society progresses and advances morally, which is why people don't consider it acceptable anymore to make slaves, only a century or two after it was abolished.
And obviously the elephant in the room, aliens are not humans. See my comment about making the mistake of projecting the familiar onto the utterly unknown.
As for your points, well, they're kind of bullshit. What civilisation do cattle have? None. As such they're quite boring. They have nothing to teach us except for what biology teaches us, as they don't transmit knowledge from generation to generation. Nothing they've done is worth studying really. Whereas civilisations, all civilisations, are worthy of being thoroughly studied. Again, you seem to have (dis)missed my point about us being more interesting left intact than "as a resource". Also you clearly overestimate our interest "as a resource". What's so good about our resources? Water? We don't even have that much non-salty water, whereas the universe is full of it. Oxygen? Again, it's not even like there's so much oxygen here that is not readily available in other places or in other ways. Minerals? Once again, there's not much you'll find here that you won't find anywhere else. It's not like there's even a lot of oil left. You'd think they'd want to eat us or any of our animals? How likely do you think this is that Earth meat is any good to a creature that would be the product of an isolated biological evolution? We share DNA with what we eat.
Also, thinking that we would be of no interest to the curiosity of any eventual alien civilisation is utterly retarded. Emphasis on utterly retarded. We study thoroughly ancient civilisations by digging their fossilised poop and analysing the whole thing in expensive imaging machines that can see through anything in 3D just to determine what they ate for breakfast, yet somehow a very complex planet-wide civilisation would be of no interest to anyone out there? Why? They'd either find a lot of things in common with us or a lot that differs, both of which are very interesting.
In conclusion, I suggest you stop taking your opinion about eventual alien civilisations from science fiction writers with inferiority complexes that stem from their high school days (evil superior aliens = jocks/bullies/mean popular girls).
Right, because if we found a fascinating uncontacted alien civilisation, our first reflex would be to kill them all, bomb their artifacts beyond recognition and just strip mine their planet for precious minerals, right? Right?!? More like we would study the shit out of them without trying to contaminate them.
No, forget it. Christopher Columbus went with destruction, and we all know that intelligent beings from more advanced civilisations would do the same dumb things as people 5 centuries ago.
Which is funny, we like to project onto those eventual aliens our projected technological advances of centuries in the future, but at the same time we want to project onto them the behaviour, moral retardation, ruthlessness, disinterest and folly of centuries ago. No cookie for you Stephen Hawking, you may be good at astrophysics but that didn't prevent you from falling in the old trap of projecting the familiar onto the utterly unknown.
You have to remember the context of this. It's just another one in a long series of moral panics. Twenty years from now no one will care about child porn cartoons or whatever as we do now.
Same thing for the war on drug. It was all the rage in the 1980s, then slowly they realised little of what they did worked that well or was worth it.
Watchu talking bout son. For every Predator in the air there are two pilots someplace in Arizona manning it remotely.
And sending 20 probes to Saturn is stupid compared to making on more expensive mission to send a drone blimp or a drone boat to Titan. Besides for every probe you have large teams of all kinds of people behind, and then you have years of study on the returned data by planetologists and such. So if you've got money to blow on probes you might as well get ambitious rather than do the same thing again and again en masse.
Yeah, and how many times do I have to repeat it for you to understand my point? What you criticize Apple for doing are things everybody and their momma does. Like I said "It's dishonest to bring up something while not acknowledging that everybody does it too". You can't criticize a company for doing what the entire competition does, you can only criticize the industry. lol faggot.
1) So? You want to blame a company for trying to have an exclusivity on an advantage? lol, get out of your basement and get a reality check, that's how business works.
2) Everybody and their momma does that all the time. They sue anyone they can for patents while getting sued over patents. It's dishonest to bring up something while not acknowledging that everybody does it too.
3) Yeah, and Amazon and Sony do it too. Besides, Apple monopoly, on eBook readers?? Nigga please.
4) So, Apple has an exclusivity deal with a phone company for the phone service on its telephones, and you don't see why they'd have to reject something that would make phone calls bypassing the phone company's service for free/cheaper? Do you know what exclusivity means?
You people are just like hipsters really, now that Apple is big and mainstream it's got to be bad, no matter the reason.
Absolutely agree about movies. I think the reason is, they've optimised movie writing. By that I mean, they tweaked the formula as much as they could, so in every movie you have a flawed hero you can relate to, spectacular and thrilling twists and turns ("oh no, I'm the hero and I'm about to be executed with a bullet in the back of my head. Oh well it's okay, all I have to do is a bad ass move to turn the gun on that goon and not even fire it but knock his ass out instead"), some love interest, a villain that stays alive until they end, etc... It's always the same elements and composition because they figured that's what always works.
You can hear the same thing in music. That's why nothing (in mainstream music) has a unique sound anymore, they figured out what the optimised sound was, so now they give it to you over and over again. That's as if McDonald's had figured the best recipe for hamburgers that works best with most people, and served you the same thing over and over, only varying their sandwiches a bit. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they had done something like that.
In a way that's not new. Think about it, there's always been inspired artists, but there's also always been uninspired makers of "art" who substituted their lack of inspiration/imagination by taking bits of artworks they didn't create and following formulas. The keyword is formula. People have always done things following well defined patterns, recipes, formulas. Sometimes you can hear a joke a deconstruct the formula that must have been used to create it. Same thing with a movie plot.
The difference is, it's a person who "ran" the algorithm, benefiting from the less rigid human intelligence, and the benefit of judgement. So it's more complicated to translate that into an algorithm. But in a way, it's nothing you. If anything, it devaluates formulaic and uninspired works of art, by showing they can be mass produced by machines, and by contrast, increases the value of inspired art. As for an algorithm imitating Bach's style, it's been for centuries that composers have imitated Bach's style (or Mozart, Beethoven etc...). So on top of human copycats now you have computer copycats. Big whoop, because none of this would have been done if Bach had never done what he had done. The true challenge is if an algorithm could create a major composer that never was. In a way in can happen and not happen. It can happen because theoretically a random ASCII generator could write Shakespeare, the corollary is it won't happen because it's doubtful an algorithm would identify a work of genius if it created one, and because the same is doubtful from a human listener/reader.
This being said, it could totally work for pop music. Think about it, for example, a Kanye West algorithm. Use a database of hundreds of records from the 1960s and 1970s, make it randomly loop a sample poorly and annoyingly, add a semi-random pattern of drums, add a poorly sliced speeded up vocal sample to use in the chorus, and there you go! But again, it's just turning a human-executed formula into a computer-executed algorithm.
Citizen Kane anyone? They can afford to lose money there as long as they please, and they've got good reasons to. Some things are more important than maximising next quarter's profits.
That's what amuses me about Americans and their ideology of having the government keep its hand off the steering wheel. Particularly since the early 1970s, you've done pretty much everything you could to see how it works when you let everything run itself without any global control.
Then when corporations and unions run wild and do whatever they can for their own profit, you guys fail to connect the dots with your ideological problem. Things work out better in some other countries because the governments define strict rules to absolutely everything to try to make sure that things run right and in most people's interest. Because a government (one without an important corruption problem)'s best interest is aligned with the best general interest. But in the USA, a bunch of John Galts made you fools believe that what was in their best interest was also in your best interest, that's how you suckers work 70 hours a week and get paid like you work 40.
I'm from France, and I used to think that the concept of working overtime for the same hourly wage as regular working time was scandalous. Because in France, not only are you paid for your overtime work, but you're paid more! And you work overtime for free? SUCKERS!!!
That's the ultimate paradox, an awful lot of you American software engineers are libertarians, preach less government control, but at the same time you suffer on a daily basis from unacceptable (by French standards) work conditions that are avoided in other countries only through more government control. It's like you guys have no clue what's good for you!
The really puzzling aspect of this is, whereas scientific management has been used for over a century in a lot of sectors of industry in order to optimise productivity, in software development, an industry that generates probably hundreds of billion dollars a year, it seems as if no one bothered to try and figure out what makes productivity peak.
It's a decades old industry, the richest man in the world for a whole decade built his empire on that, yet even at that guy's company you probably couldn't find a manager at any level who could tell you of methodically determined ways to optimise the productivity of their workers! It's like saying "well, doesn't work too bad for us, not sure if it could work better, probably could... Meh, who cares!". Makes you almost wonder what good managers are, most might as well pick their deadlines by throwing darts at a calendar, and have you spend more time at the office even if you're spending half your day trying not to close your eyes than be there less but be more productive. A lot of managers still base their planning on the idea that man-hours mean anything in software engineering! Don't you have to know anything about management to be a manager or do people just improvise themselves one?
Slightly off-topic : what annoys me most is being asked to use very verbose variable names (think 20+ characters), because it supposedly makes it more readable. That's utter bullshit, and the people who ask me this never did anything very complicated. It's much harder to juggle with a bunch of long variables than to juggle with two-letter variables. I prefer to use short variable names and comment them in a block at the beginning of the function.
That's the very reason why mathematicians use one-letter 'variable' names. Think about it.
Oh so true, I picked that up in high school after I realised that acting stupid was funnier than being serious. If you're truly smarter than most people, that's what you want to do anyway, because you don't have to prove you're smart and no one likes a tight ass nerd who's gotta act superior.
The problem with people on Slashdot is that they think 'nerds', that is, themselves, have the monopoly on superior intelligence, and therefore non-nerds from Vladimir Putin to Paris Hilton cannot be superiorly smart. I think they like to think they have the monopoly on smarts because they think that's all they have going for them whether non-nerds have everything else going for them.
Are you fucking thick? You said educated, not smart. How can you not see that the two have nothing at all in common? Education level depends mostly on socio-economical factors, very little on intelligence.
One smart soldier with a machine gun cannot beat 1000 stick wielding primitives.
Oh really? What about the Battle of Thermopylae? Apparently 300 dudes standing in line with a big shield and a big spear can defeat over 10,000 guys. Probably because King Leonidas was a superior general? Actually as far as technology only is concerned a better example might be colonials making a massacre. And sure, given the right circumstances (if the gunner cannot be easily reached) and enough bullets one machine gunner can kill a thousand stick wielding dudes.
What is typical, however, is massive hordes of stupidity to rally under a particular banner or cause which results in massive change and/or destruction.
Example please, and try not to Godwin yourself. The problem when you argue about anything intelligence-related on Slashdot is that people around here have very strange concepts of intelligence (often confused with wisdom, foresight or education) and stupidity (which can be just about anything around here).
Engineers and scientists never ruled (maybe you wouldn't have to disagree if you actually understood what I said), but through their work they gave rulers the muscle to rule. Technological superiority, that helps you win wars. Just imagine a war between an army of AK-47 wielding soldiers versions soldiers with muskets. Smart engineers like Kalashnikov make the difference. Smart generals/commanders like Napoleon, Eisenhower or Hannibal do the ruling partially using what they do. Point is, being smart isn't optional for any of these guys, it's the advantage at every level. So don't give me that crap about "boohoo jocks rule the world and get all the women while us poor losers stay stuck into lockers".
Celeb TV doesn't rule the media, people like Rupert Murdoch rule the media, people smart enough to build huge media empires and give us the crap people will want to watch. And hereditary power transmission doesn't count, because it's hereditary, and George Bush isn't dumb.
Intelligence is the muscle of the greedy and power-hungry. Just how do you get into power by being a dumbass, besides by hereditary power transmission and by chance? Before you answer GWB I propose we amend the Godwin law to include him.
Genghis Khan a genius? Judging by his descendants, difficult to prove!
Judging by his descendants? You best be trolling, nigger! Judging by what he actually did he was quite brilliant. He pretty much invented the Pony Express.
Greenspan, Paulson and Geithner are smart. That doesn't make infallible. You want to talk about economy? Look at all these bright American economists who got Nobel prizes and what not for their theoretical bullshit, but never saw the shitstorm that would come out of keeping their hand off the wheel. In hindsight they sound like dumbasses, even though they're not. Lacking foresight doesn't make you an idiot. George W. Bush is actually quite smart, even if it goes against everything that makes you feel warm. One of his main problems is that despite being quite intelligent he's incapable from adopting a point of view other than his own, quite unlike Barack Obama who seems to truly understand everyone. That doesn't make one smarter than the other though, but it makes one better fitted to be a good president than the other.
Try asking any of them to code a simple program!
Goddamnit you're dumb. Being smart doesn't make you an almighty übermensch who can do anything anyone can do.
Nope, in the long run the sociopath wins, which is why humanity will have a short run indeed....
Which flies into the face of just about every fucking thing we know. Humanity has been around for millions of years, and your government gives you money for you to buy food and shelter even if you don't produce anything.
The smarter people will invariably be the minority overridden by the less smart masses for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways.
Persecution complex much? Just about everything you just whined about is utter bullshit. The smart have always ruled. The smart generals have triumphed from the less gifted leaders, helped by the inventions of the smart engineers, enabled by the discoveries of the smart scientists. Don't let your historical shortsightedness and your obsession with modern day American conservatives or even your movie-watching make you think otherwise.
Does a bigger brain necessarily mean they had a higher IQ?
Yes, and I'll have you know it works the same way with computer chips. And imagine what an ENIAC may have done with such a volume!! Alas we men of the 21st century and our incredibly small chips may never find out...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh ha ha that's funny because you described Modern Warfare 2 and acted like it was a prediction of what this one is going to be like.
we do in fact know a great deal about aliens
lol, what??
Tell me a single thing we know.
Fine, well if you'll go with the constance of human behaviour, how about you stop with the cherry-picking of historical events? The Chinese back in the 14th century would go all around the world as they knew it in peace, even in places where they could have easily dominated and conquered such as Africa. To use Colombus' example as if it was what always happens when civilisations meet is just bullshit. Maybe that's far from obvious if your knowledge of history is centred on the Americas.
Furthermore, while basic human behaviour remains the same, civilisation and society progresses and advances morally, which is why people don't consider it acceptable anymore to make slaves, only a century or two after it was abolished.
And obviously the elephant in the room, aliens are not humans. See my comment about making the mistake of projecting the familiar onto the utterly unknown.
As for your points, well, they're kind of bullshit. What civilisation do cattle have? None. As such they're quite boring. They have nothing to teach us except for what biology teaches us, as they don't transmit knowledge from generation to generation. Nothing they've done is worth studying really. Whereas civilisations, all civilisations, are worthy of being thoroughly studied. Again, you seem to have (dis)missed my point about us being more interesting left intact than "as a resource". Also you clearly overestimate our interest "as a resource". What's so good about our resources? Water? We don't even have that much non-salty water, whereas the universe is full of it. Oxygen? Again, it's not even like there's so much oxygen here that is not readily available in other places or in other ways. Minerals? Once again, there's not much you'll find here that you won't find anywhere else. It's not like there's even a lot of oil left. You'd think they'd want to eat us or any of our animals? How likely do you think this is that Earth meat is any good to a creature that would be the product of an isolated biological evolution? We share DNA with what we eat.
Also, thinking that we would be of no interest to the curiosity of any eventual alien civilisation is utterly retarded. Emphasis on utterly retarded. We study thoroughly ancient civilisations by digging their fossilised poop and analysing the whole thing in expensive imaging machines that can see through anything in 3D just to determine what they ate for breakfast, yet somehow a very complex planet-wide civilisation would be of no interest to anyone out there? Why? They'd either find a lot of things in common with us or a lot that differs, both of which are very interesting.
In conclusion, I suggest you stop taking your opinion about eventual alien civilisations from science fiction writers with inferiority complexes that stem from their high school days (evil superior aliens = jocks/bullies/mean popular girls).
Right, because if we found a fascinating uncontacted alien civilisation, our first reflex would be to kill them all, bomb their artifacts beyond recognition and just strip mine their planet for precious minerals, right? Right?!? More like we would study the shit out of them without trying to contaminate them.
No, forget it. Christopher Columbus went with destruction, and we all know that intelligent beings from more advanced civilisations would do the same dumb things as people 5 centuries ago.
Which is funny, we like to project onto those eventual aliens our projected technological advances of centuries in the future, but at the same time we want to project onto them the behaviour, moral retardation, ruthlessness, disinterest and folly of centuries ago. No cookie for you Stephen Hawking, you may be good at astrophysics but that didn't prevent you from falling in the old trap of projecting the familiar onto the utterly unknown.
You have to remember the context of this. It's just another one in a long series of moral panics. Twenty years from now no one will care about child porn cartoons or whatever as we do now. Same thing for the war on drug. It was all the rage in the 1980s, then slowly they realised little of what they did worked that well or was worth it.
Content-aware filling is old in the same way anything else is old. It was around a long time ago but it sucked. Hopefully this one is much better.
"not even the military needs pilots anymore"
Watchu talking bout son. For every Predator in the air there are two pilots someplace in Arizona manning it remotely.
And sending 20 probes to Saturn is stupid compared to making on more expensive mission to send a drone blimp or a drone boat to Titan. Besides for every probe you have large teams of all kinds of people behind, and then you have years of study on the returned data by planetologists and such. So if you've got money to blow on probes you might as well get ambitious rather than do the same thing again and again en masse.
Yeah, and how many times do I have to repeat it for you to understand my point? What you criticize Apple for doing are things everybody and their momma does. Like I said "It's dishonest to bring up something while not acknowledging that everybody does it too". You can't criticize a company for doing what the entire competition does, you can only criticize the industry. lol faggot.
1) So? You want to blame a company for trying to have an exclusivity on an advantage? lol, get out of your basement and get a reality check, that's how business works.
2) Everybody and their momma does that all the time. They sue anyone they can for patents while getting sued over patents. It's dishonest to bring up something while not acknowledging that everybody does it too.
3) Yeah, and Amazon and Sony do it too. Besides, Apple monopoly, on eBook readers?? Nigga please.
4) So, Apple has an exclusivity deal with a phone company for the phone service on its telephones, and you don't see why they'd have to reject something that would make phone calls bypassing the phone company's service for free/cheaper? Do you know what exclusivity means?
You people are just like hipsters really, now that Apple is big and mainstream it's got to be bad, no matter the reason.
Wow, butthurt at church much? Makes you wonder why. Or perhaps not...
The dynamic range of human hearing is 120dB
Yeah, if you play sounds at 120 dB...
Absolutely agree about movies. I think the reason is, they've optimised movie writing. By that I mean, they tweaked the formula as much as they could, so in every movie you have a flawed hero you can relate to, spectacular and thrilling twists and turns ("oh no, I'm the hero and I'm about to be executed with a bullet in the back of my head. Oh well it's okay, all I have to do is a bad ass move to turn the gun on that goon and not even fire it but knock his ass out instead"), some love interest, a villain that stays alive until they end, etc... It's always the same elements and composition because they figured that's what always works.
You can hear the same thing in music. That's why nothing (in mainstream music) has a unique sound anymore, they figured out what the optimised sound was, so now they give it to you over and over again. That's as if McDonald's had figured the best recipe for hamburgers that works best with most people, and served you the same thing over and over, only varying their sandwiches a bit. Actually I wouldn't be surprised if they had done something like that.
In a way that's not new. Think about it, there's always been inspired artists, but there's also always been uninspired makers of "art" who substituted their lack of inspiration/imagination by taking bits of artworks they didn't create and following formulas. The keyword is formula. People have always done things following well defined patterns, recipes, formulas. Sometimes you can hear a joke a deconstruct the formula that must have been used to create it. Same thing with a movie plot.
The difference is, it's a person who "ran" the algorithm, benefiting from the less rigid human intelligence, and the benefit of judgement. So it's more complicated to translate that into an algorithm. But in a way, it's nothing you. If anything, it devaluates formulaic and uninspired works of art, by showing they can be mass produced by machines, and by contrast, increases the value of inspired art. As for an algorithm imitating Bach's style, it's been for centuries that composers have imitated Bach's style (or Mozart, Beethoven etc...). So on top of human copycats now you have computer copycats. Big whoop, because none of this would have been done if Bach had never done what he had done. The true challenge is if an algorithm could create a major composer that never was. In a way in can happen and not happen. It can happen because theoretically a random ASCII generator could write Shakespeare, the corollary is it won't happen because it's doubtful an algorithm would identify a work of genius if it created one, and because the same is doubtful from a human listener/reader.
This being said, it could totally work for pop music. Think about it, for example, a Kanye West algorithm. Use a database of hundreds of records from the 1960s and 1970s, make it randomly loop a sample poorly and annoyingly, add a semi-random pattern of drums, add a poorly sliced speeded up vocal sample to use in the chorus, and there you go! But again, it's just turning a human-executed formula into a computer-executed algorithm.
Citizen Kane anyone? They can afford to lose money there as long as they please, and they've got good reasons to. Some things are more important than maximising next quarter's profits.
That's what amuses me about Americans and their ideology of having the government keep its hand off the steering wheel. Particularly since the early 1970s, you've done pretty much everything you could to see how it works when you let everything run itself without any global control.
Then when corporations and unions run wild and do whatever they can for their own profit, you guys fail to connect the dots with your ideological problem. Things work out better in some other countries because the governments define strict rules to absolutely everything to try to make sure that things run right and in most people's interest. Because a government (one without an important corruption problem)'s best interest is aligned with the best general interest. But in the USA, a bunch of John Galts made you fools believe that what was in their best interest was also in your best interest, that's how you suckers work 70 hours a week and get paid like you work 40.
I'm from France, and I used to think that the concept of working overtime for the same hourly wage as regular working time was scandalous. Because in France, not only are you paid for your overtime work, but you're paid more! And you work overtime for free? SUCKERS!!!
That's the ultimate paradox, an awful lot of you American software engineers are libertarians, preach less government control, but at the same time you suffer on a daily basis from unacceptable (by French standards) work conditions that are avoided in other countries only through more government control. It's like you guys have no clue what's good for you!
The really puzzling aspect of this is, whereas scientific management has been used for over a century in a lot of sectors of industry in order to optimise productivity, in software development, an industry that generates probably hundreds of billion dollars a year, it seems as if no one bothered to try and figure out what makes productivity peak.
It's a decades old industry, the richest man in the world for a whole decade built his empire on that, yet even at that guy's company you probably couldn't find a manager at any level who could tell you of methodically determined ways to optimise the productivity of their workers! It's like saying "well, doesn't work too bad for us, not sure if it could work better, probably could... Meh, who cares!". Makes you almost wonder what good managers are, most might as well pick their deadlines by throwing darts at a calendar, and have you spend more time at the office even if you're spending half your day trying not to close your eyes than be there less but be more productive. A lot of managers still base their planning on the idea that man-hours mean anything in software engineering! Don't you have to know anything about management to be a manager or do people just improvise themselves one?
Slightly off-topic : what annoys me most is being asked to use very verbose variable names (think 20+ characters), because it supposedly makes it more readable. That's utter bullshit, and the people who ask me this never did anything very complicated. It's much harder to juggle with a bunch of long variables than to juggle with two-letter variables. I prefer to use short variable names and comment them in a block at the beginning of the function.
That's the very reason why mathematicians use one-letter 'variable' names. Think about it.
The truly smart know how to be stupid.
Oh so true, I picked that up in high school after I realised that acting stupid was funnier than being serious. If you're truly smarter than most people, that's what you want to do anyway, because you don't have to prove you're smart and no one likes a tight ass nerd who's gotta act superior.
The problem with people on Slashdot is that they think 'nerds', that is, themselves, have the monopoly on superior intelligence, and therefore non-nerds from Vladimir Putin to Paris Hilton cannot be superiorly smart. I think they like to think they have the monopoly on smarts because they think that's all they have going for them whether non-nerds have everything else going for them.
Educated people are having fewer
Are you fucking thick? You said educated, not smart. How can you not see that the two have nothing at all in common? Education level depends mostly on socio-economical factors, very little on intelligence.
One smart soldier with a machine gun cannot beat 1000 stick wielding primitives.
Oh really? What about the Battle of Thermopylae? Apparently 300 dudes standing in line with a big shield and a big spear can defeat over 10,000 guys. Probably because King Leonidas was a superior general? Actually as far as technology only is concerned a better example might be colonials making a massacre. And sure, given the right circumstances (if the gunner cannot be easily reached) and enough bullets one machine gunner can kill a thousand stick wielding dudes.
What is typical, however, is massive hordes of stupidity to rally under a particular banner or cause which results in massive change and/or destruction.
Example please, and try not to Godwin yourself. The problem when you argue about anything intelligence-related on Slashdot is that people around here have very strange concepts of intelligence (often confused with wisdom, foresight or education) and stupidity (which can be just about anything around here).
Engineers and scientists never ruled (maybe you wouldn't have to disagree if you actually understood what I said), but through their work they gave rulers the muscle to rule. Technological superiority, that helps you win wars. Just imagine a war between an army of AK-47 wielding soldiers versions soldiers with muskets. Smart engineers like Kalashnikov make the difference. Smart generals/commanders like Napoleon, Eisenhower or Hannibal do the ruling partially using what they do. Point is, being smart isn't optional for any of these guys, it's the advantage at every level. So don't give me that crap about "boohoo jocks rule the world and get all the women while us poor losers stay stuck into lockers".
Celeb TV doesn't rule the media, people like Rupert Murdoch rule the media, people smart enough to build huge media empires and give us the crap people will want to watch. And hereditary power transmission doesn't count, because it's hereditary, and George Bush isn't dumb.
Intelligence is the muscle of the greedy and power-hungry. Just how do you get into power by being a dumbass, besides by hereditary power transmission and by chance? Before you answer GWB I propose we amend the Godwin law to include him.
Genghis Khan a genius? Judging by his descendants, difficult to prove!
Judging by his descendants? You best be trolling, nigger! Judging by what he actually did he was quite brilliant. He pretty much invented the Pony Express.
Greenspan, Paulson and Geithner are smart. That doesn't make infallible. You want to talk about economy? Look at all these bright American economists who got Nobel prizes and what not for their theoretical bullshit, but never saw the shitstorm that would come out of keeping their hand off the wheel. In hindsight they sound like dumbasses, even though they're not. Lacking foresight doesn't make you an idiot. George W. Bush is actually quite smart, even if it goes against everything that makes you feel warm. One of his main problems is that despite being quite intelligent he's incapable from adopting a point of view other than his own, quite unlike Barack Obama who seems to truly understand everyone. That doesn't make one smarter than the other though, but it makes one better fitted to be a good president than the other.
Try asking any of them to code a simple program!
Goddamnit you're dumb. Being smart doesn't make you an almighty übermensch who can do anything anyone can do.
Nope, in the long run the sociopath wins, which is why humanity will have a short run indeed....
Which flies into the face of just about every fucking thing we know. Humanity has been around for millions of years, and your government gives you money for you to buy food and shelter even if you don't produce anything.
TL;DR : Persecution complex much.
The smarter people will invariably be the minority overridden by the less smart masses for a variety of reasons in a variety of ways.
Persecution complex much? Just about everything you just whined about is utter bullshit. The smart have always ruled. The smart generals have triumphed from the less gifted leaders, helped by the inventions of the smart engineers, enabled by the discoveries of the smart scientists. Don't let your historical shortsightedness and your obsession with modern day American conservatives or even your movie-watching make you think otherwise.
Does a bigger brain necessarily mean they had a higher IQ?
Yes, and I'll have you know it works the same way with computer chips. And imagine what an ENIAC may have done with such a volume!! Alas we men of the 21st century and our incredibly small chips may never find out...