Has anyone here read Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan? The AI stuff and robots on Titan aside, he builds a very frightening view of future society. The main character is a charlatan, who pulls magic tricks and pychic stuff, to make a living. No big deal, but the scary part is that the people are so dumbed down and stuff, that they believe him. In the book, he actually admits that he feeds on the stupidity of society at large. I thought of this when looking at this thread, and the attached article reminded me of the gullability and apathy of that future. I know I too would be more interested, despite the discomforts, to engage in discourse with people that actually have brains in their heads. This from working around people who's main priorities are getting payed so that they can kill brain cells on the weekends, and being hormonal machines. Wouldn't you feel the same way?
You know, people have been saying that kind of thing for several thousand years. meanwhile, society carries on as normal. Charlatans feeding on society at large are normal and expectable. I woudl like to think there are somewhat less of them than there used to be, but have no figures available. As for "engaging in intercourse" with people that actually have brains in their heads, welcome to sciforums! Hang on, youve been here a while. Guess you must have found what your looking for. (i hope i dont sound too panglossian, or patronising.)
No, the big thing was how much of the feeding was going on in the society he portrayed in the book. With the falling intelligence in the world today, I would worry. And it is good to be here. Most of the places here, anyway.
WEll, its blanket statemetns like "fall in intelligence" that get me worried. Have you any evidence, like 100 years IQ tests from 20 countries? Or Something, anything, apart from your conviction that theres more drinking and such around now than there used to be. There have likewise been complaints about intelligence or lack of for generations, for example, 100 years ago "they" were exercising themselves over the lower classes breeding too much, yet, somehow, things arent actually any worse in most ways, and in others they are better. To have a sensible talk about this we need more than just impressions and feelings. I mean all you have to do is read any right wing tabloid newspaper in the UK for the past 100 years and they all say the same thing, every year.
Good point. When polls show a lack of basic knowledge that IS taught in school today, it's disturbing.
yeah, when it comes to basic knowledge, I'm worried myself. They had a program on TV called "test the nation" I think, (this is the UK) and about 70 general knowledge questions. I scored in the high 50's or so, the same as my mother. They had worked out the correlation between age group (eg 20-30, over 70, etc.) and your score. I should be in my 60's according to that, but am half that age. Part of what I'm thinking about is that people generally know/ learn what is useful/ important, and what they percieve to be useful and important. General knowledge isnt actually that important in most peoples lives, even I, (a deep fund of general knowledge) only really find it useful in odd sitiations, meeting different people, etc. In every day life around town, I dont need it. However, basic knowledge, taught in schools, thats slightly different. And I would blame the schools and the parents. the schools for not as many teachers bieng as good as they could be, and also for teh curriculum being not exactly the best thing around. And the teaching methods often arent so good. I also blame the parents for not reinforcing any attempts to learn, letting the child get away with the kind of poor discipline that means they dont do well at school, etc. On the other hand, as to whether this is worse or better than is used to be, I really cant say. The whole commercial culture is definitely "to blame" as well.
Welcpme the world. What would you like sir? A little bit of "reality" tv? Or maybe some Jerry Springs? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! "I fell good! Ta-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra!..." Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Now, seriously, about the nanotechnology stuff... wouldn't it be dangerous if we would inhale such things? Ahhhhhh! We are doooooomed!! Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
If we want to change our destinity, we first need to change our priorities. Do we really need all the trivial and superficial stuff that we have? Why are we so superficial in every way? Maybe we are valuing things that shouldn't be valued and ignoring things that shouldn't be ignored... Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Your sarcasm overwhelms me, Truthseeker. This would be the center of the problem, wouldn't it? Perhaps some extrapolation on the topic anyone? I'd say get back to basics. We value money, material goods too much. With the way families are going downhill, it's no wonder that they are taking guns to school.
Don't you just luuuuuuv'it? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! And it is not just that. It is also the way we think. For example, a lot of people are patriots. They finish isolating themselves from the rest of the world. Instead of thinking of patriotism, people should think about humanism. They should say to themselves that they aren't american, or canadian, or brasilians. They should say to themselves that they are humans, all of us. Thinking that way unite us. That's what the world really needs - union. Union is the best medicine against fear and violence. Not just that. People should not only accept but value each other's diufferences. Cause it's our differences that make us strong. That ties up to the whole "patriotism" stuff. Valuing and recognizing different cultures is a good step towards a more unified world. And of course, value money only as a tool, instead of valuing it more then a human life. What values more, a diamond in a store or a homeless in the street?
I was being somewhat sarcastic too there. "Humanism" is just another form of patriotism. A unified world government isn't going to be practical, let alone possible, for several decades at least. In the meantime, patriotism will have to suffice, though it needs to be guided so as to keep from causing problems.
Really? Well... I guess you are not as sarcastic as I am, eh? Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Yes. But it is better then the normal kind. Respect for animals and nature should also be added, bot to mention to understand our limitations and accept ourselves as humble and insignificant beings. I'm not talking about world government. When i talk about unity, I'm talking about how we deal with each other. There is no government or economy involved on that issue.
Hey, that is just about my favorite book of all time, and you're the only other person I've ever encountered who has read it! Sorry, I'm not terribly aroused by the issue you've raised (although I certainly agree with you), but I just wanted to log in and thank you for being a kindred spirit. I've got more notes scribbled in the margins of that book than the whole rest of my library. Somebody turned me on to the "Gentle Giants" trilogy about thirty years ago (if they're that old) and I've been hooked on Hogan ever since. "Reality Interrupt" was also really good. As for charlatans, well, humans have a tremendous capacity for being duped. I don't know what else to say about it. Cognitive dissonance is something we use to make ourselves feel comfortable in a universe that otherwise does not seem to be very sympathetic to our cause, and people take advantage of that. Religions are based on it, at least the Abrahamic ones that keep popping up in the Middle East. There's a televangelist named Peter Popoff who's been conning suckers for at least twenty years. He's utterly flagrant, he uses all the stage magic tricks and doesn't even do a good job of concealing them. (It's been said that stage magicians who don't have a lot of talent find a second career as faith healers, because in that "profession" the audience is predisposed to believe, rather than to be skeptical.) Anyway, he's been caught red-handed and called out at least a couple of times and driven off the airwaves by the religious UHF channels, and later cable channels, who admit with quiet embarrassment that even they have some standards. He just retires for a few years and then starts over, without even changing his name. Last time I checked the cable log he was back on again, raking in the cash and deceiving the willingly gullible. For a lot of people the universe is simply too damn complicated. They're always ready to believe somebody who claims to have it figured out, in such a way as to make it easier to navigate. Even if it requires believing something that contradicts something they already know: cognitive dissonance. Our entire nation is currently in the thrall of one of them, and not even a very good one. Americans desperately want to believe that the world is the way it has been for the past ten or fifteen centuries: organized neatly into nation-states in which the political and military power is concentrated, so that if you don't like a particular dogma you can make war against the nation-state that promotes it, defeat them, and be happy again. The concept of power devolving down to small groups of individuals -- ironically the next step in the implementation of the "democracy" which America is supposed to stand for -- turns out to be rather frightening when a lot of those individuals don't like many of the key attributes of our way of life. So when a charlatan says that 9/11 was the work of the genuinely nasty leader of a small, fairly weak and not particularly popular country, Americans who actually know better have no trouble at all juxtaposing this new knowledge with the contradictory knowledge they already have, and cheering the charlatan on. The alternative would be to revise our model of the world into one in which being the only remaining superpower is not enough for America to continue always getting its way. Notice that the cognitive dissonance has been institutionalized. The election is less than four months away and the campaign is shifting into high gear. Yet the most important issue -- what is America's place in the world and how do we assume it with honor -- is not being discussed at all. Both parties are reinforcing our belief that the world is as it has always been since long before most of the countries now on Earth even existed, even though every day we assimilate irrefutable evidence that this is not the truth. We love charlatans because they protect us from painful realities.
First and foremost, I want to introduce myself to the community. I am really glad I found a group of interesting open-minded people like you! Well, as other posters have already mentionned, the whole "society is getting dumbed down every year" fiasco is not new nor proven by credible facts. I have to add, that contrary to this, I see our future with a glimer of hope. Here are the reasons: 1) Maybe our schools aren't teaching as effectivily or as interestingly as we would want, we do live in a age of information. Like so many people mumbled not so quielty into our ears, we are the first generation of humans with INSTANTANEOUS access to any information in any form desired. Obviously the internet is the main ressource to thank for. But even, as much as many people seem to resent it, television does bring in some good. Stations such as canada's very own Canadian Broadcasting Channel, the BBC, Discovery Channel, AE, Bravo, ammong those I know offer a vast amount of intelligent & cultured entertainment and knowledge. Although these stations may not be the most popular, they are a sign that there are many people seeking more to life than just "the same shit on a different day". All this and on top of that we have libraries, bookstores, magazines, newspapers and litterally forests worth of knowledge that many people are interested in. 2)We are also living in a era of communication. With all these means to amass information came communication (rather communication was the means to deliver this information, but that's just a formality Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!). A perfect example is this forum. A large number of people from all around the world can communicate, help, discuss, plan, network, socialize and express anything they want! It's amazing, the amount of interesting ideas being explored here! These are the two reasons why I think we may in fact be becoming smarter. Not a very scientific assumption, but seemingly more of a guestimation. Also, in earlier times, not all great minds were able to share what they know and grow with others alike, but today it hapens every day! Now onto something different, I agree with Truthseeker, that patriotism and nationalism are as outdated as the telegraph. It was good at the times it was invented, but the world has changed and it no longer applies. We should be more humanistic and, even better, be more life-istic (forgive my euphimism and bad spelling). What I mean by "life-istic" is to consider and balance ourselves within the scheme of life and the global ecosystem. We need to live with eachother and with the earth. Life will most likely continue after we make our species and probably millions of others disappear. Life will always find a way right. So, a new approach and perceptive should be adopted in order to continue advancing as a species. Ok. Finally I just want to end this first post with something that should be more humbling: "All forms of life are just a means to maintain the existence of DNA" No matter if one is an amoebe, an apple tree, a dolphin or a human, we all do the same basic thing: reproduce DNA. Arcturus
The problem with communication is laziness. People don't want to search this journal, and then check the references people give, to find out the truth. There are so many people that know that a dumb population is easy to manipulate, and have control over. The people take the first stuff that comes in, and just go with that. We are also emotional, and few people make the effort to include logic into thier thinking. Take gun control for example. The evidence is out there, that 90% of the laws don't help at all. But the emotional attachment given by Fox and CNN and the lobbyists combine with people being too lazy to bother looking up the real stats and so they just believe, and click thier heels until they're more helpless than they are. And then the next generation is fed more crud, and eventually, pow, you sit up, blink, realize "this isn't right," but then roll over and go back to being a sheep.
While your obvious superiour intelligence is quite impressive, it seems that this topic would go much further if you had a point besides complaining that "people are stuuuupid" Society is of course arranged to favor those of average or slightly below average intelligence. Average is the majority. How this can be seen as something new or shocking escapes me. However, your point is valid in this: as mechanization allows us to feed and carry more and more humans, the needs and wishes of the majority become more prominent in policy decisions - in the very structure of society. The exceptional were once needed, to lead countries, fight wars, and as intellectual leaders. With industrialization, such people are less in demand and their needs become more irksome to meet. What you describe as a "drop in intelligence" is simply the average man's needs coming to dominate culture. You've not asked for proposal of solutions, but I should say the Hippies had a good strategy: "Tune in, turn on, drop out"
Society is of course arranged to favor those of average or slightly below average intelligence. Average is the majority. How this can be seen as something new or shocking escapes me. mindless and cliched chatter. lay out this alleged structure if you want to be accorded even the slightest bit of credibilty. The exceptional were once needed, to lead countries, fight wars, and as intellectual leaders. explain then, how it is that mediocrity manages to crawl its way to the top rung of the ladder and lead the allegedly superior. average man's needs coming to dominate culture needs? what needs? make some distinctions. how do these "needs" differ from others? * i see you escaped the sharks.
is it not the goddamn case that, if the exceptional are marginalized, it is because they are unfit? *why dont you eyeball the background of our leaders..congress/senate/president.
