My theory of the afterlife is that others will be alive after I am dead. That should be afterlife enough for anyone. It isn’t, but it should be.
Besides, I didn’t exist for 13.8 billion years, and it didn’t bother me any. Why should nonexistence for infinity years afterwards be any different?
I’m not scared of death. There’s literally nothing to fear from it. I am scared of dying, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy, so I hate big changes. I’m sure that, when my time approaches, I’ll whine and whinge and complain; but afterwards I guarantee that I’ll shut up.
Some people get to enter oblivion without even knowing it. E.g. some taliban setting up a RPG only to be sighted and dispatched by a lurking A10 “warthog” one second they are there then as the depleted uranium shells hit them they are turned into clouds of meat dust….they never knew they were dead…
I am not familiar with the Sopranos. Not a big fan of the lionisation of scummy gangster types at my age…the naked ape looking in the mirror and not liking what he sees…
Ah, we’re taking about stupidity again.
So please allow me to append a new example, this time from the country of my birth.
A Philippine woman, a QAnon influencer named Romana Didulo, proclaimed herself Queen of Canada. In this regal role she told her many Q-besotted followers that she had made bills illegal. Meaning bills for services. That they no longer had to pay for electricity, water/sewer, credit cards etc.
People believed her.
And they are having their electricity and water cut off for non-payment.
She told her followers to shoot/kill healthcare workers administering covid vaccines, and she was arrested for that. They had a psychiatrist check her out. Apparently they could keep her locked up because she wasn’t crazy.
The people who get fooled be her are not what psychologists would call intellectually impaired. They can read, write and do arithmetic, and we know that because they learned about her on social media and previously paid their bills.They are low average to average.
People in that range are also the majority of the population. Depending on which standard deviation you choose for the normal model, 15 or 16, they’re 54% or 52% of the population. I don’t want to stand on precise figures because they can’t be precise. The actual number doesn’t matter. The takeaway is that gullible people, low average to average, are the majority in the world. They can be made to believe almost anything, and in large consequential numbers. (In this case, 70,000 followers.)
Public policy should be based on the understanding that normal people are that stupid.
If they can be made to believe in miracles like virgin birth and parting the Red Sea, they can be made to believe in QAnon nonsense.
You have published a very good article, I keep looking for such good contact, I agree with your information and important facts, and keep working with the publication of such good information. https://update.holdpuris.com/
Interesting. I didn’t click on the “holdpuris” link, but I did a Google search on the link, and apparently it’s an Indian “stock market advisory and investment firm” run by some guy named “Hold Puri”. So yeah, spam. “Ayushi Basu” appears to be spamming the comments sections of random blogs with both “holdpuris” and various porny looking links, but not a huge number of them, so maybe he’s doing it by hand? Lame!
Once children are taught to read and write and to the basic math. They should then be taught how to use critical thinking to deduce what is clearly true and what is obviously false. And stop reading the bible and koran to impressionable children you are enabling the ruthless to prey on the gullible…..simples…
Laripu – as you did last week, you’re associating foolishness with intelligence scores, when the two are really quite independent.
The majority of extremely foolish people therefore naturally belong to the majority in their intelligence scores, but it doesn’t automatically follow that the majority of people are extremely foolish.
Just this morning I was reminded what a miserable fool I have been at certain points, and I’m exceptionally intelligent — QED.
Intelligent people usually make foolish decisions when they give in to emotional subroutines in their head. I once worked with a woman who had a doctorate in physics and was probably the best mathematician I have ever met. But she had a soft spot for dangerous geezers…she dated a geezer who was only three months out of prison for raping and nearly killing three women…her friends told her that she was dicing with death….she was…three weeks later he strangled her to death….foolish? Aye…
Donn – everyone is stupid some of the time. Making a isolated mistakes, which you recognize and correct, doesn’t make you stupid.
But people who consistently fail to make good decisions are stupid; and that’s normal, because the norm is stupid. (And people who consistently make terrible decisions and never learn from mistakes do so because they are unable to figure out what’s better for them. That sounds like normal stupidity to me.)
And intelligence is distributed just like every other human trait: a very few people are severely impaired, a very few people are geniuses and the majority clusters around the norm. Using IQ as a proxy is a useful abstraction when taking about populations, and that doesn’t mean anything for individual people.
Even if using the normal distribution is no more than drastically approximate, that doesn’t matter because I’m only using it to come to the conclusions that 1) most people are stupid and 2) stupidity is normal. It doesn’t matter to me what the actual distribution is. I see that conclusion as pretty obvious.
If you think intelligence isn’t anything like normally distributed, which curve is a better model for it? Do you think it’s a skewed distribution? If so, skewed in which direction? It can’t be uniform or geniuses would be as common as average people, which we know isn’t true.
My motivation for these assertions is political. I think public policy should be structured in a way that makes navigating life easier for most people, normally stupid people. I also think that we should rethink how much say normal/stupid people have about social decisions like the human rights of minorities, and whether schools should teach creationism or evolution.
No, I’m OK with whatever distribution you like for intelligence – could be normal, or somewhat skewed – whatever.
That doesn’t correlate with foolishness, though. I mean, if anything, M27Holts’ example is more the rule than the exception – so many exceptionally intelligent people, by the measures we commonly use for that, are surprisingly, consistently foolish. And, as Jim Baerg suggested last week, better able to rationalize. One vicissitude they seem prone to, in terms of politics, is libertarianism, a political philosophy that seems excusable for teenagers but in adults is a kind of intellectual sociopathy.
Though maybe it makes no difference to your conclusions. We can agree that many people are foolish, without needing to establish a specific distribution based on better studied phenomena. We can observe that the majority are capable of foolish choices, and therefore society needs protections against majority rule. I think that has been well understood for some time, just a matter of getting the details right.
I don’t think there’s much genuine debate over whether schools should teach creationism, though?
About creationism: here in the wild west (I mean the USA) that debate isn’t over. American religious nuts, of which there are many, keep trying to sneak religion into schools one way or another. Some call it “creation science” and say that it ought to be taught as an alternate explanation. The Supreme Court had deemed that to be religion and therefore not allowed in public schools, but the current Supreme Court is much more conservative and religious, so I expect changes in the next 10 years.
Just been reading an article on teaching evolution in british schools which says tension is generated when you force children indoctrinated by their faith are forced into accepting that evolution is fact…and yes if you believe something in the face of a mountain of evidence that proves you wrong then surely the lesson is taught that you cannot bury your head in the sand or close your eyes and ears…unfortunately even in britain, religion will win the battle and science teachers will have to concede or lose their jobs…we are going to hell in a handcart….I tells ya…
I don’t generally quiz people on either their religious beliefs or their thoughts on evolution, but my guess is that I know a few who are Christian, and that not one of them sees any conflict with evolution. I know there’s another side to it, but that’s why I said “genuine debate” – those people aren’t part of any such thing.
I can see the current Supreme Court letting the Christians back at the table to some extent, but I really don’t see how they could find creation science or any variation thereof to be anything but religious instruction, and hence unconstitutional.
The current anxiety over the Supremes is of course the Roe vs Wade abortion ruling, where the issue is currently framed as Christian. But it isn’t, fundamentally, and that makes a great deal of difference for its constitutional status. It just has been seized on by some Christian factions.
M27Holts 11:29 – I think you may be only a small step from constructing a linear philosophy! Already have 0 and 1 so: Quick, fix up a couple of operators and — done.
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November 11, 2020
Snigger 🙂
Chortles
My theory of the afterlife is that others will be alive after I am dead. That should be afterlife enough for anyone. It isn’t, but it should be.
Besides, I didn’t exist for 13.8 billion years, and it didn’t bother me any. Why should nonexistence for infinity years afterwards be any different?
I’m not scared of death. There’s literally nothing to fear from it. I am scared of dying, but that’s mostly because I’m lazy, so I hate big changes. I’m sure that, when my time approaches, I’ll whine and whinge and complain; but afterwards I guarantee that I’ll shut up.
Some people get to enter oblivion without even knowing it. E.g. some taliban setting up a RPG only to be sighted and dispatched by a lurking A10 “warthog” one second they are there then as the depleted uranium shells hit them they are turned into clouds of meat dust….they never knew they were dead…
at least Mo is not using emojis! Sheesh
My sister is JW. Because she wants to see our mother and grandmother again, she will not leave the religion. Sigh
Remember the words of the great prophet Jagger:
“You can’t always get what you want …”
Eh. Jagger…somebody should tell my mrs that….
When you are dead, you do not know you are dead. It’s only painful & difficult for others. The same applies when you are stupid.
Paradoctor – great punchline! 🙂
postdoggerel: Love it! I’m definitely not dead, but may be stupid!
We are all stupid! but some are more stupid than others…
Like my old gran used to say. “It’s only easy if you know the answer”….
M27Holts: Tony Soprano didn’t see it coming either. Don’t stop –
I am not familiar with the Sopranos. Not a big fan of the lionisation of scummy gangster types at my age…the naked ape looking in the mirror and not liking what he sees…
Ah, we’re taking about stupidity again.
So please allow me to append a new example, this time from the country of my birth.
A Philippine woman, a QAnon influencer named Romana Didulo, proclaimed herself Queen of Canada. In this regal role she told her many Q-besotted followers that she had made bills illegal. Meaning bills for services. That they no longer had to pay for electricity, water/sewer, credit cards etc.
People believed her.
And they are having their electricity and water cut off for non-payment.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3na53/qanon-queen-bills-electricty-canada
She told her followers to shoot/kill healthcare workers administering covid vaccines, and she was arrested for that. They had a psychiatrist check her out. Apparently they could keep her locked up because she wasn’t crazy.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8417379/queen-of-canada-covid-online-threats/
She’s currently on a crowd-funded tour of Canada, doing meet-and-greet meetings. The following link has a video of her, talking.
https://news.yahoo.com/followers-qanon-queen-canada-face-232436123.html
The people who get fooled be her are not what psychologists would call intellectually impaired. They can read, write and do arithmetic, and we know that because they learned about her on social media and previously paid their bills.They are low average to average.
People in that range are also the majority of the population. Depending on which standard deviation you choose for the normal model, 15 or 16, they’re 54% or 52% of the population. I don’t want to stand on precise figures because they can’t be precise. The actual number doesn’t matter. The takeaway is that gullible people, low average to average, are the majority in the world. They can be made to believe almost anything, and in large consequential numbers. (In this case, 70,000 followers.)
Public policy should be based on the understanding that normal people are that stupid.
If they can be made to believe in miracles like virgin birth and parting the Red Sea, they can be made to believe in QAnon nonsense.
Laripu: Shudder indeed!
You have published a very good article, I keep looking for such good contact, I agree with your information and important facts, and keep working with the publication of such good information. https://update.holdpuris.com/
“If you can sell ’em god and the bible, you can sell ’em anything.”
Basil Faulty.
Ayushi Basu says:
“You have published a very good article,”
So the cartoon is now an “article”? Looks suspiciously like spam to me. But I am good at being wrong, so …
Interesting. I didn’t click on the “holdpuris” link, but I did a Google search on the link, and apparently it’s an Indian “stock market advisory and investment firm” run by some guy named “Hold Puri”. So yeah, spam. “Ayushi Basu” appears to be spamming the comments sections of random blogs with both “holdpuris” and various porny looking links, but not a huge number of them, so maybe he’s doing it by hand? Lame!
Once children are taught to read and write and to the basic math. They should then be taught how to use critical thinking to deduce what is clearly true and what is obviously false. And stop reading the bible and koran to impressionable children you are enabling the ruthless to prey on the gullible…..simples…
Laripu – as you did last week, you’re associating foolishness with intelligence scores, when the two are really quite independent.
The majority of extremely foolish people therefore naturally belong to the majority in their intelligence scores, but it doesn’t automatically follow that the majority of people are extremely foolish.
Just this morning I was reminded what a miserable fool I have been at certain points, and I’m exceptionally intelligent — QED.
Intelligent people usually make foolish decisions when they give in to emotional subroutines in their head. I once worked with a woman who had a doctorate in physics and was probably the best mathematician I have ever met. But she had a soft spot for dangerous geezers…she dated a geezer who was only three months out of prison for raping and nearly killing three women…her friends told her that she was dicing with death….she was…three weeks later he strangled her to death….foolish? Aye…
Donn – everyone is stupid some of the time. Making a isolated mistakes, which you recognize and correct, doesn’t make you stupid.
But people who consistently fail to make good decisions are stupid; and that’s normal, because the norm is stupid. (And people who consistently make terrible decisions and never learn from mistakes do so because they are unable to figure out what’s better for them. That sounds like normal stupidity to me.)
And intelligence is distributed just like every other human trait: a very few people are severely impaired, a very few people are geniuses and the majority clusters around the norm. Using IQ as a proxy is a useful abstraction when taking about populations, and that doesn’t mean anything for individual people.
Even if using the normal distribution is no more than drastically approximate, that doesn’t matter because I’m only using it to come to the conclusions that 1) most people are stupid and 2) stupidity is normal. It doesn’t matter to me what the actual distribution is. I see that conclusion as pretty obvious.
If you think intelligence isn’t anything like normally distributed, which curve is a better model for it? Do you think it’s a skewed distribution? If so, skewed in which direction? It can’t be uniform or geniuses would be as common as average people, which we know isn’t true.
My motivation for these assertions is political. I think public policy should be structured in a way that makes navigating life easier for most people, normally stupid people. I also think that we should rethink how much say normal/stupid people have about social decisions like the human rights of minorities, and whether schools should teach creationism or evolution.
No, I’m OK with whatever distribution you like for intelligence – could be normal, or somewhat skewed – whatever.
That doesn’t correlate with foolishness, though. I mean, if anything, M27Holts’ example is more the rule than the exception – so many exceptionally intelligent people, by the measures we commonly use for that, are surprisingly, consistently foolish. And, as Jim Baerg suggested last week, better able to rationalize. One vicissitude they seem prone to, in terms of politics, is libertarianism, a political philosophy that seems excusable for teenagers but in adults is a kind of intellectual sociopathy.
Though maybe it makes no difference to your conclusions. We can agree that many people are foolish, without needing to establish a specific distribution based on better studied phenomena. We can observe that the majority are capable of foolish choices, and therefore society needs protections against majority rule. I think that has been well understood for some time, just a matter of getting the details right.
I don’t think there’s much genuine debate over whether schools should teach creationism, though?
Donn, I think we’ve reached agreement.
About creationism: here in the wild west (I mean the USA) that debate isn’t over. American religious nuts, of which there are many, keep trying to sneak religion into schools one way or another. Some call it “creation science” and say that it ought to be taught as an alternate explanation. The Supreme Court had deemed that to be religion and therefore not allowed in public schools, but the current Supreme Court is much more conservative and religious, so I expect changes in the next 10 years.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/schools-still-dont-teach-evolution/598312/
Just been reading an article on teaching evolution in british schools which says tension is generated when you force children indoctrinated by their faith are forced into accepting that evolution is fact…and yes if you believe something in the face of a mountain of evidence that proves you wrong then surely the lesson is taught that you cannot bury your head in the sand or close your eyes and ears…unfortunately even in britain, religion will win the battle and science teachers will have to concede or lose their jobs…we are going to hell in a handcart….I tells ya…
All the people are stupid some of the time and some of the people are stupid all the time, but Tucker Carlson is stupidest all the time.
I don’t generally quiz people on either their religious beliefs or their thoughts on evolution, but my guess is that I know a few who are Christian, and that not one of them sees any conflict with evolution. I know there’s another side to it, but that’s why I said “genuine debate” – those people aren’t part of any such thing.
I can see the current Supreme Court letting the Christians back at the table to some extent, but I really don’t see how they could find creation science or any variation thereof to be anything but religious instruction, and hence unconstitutional.
The current anxiety over the Supremes is of course the Roe vs Wade abortion ruling, where the issue is currently framed as Christian. But it isn’t, fundamentally, and that makes a great deal of difference for its constitutional status. It just has been seized on by some Christian factions.
“I like your Christ, but not your Christianity.” – Mahatma Gandhi
Donn. You’re wearing the wrong t-shirts….hahaha
I particularly like my…”If Evolution = 1 then religion = 0″ tshirt…
M27Holts 11:29 – I think you may be only a small step from constructing a linear philosophy! Already have 0 and 1 so: Quick, fix up a couple of operators and — done.
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