Posted on 09/23/2016 8:16:02 AM PDT by Be Careful
Don’t underestimate “the power of persuasion” in getting laid. LOL. I remember my youth fondly and this kind of stuff is one hell of an aphrodisiac. Better than a ton of flowers and chocolate.
I don’t believe I missed the point, just the alleged value. Does the author presume that his own observations are more closely tied to reality than the observations he describes?
We are in complete accord
This reminds me of a book entitled “Fashionable Nonsense” by Paul (?) Sokol featuring the new paradigm of quantum gravity and heuristics. Adams needs to tread lightly lest he becomes a modern day Lacan.
The classical bible story tells us of a garden in which everything worked fine as long as we agreed with what God communicated His understanding about to us.
When we tried to make it our own moral show, in some mysterious act of pan-human collusion, we failed spectacularly, and ultimately had to surrender our lives because we didn’t even know enough any more to keep them going.
I wouldn’t see it as having checked into a fourth (or more) dimension so much as Someone from it having reached out to us. In the scripture this is known as having eternity set in our hearts.
I think that Hoffman is full of crap. Oh, sometimes his hypothesis is correct, but not for the reason he believes.
Here’s my hypothesis: Mother Nature is a stone cold bitch. You make just one really stupid mistake, and you’re dead. If you haven’t reproduced yet, your stupidity just increased the average Survival IQ of the human race. Even if you’ve reproduced, your offspring will now have a harder time reaching reproductive age and passing your stupid/complacent genes to your grandkids. That is pretty conventional so far, no new ground broken, and I’m not taking any credit for it.
I also think that most humans have an instinct (built in by Mother Nature and/or God) to be cooperative with others, for reasons of common interest. If a tribe of loosely (and sometimes not-so-loosely) related people cooperate with each other, the strong will watch over the weak (while having time to rest and improve skills), while those weaker can plant/harvest/cook food, make clothing, raise kids and pass on knowledge, etc. Again, nothing much new here - and if our ancestors didn’t do this, I wouldn’t be writing it, and you wouldn’t be here to read it.
However, sometimes when the cooperation is hyper-successful, particularly for a long period of time and over a large area, a measure of complacency develops. As an example, ANY civilization that becomes rich and powerful, and extends over a large land mass for a long period of time (Rome and the US being primary examples). People don’t face - sometimes for several generations - any kind of mortal threat to their survival besides old age, common diseases and injury (i.e. no or very few enemies of the biped variety). They see their situation as being normal, not the exception to the rule of Human History. So their complacency turns into feeling sorry for those worse off (they have the luxury to think that way), and begin to give them a helping hand (or more). Eventually, they begin to view simple kindness and generosity as ends unto themselves...and they become evolutionarily stupid in the process. Their WISHES for reality become reality - for them (and, sometimes, for a large portion of society). They have no need for the smarts, the cold, hard look at reality that their ancestors required to survive. Then comes an evolutionary challenge, a severe one - and large numbers of these kind of people die, some before or during their reproductive years. Lots of people DO survive, as they were either just lucky (and that plays a role in evolution), or they were among the smart people who could actually determine reality and deal with it. Society then becomes VERY reality-based for a while, until the evolutionary challenge goes away for another few generations.
IMHO, we’re in the stage just before a big evolutionary challenge to our society (or we could be in the middle of it, and there’s a powerful argument to be made for that). Soon there will be a winnowing of the stupid, in some form or other. For now, Scott Adams and Hoffman are correct - because we’re at the stage of evolutionary complacency here in the Western World.
By the way, all great religions teach us to be kind and compassionate with the poor, old, widows & orphans, etc. I’m not saying that such is a bad thing and, in fact, it can be very advantageous for both individuals and society...if not allowed to be transformed into a society-wide misplacement of compassion. Misplaced compassion is probably as guilty of creating human misery as outright evil, though I’ll leave that argument to a bunch of religious and moral philosophers (mainly because it bores the piss out of me, but also because I have better things to do).
People ARE irrational.
We conservatives cherry-pick data to support our worldview. So do liberals.
Bias is a part of human nature and every one sees the world differently. No two people agree on everything.
That’s true even if you’re married - you won’t always agree with your partner.
What to make of the election? Scott Adams says feelings and your personal hunches matter more than the facts.
People decide first and look at the data later.
We are like radios: we can tune some things in, other things out.
Hopefully we look for the “announcer” who makes the most sense.
It’s interesting you wind up with a statement in which you might as well have said things exist for the sake of your entertainment. (The argument from boredom.)
I seem to remember the guys on the baseball team did pretty well too.
Ah,youth.
How interesting! I get really annoyed when people post the whole article...too much to plow through. Will consider that in the future...but someone else remarked that Adams should get the visit/hit..which is also something that I never thought of....so from now on...if I don’t want the site to get the hit, I will post the whole thing....if someone that I like will benefit, I will post the excerpt!
My new strategy Thanks!
I agree with you...but I still feel that the Godless Left has not experienced hitting bottom yet to feel the pain of having to turn to humility as their only remaining resource.
They still have too much money standing between them and the bottom.
They think that if they can just get rid of ‘us’, then everyone can live in their “Whole Foods Version of Communism”.
I suppose we each have our own gifts. LOL.
When I was sixteen I recall fondly looking at the stars with an attractive blonde I considered a FReind but not a potential “target” (so to speak) as she was a seriously committed Christian and at sixteen I was just not willing to start my “ mountaineering” with Mt Everest so to speak. But I stated go on about imagine the stars are neutrons and the planets are electrons... She was IN LOVE with me for months after that. I never kissed her or even touched her.
I recall looking at a fingernail that I had banged up, leaving a white speckled area, and thinking "wow, there's a whole universe in there."
Ah, but we’re you able to turn a young lady’s head with that idea? LOL.
You really want your mind blown and to release the chains of dogma? Check out some lectures by Rupert Sheldrake on Morphic Resonance.
Not meant that way - I literally just meant that the type of argument/discussion that I referenced was/is boring as Hell to me. I am not like the Narcissist-in-Chief, who thinks (and I use that term loosely) that everyone else exists for his sake.
Come to think of it, you might classify it as science fiction after all, what with Grendel and all. Perhaps fantasy?
Humans, unlike animals, can project their needs and aims into the future, which is always and unfailinbgly a semi-known to unknown, depending on how far into the future one is trying to project. ANY conception about future time is a model with data gaps and the function of mind that attempts to fill in those gaps is indistinguishable in its process from delusional states and hallucination. If you add the element of expectation derived from wishing (which is an attempt to grasp, apprehend, possess the future before it’s here as a means to lessen insecurity, anxiety, fear), it is apparent that humans live largely in a subjective universe in which reality and logic have the same attributes we see them evidence in dreams - very plastic, stretchy, bizarre, uninterpretable. Children, with little control over their reality, live in a state of wish and fantasy. Liberals who live in the childish realm of wish and whimsy are unable to, not only see reality, but to project future realities with a necessary degree of accuracy to insure survival.
And our eyes are limited to 3 colors. 3 is computationally efficient for maximum survival. If we saw more colors or dimensions our brains would need to be larger and would consume more energy.
The sweetness receptors on our tongues work like a lock and key to tell us when we have found an energy rich food. We think of sweetness as a fundamental property that can vary between substances however no current lab instrument can directly measure it. In the natural environment a bitter taste often indicates a poison and we are programmed to dislike it. It is so important to avoid poisons that our tongues have 6 different kinds of bitter receptors. Our perception of reality is an illusion meant for maximum survival but is an extreme simplification of it.
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