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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: neolib who wrote (185036)	4/12/2006 4:14:18 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Neo, I prefer not to have the Nobel Prize because the publicity would be annoying. But I'm happy to provide the information anyway. Being a registered international expert on psychological stochastic analysis of happiness in large populations, it's tough to realize just how ignorant is the mass of humanity. Heck, if I'd explained this earlier, a LOT of people could have stopped worrying and been happy. I thought the Club of Rome doomsters had been laughed out of town last millennia. I am astonishing, but somebody has to do it: <Darwins outstanding realization was that it is birth rates > replacement which leads to an unpleasant life. You are claiming the opposite. Thats quite astonishing. > BTW, that's Darwin's. We can't have apostrophical omissions like slips in DNA leading to new specie's of english. The Malthusian/Club of Rome woes along those lines are true if numbers grow because of sex rather than selection. Until the invention of contraception, unrelenting over-population did lead to genocidal war and misery in poverty. But now, women choose to have children. They can have sex and not get pregnant. That means children are wanted and are expected to be a LOT more than another hungry mouth to feed and compete in an overcrowded world of desperate survival. Animals are constantly in that situation because that's how it works in the jungle, red in tooth and claw. Humans are the only ones who choose how many children to have. But note that with humans, the number who could live has constantly increased due to amazing technological improvements as well as social, legal, and conceptual redesigns. Humans have also enjoyed a steady improvement in intellect as the dull were filtered out of the gene pool. We are no longer chimps. Over 100,000 years, we have gone from borderline chimps to supersonic geniuses who can learn how to drive cars and change channels using a remote [though working a VCR is still beyond many]. That brainpower improvement process is continuing. Those improvements have enabled 6 billion of us to live happily. Not all are of course as the process is a work in progress. But every day there are more gains. Check out how cool 3G cyberspace is now. That is going to improve things more than all improvements ever. The industrial revolution merely replaced our muscles. The cyberspace revolution is turbo-charging and replacing our brains. This is the biggest thing since the invention of sexual selection in biology and not wanting to overstate the case, but I'd say since the invention of DNA itself. This is the replacement of DNA underway. And we are alive to witness the beginnings of it. What fun. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? Not as many as can swim happily through nano cyberspace. Happiness will be freed from a litre of wet chemistry in a bony skull. Already human life has increased right up to 80 years or so, because brains are so valuable that they need to last that long and longer to get value out of them. Nature has rewarded brains and longevity because they go hand in hand. It takes decades to learn things and to then have the brain die of old age at 30, when it's still learning flat out, would be really stupid. Nature, not being stupid, figured that out and has been trying to increase human lifespans. Nature isn't very bright though, so humans have taken over where nature got to and we are doing the improvements ourselves. Well, it was actually women who did the improvements, not nature, as it was they who selected who would get to do the impregnating and women are completely racist, sexist and discriminatory. They ruthlessly eliminated races which didn't appeal to them. Women like smart [as well as other variables]. Smart gets them stuff they want and handles the challenges of life better than the dull. So, humans now are up to 100 IQ average. With smart ones zooming off into the wild blue yonder at 150 and more. But now they are becoming synergistic and symbiotic with cyberspace and going even further. So, there you have it. More and more people are alive than ever and they are happier than ever for longer than ever. I guess you are mathematically astute enough to understand that these are averages. Finding somebody who is suicidally unhappy doesn't disprove the case. Nor does finding a whole country where it's a major mess of limits to growth, starvation, unhappiness per capita is declining and things are going from bad to worse. Actually, on reflection, a Nobel Prize would be fun to have. Please put me in for one. <If it were true that endlessly increasing numbers of any species makes the sum total of life on earth better, a Nobel Price awaits the first individual who can prove it. Take a shot!> I'd like a Nobel and bar, so here's the bar part. It is a law of nature than increasing numbers increases happiness. Count the number of neurons in our brains. 100,000 years ago, they were more sparse. The more there are, the better we get and the more we can live happily. People with IQ 130 are happier than those with IQ 70. Life is just too tough at the dull end. It's more a constant battle. Most crime is at the low end and crime is not a result of a happy state. Humans are like neurons, the more there are of us working together, the better. We are like a giant brain forming over the surface of Earth. And, we are turbocharging our brains with cyberspace, which is now mobile rather than stuck at the end of a wire. So, there you have it. Sir Mqurice [or whatever honorific Nobel Prize + Bar gets to use]. PS: How many Nobel Prize + Bar have there been? Not many I bet.

To: neolib who wrote (185036)	4/13/2006 3:25:24 PM
From: Don Hurst	Respond to of 281500

>>" It is true that intelligence can go a long ways towards mitigating said evil, but it remains the original sin. I've always found it amusing that religions focus on sexual matters as a sin, while glorifying reproduction, when in fact, its reproduction which both gives life and evil. However, the history of intelligence as brought to bare on the matter is largely of mitigating the unpleasantness of ones own life, while increasing it for others, often with the most unpleasant increase being placed on those having a further genetic distance from oneself. Thus our Founding Fathers in the USA thought it useful to apply their intelligence to improving their own lot wrt to King George (and uttered many fine and noble words on the subject) while not being quite so concerned about other creatures with darker skins. Their intellectual descendents today are with us in force, although the genetic vector of kindness has lengthened a bit. "<< Have you ever thought of having a conversation with rough cut germstone? No doubt you two could blather well together.