Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (118021)	4/11/2016 7:25:57 PM
From: bart13	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 220081

Is it solipsistic in here, or is it just me?

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (118021)	4/11/2016 7:58:05 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 220081

I think you've got that a little mixed up. No one anywhere on earth thought of the concept of democracy until the Greeks started printing books and 10% of the population became literate about 3,000 years ago. You can find nowhere on earth where they were discussing the sophisticated concepts like democracy and ethics, etc. in a formal manner until the ancient Greeks. So all the evolution of the human species revolves around learning. There is no biological evolution taking place right now. The world is become a big mixing bowl as it should be. That gives us hybrid vigor which all biologists are very respectful of. There was a lot of intelligent philosophy in the East, but it never seem to result in democracy. There are two time periods when intellectual enlightenment exploded. One was right after the ancient Greeks started writing books, and the second was after Gutenberg invented movable type. That is a historical fact. In the East, both Korea and China did invent movable type, but the Koreans destroyed it after they used it for the monarchy, and in China it was held tightly inside the dynasty. China also did not allow different lines of thought to coordinate. That impeded them in their intellectual development, although their concepts of enlightenment were pretty amazing, but just very hard to organize and quantify. But today one can see how the Asians philosophical foundation, as opposed to the West's dogma, is aiding them greatly as they surge ahead of the world intellectually in certain instances

To: Maurice Winn who wrote (118021)	4/11/2016 10:32:47 PM
From: koan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 220081

<<The cognitive development preceded the invention of those things you mentioned. You can't teach a chimp to use alphabets, books and agriculture. First come brains. You can't teach most people to use Fourier transforms in wave theory. First they need the brain function.>> No, that theory is 100% incorrect. We're not talking about chimps, we're talking about humans and 90% of all humans on earth today fall within the normal range of intelligence and that means they are geniuses in the rough. And the way you can know your idea is incorrect: is that there WAS NOT ENOUGH TIME between our knowing pretty much nothing, to being able to discuss democracy and ethics at the university level in ancient Greece. There simply was not enough time for evolution to have any impact on that. It happened over a matter of only a few hundred years. On top of that, we have been around in our present form, more or less, for a couple hundred thousand years. Even the Neanderthal had a brain as large as ours, and probably the Denisovans. But none of them had a written language and over several hundred thousand years observation did them no good as far as intellectual evolution goes. We know this because they kept using pretty much the same tools with little improvement. When you say things that are passed on from person-to-person have to be observed to be true, you left out the most important part which is the scientific method. The one thing that all the great minds have in common is how much they all studied. All of them. Guys like Einstein barely slept. Yes he was good at math, but he also thought about physics 24 seven. All the great thinkers spent a great portion of their life learning. Einstein knew all the physics in the world when he finally came up with his specil theory of relativity. In areas where they teach people to read, they learn to read. In areas where they teach people to think, they learn to think. And areas where they do not teach people to read, or to think they learn neither. As mentioned, we know that we developed our sophisticated intellectual abilities over a very short period of time and it was exactly the time when we started producing books and people became literate. When we stopped producing books, when the ancient Greeks were wiped out, we devolved for the next 1500 years into almost categorical illiteracy. Only a few monks knew how to read by the 13th century.. And then Gutenberg came along invented movable type, and within 100 years, millions of books had been printed and that led to the age of enlightenment. The average brain is genius. But it has to be developed. That means learning. In the future there will be biological engineering to increase intelligence, but for the 7 billion people on earth today, most of whom are of normal intelligence, whether they turn out to be a great thinkers, or a poor thinker is dependent upon nothing but education. And the average person, on earth, all people on earth, that receives a good early childhood education can zip through any university in the world. And that goes for any child on this earth and includes about 90% of the population of the planet. Eugenics as it applies to human intelligence today, is a primitive idea and dead wrong and often used by racists to bring others down to build themselves up.