antibush wrote:

And nobody can challenge those points. If any reliable measures of group IQ-differences are ever to be made, they will be based on direct genetic information (after we know "the genes for intelligence").

I'm sure this will happen within 10 years (or what do you think?). Until then, the discussion about this is mere speculation.

And nobody can challenge those points. If any reliable measures of environmentally caused IQ-differences are ever to be made, they will be based on direct biological and neurological information (after we know the "neurons which are easily influenced").

I'm sure this will happen within 10 years (or what do you think?) Until then discussion about this is mere speculation.

I don't understand what all this talk of pi taking one values other than 3.14... Can anyone explain what's going here, or is this just a case of bad joking?

My thoughts on the cube. I haven't thought about it much but I observed the following obvious (though not mathematically proven) things

Suppose the corners are (0,0,0) (1,0,0) .... (1,1,1)

A) There is exactly one hexagon-edge in each face of the cube.

B) Each such edge has its endpoints on two adjacent (intersecting) edges of the cube.

C)The angle between adjacent edges of the hexagon is 120 degrees (because its a hexagon).

D) After we draw one putative edge with verticies 1 and 2, (I drew a cube btw), there is only one edge of the cube on which vertex 3 could lie if conditions A, B and C are to be satisfied. Apply the same principle to determine on which edges points 4, 5 and six lie.

Anyway that's not a proof of anything. THose are just intutions which enabled me to sketch a hexagon cutting through the cube.

These vertices then seemed reasonable.

P1=(0,1/2,1) P2=(1/2,0,1) P3=(1,0,1/2) P4=(1,1/2,0) P5=(1/2,1,0) P6=(0,1,1/2)

I think they are all on the plane given by equation

2x+2y+2z=3

thus coplanar.

In short, my thinking process basically involved figuring out constraints then doing a constraints based search. Hope I'm not wrong. It can be very embarassing when getting a math point wrong..haha.but I'm about to hit "Post" NOW...

Oops, I didn't read (or I forgot about the the part) that said I coldn't draw a diagram.... :( Oh well I am embarassed now.

BTW I do have a nice looking diagram.

HB, The theory of relativity has more explaining power than Newtonian physics. Environmental theories of behaviour don't have any more explaining power than behaviour ones in spite of their complication.

What you describeed as argument ad populatum was not really that, but instead argument by authority which is a often a perfectly valid form of argument.

Your response just indicates to me that you seem to have an axe to grind where certain groups are concerned. Why should blacks or anyone else have to bear the burden of "proving" their intellectual capabilities to you?

What is wrong with my asking blacks to prove it? I think its an eminently fair thing to ask given that black people blame white people for their present-day failures. Also, for someone to say that he is good at something without being willing to demonstrate it, is egotistical. Unchallenged egotism could have a morally corrosive effect on society.

During your recent flood of visits from some of your less-appealing "friends", I think that maybe you guys got a better idea why a lot of us are not eager to have this particular can of worms opened.

In other words, you are saying that truth should be concealed whenever its profesors are politically unsavoury (in the sight of you and your friends).

I personally agree with Fred, because, logically, IMO, Reality (capitalisation intended) must be conceived of as some collection of propositions for which there are no counterfactuals. After all, if something is absolutely true, then it should be impossible to even conceive of its being false. (i.e. a hypothetical counterfactal situtation shouldn't be possibile). But any situation we can think of comes comes with possible counterfactual situations. So where does this leave us? With the absolute imponderability of Reality. Some people call this religious mystery. It doesn't matter what you call it, but people who deny it are being unscientific, because insisting that Reality is some accident instead of what must be is a failure to apply Occam's razor.

So some hard questions. 1) Do we care that a non-trivial portion of the world is bleeding itself to death on the road before us? 2) If we care, are we going to do anything about it? 3) If we are going to do something, what? 4) We we sacrifice our own personal material well being (what else matters?) to staunch the beelding?

No, n/a, n/a, and no. Why help belligerents and ingrates? Extending the hand of friendship to people who blame you for suffering itself is out of the question. I would much rather help humble and polite space aliens than spiteful third-worlders.

I continously hear talk on the radio of how inequal distribution of wealth is an injustice, indeed the cause of terrorism[1]. No one with an attitude like that deserves any help whastoever.

[1]The terrorists who flew planes into the WTC were explicit about their grievances. The unequal distribution of wealth wasn't one of them.

The elite will simply continue to hold referenda until the populace votes the "right" way. (That's what happened in Ireland wrt the Nice treaty.) Failing that, Euroisation will be done slowly and surreptitiously without any official votes being taken.

One wonders what motivates typical "utopianism". I don't believe that utopianists are necessarily well-intended. I think that they often harbour dark feelings. It would be better if they worked through their own pyschological problems before setting about to reform the world. Many of the methods proposed (and employed) by utopianists conflict with conventional notions of justice. Stealing from someone to alleviate the poverty of someone else is an example. The road to hell is paved with good intentions so we hear, but are they really good intentions? These so called good intentions are sometimes accompanied by greed and malice, and often a great deal of self-importance. The utopianist must defy conventional morality on a daily basis paving his road.

Of course anyone with an opinion on how things should be could be accused of utopianism. Where should the line be drawn? Well I think that people should strive to alleviate the suffering of other sentient beings (as well as our own). But we can do that while ackowledging that all that matters is that we try because the real reward is our own sefl-transormation. Transforming the world isn't the real goal.

I don't think that the resolution of the free will debate changes things much. I don't believe in free will on account of parsimony. Free will is would be an unnecessary add-on to what I already believe. Also I don't understand why non-materialists tend to believe in free will moreso than materialists. I would think the idea of a some sort of purely random element is more consonant with materialism then non-materialism.

Its likely that everything on earth has been invented billions of times before on other planets. If there are infinitely many universes then everything has probably been invented before infinitely many times. The only way we can possibly be novel is in craftsmanship and artistry. These are the hallmarks of great civilisations, not "macroinventions".

Oleg, there are countlessly many galaxies and stars and ours is but one planet circling one star. I consider that evidence of our non-uniqueness. I concur that direct positive evidence is unavailable.

I also note that h-bd types seem to think that the measure of a civilisation is in its intellectual feats. I feel, on the contrary that great civilisations produce intellectual feats because the people living in them have the time and inclination to think about such things. I don't deny that technology brings some material comfort, but for the most part it cannot be enjoyed. I would not want to live in some dirty world of machines and garbage.

Science cannot resolve the mystery of what you are. You can say "I am this, I am that", but every answer you give will be wrong unless it is absolute reality that you are refering to. Every experience has a subject/object hierachy. For instance when you see a chair there is the chair, the image on your retina, then electrical impulses in the visual cortex and then, it is apprehended by the apprehender of all things. Although all images change, universal conciousness does not, a bit like the way a wheel turns but the centre always stays the same. Also all things are within conciousness, even change. To see something you only need an image upon your retina, not an external object. In the case of universal conciousness nothing exists apart from it. Its like a single unchanging point. This is why spiritual people are obsessed with self-knowledge. It is knowledge of all that is. All beings have relative existance within experience, but conciousness needs no existance to be real, and therefore can never be intellectually analysed. Therefore it is fully outside of the domain of science. Science and religion can never become one.

Braun,
I am also not entirely comfortable with Christianity. I see it as a sort of MacDonald's religion, offering easy, but unsatisfying, answers in the form of a crudely mechanistic, quasi-Marxist cosmology. I don't know about other civilisations but in the West we have many people who would rather moralise than do productive things with their time, and Christianity has tended to attract those people, with tyranny resulting. I think that Eastern religion is generally superior.

godlesscapitalist,
What do you say to WASPs (like me) who couldn't care less about military or economic greatness and would much prefer to live in freedom? Your idea that government minders watching everyone will bolster the economy is just a fantasy anyway. Nothing could stop a policy from quickly becoming an ethnic spoils system such as we have now.

As a paleocon, I'm a bit bothered by religious fundies myself. They seem to harm the cause of conservatism far more than they help. They have hopped on the anti-Islamic bandwagon, and I assume its because they're clueless about what's really going on in the world and need a scapegoat. On the other hand it wouldn't be happening if the neocons weren't fomenting it. The neocons seem to think that making the world safe for Israel is the patriotic duty of all Americans.

Anti-Islamicism wasn't permissible up until recently due to the strictures of PC, but that's changing due to the efforts of the neocons. Personally I don't know much about Islam, but what I see of it I generally don't like. Joe Sobran said something like "to a non-Muslim Islam is what Islam does". I don't think that that is *entirely* fair. I do think the intentions of Islam's founders should have *something* to do with how we regard it, just as we should attempt to discern the intentions of the writers of the constitution when trying to interpret the thing, and it's likely that Sobran would agree with *that*. However there is the murky question of who its founders were. Muhammed was illiterate so of course he could not have written the Quran, and Islam isn't based strictly on the Quran anyway as there are other additional scriptures called Hadiths and the authors of those should be considered among the Islam's founders.

A while back a fellow attempted to convert me to Islam by mailing me Islamic literature. What did the literature resemble? It resembled those "for dummies" books that you see all over the bookstore. It began with some badly-flawed (but simple) logical arguments in order to justify the faith. The idea was to present Islam as purely logical. Then it went on to describe an ideal Islamic society governed by Islamic law. Anyway none of this stuff is what I would want in a religion. To me a religion should give the aspirant some hope that he can conquer time, the great devourer, and no longer be subject to old age disease and death. I doubt that Muhammed or his associates had any great spiritual insights.

Of course religion is partly a socio-biological emergent so we should expect primitive and violent peoples to have primitive and violent religions. When we judge religions we end up indirectly judging nations and races, which is partly why religion is such a touchy subject in this PC day and age.

We are all living in the same reality. All is one and all that, so the best of religions should be universal to the extent that any sentient being that understands one of them and practices its precepts should benefit. On the other hand we should fully expect that large parts of the world would not be attracted to such a religion all, because truth is not necessarily simple and appealing. Animals have no interest in religion at all.

No single religion could really draw the whole world into its fold because of the inate differences of temperment and intelligence in the world. Any religion that attempts to become fully universal would have to be sluttish or become sluttish, putting universality ahead of its doctrines.

I've got another anecdote. I once attended a talk by a muslim speaker. I could barely make out a word he said due to his high falsetto voice and thick accent. He went on forever about doctrinal differences between CHristianity (or was it Judaism?) and Islam. I don't think that any of this stuff would be interesting except to a fundies (of either religion), and I understood that in his previous talk, his main theme was the ideal Islamic society. They're completely obssessed by this idea. If I remember correctly this guy was supposed to have been some kind of "scholar". We are living in interesting times.

MaryClaire wrote:

As for eternal life (on earth, I presume you mean) and freedom from old age--enterprising researchers are energetically marketing that in various little jars, and from what I hear, some of them aren't half bad.

I was thinking more in Buddhistic terms but I was trying to refrain from endorsing any one religion, having no fixed view on the subject. The Buddha is sometimes described as being the "conqueror of sickness, old age, and death". Wether he succeeded or not, I think it's a worthy aim for religion.

From The Life of the Shakyamuni Buddha:

Weighing his duties to his family and humanity as whole, he abandoned his worldly possessions and chose the quest for the Truth. * The Seeker of Truth After his chariot left the boundary of the kingdom, the prince told his charioteer Chandaka that he was leaving. He also told his charioteer to tell the king that, "I will return one day as the conqueror of sickness, old-age, and death."

If the pyramid builders were so advanced, then why were they building pyramids? Pyramids are essentially big heaps of stones.

godlesscapitalist: I was being a bit tongue in cheek but I was making a point. A pyramid is an easy to conceive-of structure. I wonder if the ancient Egyptians had even thought of or tried to build cut-stone arches. (I don't know for a fact that they didn't but I've only ever seen lintil-and-post and pyramid architecture associated with ancient Egypt.)

The Romans managed to build a building with a 142 ft. diameter fully-concrete roof. Check out ANCIENT ROMAN PANTHEON

I'm not trying to be meanspirited about the Egyptians. I guess I was challenging maryclaire's belief that they possesssed advanced technology. It is true that they managed to get some huge stones to a great height, and cut them to a high degree of precision without iron tools. How they did that is probably a mystery.

Actually, studies of self-esteem show that (at least for young people) African-Americans have self-esteem as good or better than whites. See here.

I was going to point out the same thing. Those who blame their failures on low-self esteem, believe themselves to be inately capable in ways that they have not demonstrated, and since they hold their own capabilities in such high regard, they must actually have high self esteem. This sort of behaviour used to be called egotism.