Thats how i play basketball, i do not go 100% all time as then defence can easy predict my motion, instead i go half speed and burst in speed when needed.
i voluntierly sail alone for months in very small boat, i never understood why people start talking inanimate objects and such, i feel great alone and cut off, but ye in vast ocean you realise civilization is still just small pockets on earths surface
When i walk all day i sleep 12 hours, in morning i feel like i want to continue this way instead of noooooo no more walking! Sleep deprivation is just ridiculous, water sleep and food should be plenty in any of long strenous things or else its just self destruction madness
I agree that people often miss the easy answers on sleep. It's important, though, that light/dark and exercise are not interchangeable sleep aids. Very, very broadly:
Light issues are about melatonin, which is production-inhibited and rapidly destroyed in the presence of blue light. Increasing melatonin levels is the point of Flux and blue glasses and all the rest.
Exercise issues are about adenosine, which is produced over time and gradually with physical activity, and consumed during sleep. (It's also what caffeine inhibits.)
These aren't entirely interchangeable, so there's more to be gained from addressing whichever one is the largest personal issue. (Anecdotally, I have a suspicion that the feeling zombie-tired insomnia is about a bad mismatch from sedentary tiredness.)
I do think that people preferentially worry about light issues without trying exercise, though.
To draw nice quick just focus on fundamental - perspective, creating 3d illusion on 2d, look up coil technique drawing on utube, it really makes even ur stick figures look pro
There are difference between natural and fake diamonds, natural diamonds have some impurities which make detection of artificial ones possible. I think those impurities give "character" to natural diamonds and make em more valuable. Same all stuff u get when u eat fruit like fiber, slows down vitamine absorbtion and we are adapted to that, thats why sintetic vitamines must be taken with food.
How its artificial scarcity if it is possible to tell man made vs natre made diamond, they are two different this then!
Purity of man made stuff is why it sucks, pure iron will rust the fuck away, u need add carbon and some metals to make good steel, same pure diamonds dont break light passing trough in such beautiful way as natural diamonds, and those impurities so far were not recreated by man.
If "manufactured" diamonds carried the exact same impurities everything would still stand. It's just another post facto excuse. No one used that argument for extracted ones before manufactured ones where even a thing.
Diamonds are about status projecting/social proof.
Manufactured ones would continue to be considered sub par because "reasons".
s/reasons/diamonds' only purpose as jewelry is to show you spent a lot money on them/.
Even the article misses this. Literally the only reason people buy diamonds for is because they want to show that they burnt a large sum on it. If you buy fake diamonds, other people shame you because "I didn't burn the sum so you could reap the same social benefits without actually wasting your money", so fake diamonds have a stigma attached to it.
>diamonds' only purpose as jewelry is to show you spent a lot money on them
I wouldn't say that is their only reason. They are also very eye-catching and can be used to accentuate certain features. Their hardness makes their luster and shine outlast other jewelry too.
That isn't to say that diamonds are worth their price, just that the do serve a purpose from a fashion standpoint besides for signaling wealth.
Sort of like how bitcoin uses hashes to demonstrate value, things like diamonds and dyes are a social "proof-of-work" - meaningful only because the cost they imply.
> s/reasons/diamonds' only purpose as jewelry is to show you spent a lot money on them/.
Yes, but the reason used to justify it must be indirect, otherwise it's just crass behavior.
It can be impurities, it can be color (blue vs yellow), anything related to the extraction process, but never as simple as directly stating "it's more expensive".
Your eyes are ignorant the vast majority of photons, and if your brain in it's current form tried to take on a greater number, such a feat would compromise your entire body from glucose consumption alone.
So, yes, ignorance is responsible for you seeing what you need to see of the universe in order to survive.
One human retina has about 120 million photoreceptors. In reasonably well-lit conditions they will all fire many times per second. I think this figure is too small by a factor of at least 1000, maybe more.
> A light bulb generates 10^60 photons per second.
Back of envelope: energy per photon = Planck constant times speed of light over wavelength (there might be a factor of 2pi or something missing there) or about 4x10^-19 Joules at visible-light wavelengths. A typical light bulb might put out, say, 10W of visible light, or 2.5x10^19 photons. If it's an old-style incandescent, a lot of energy goes out in the infrared; let's be generous and say it's 2.5x10^20 photons.
So this number is too large by a factor of at least 10^39.
It's still true that the great majority of photons emitted by a light bulb don't affect what you see when you look at it. For instance, because most of them are emitted in directions that don't let them reach your eyes. It is entirely beyond me how it is useful to categorize this as "ignorance".
Most of those photons contribute no relevant information.
But your argument is shit anyway: you suppose that having more powerful eyes would overload the brain, even though they both developed in relation to each other. If you had more powerful eyes, you'd obviously have evolved a more powerful brain to use them.
You've missed the point entirely, perhaps because of some misguided faith.
How do YOU know what photons are relevant and which ones aren't? Did you personally train your brain into accepting only photons under certain contextual conditions that only you personally allow? No, you didn't. Two billion years of evolution did that for you when it determined how your neurons would be configured to form your visual cortex. And it did it without your permission. You are ignorant to the history of that evolution, and you are permanently ignorant to everything that evolution was ignorant of.
Tell me, how many creatures evolve to have more noses? More ears? Scaling sensory organs horizontally is not a recipe for survival because it is neurologically expensive to support that naive type of scaling. Instead, neurology evolves by intentionally limiting the sample sizes of reality to near insignificance... and then shapes your behavior based on that. It's like me giving you a single pixel of something and you correctly can deduce a huge body of information from that to then determine what actions you can take. Your deductions aren't reality, mind you. They are models, and models are not reality. Thus, the ignorance you seem to think you can conquer if you just try super duper hard enough is a fundamentally permanent to the human condition.
There is no such thing as "powerful" in evolution. All sensory intake and neurology is not just linearly relational... it is contingent upon neurology extrapolating MORE about reality from INSIGNIFICANT sample sizes with LESS energy.
Wow, nice graphs. They reminded me of Asimov's essay on The Relativity of Wrong [1]:
The young specialist in English Lit, having quoted me, went on to lecture me severely on the fact that in every century people have thought they understood the universe at last, and in every century they were proved to be wrong. It follows that the one thing we can say about our modern "knowledge" is that it is wrong. [...]
My answer to him was, "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together." [...]
So arrogant! You don't have to be stupid to be religious, you only have to choose to believe. I'm not religious, but I know plenty of highly intelligent people who are devoted one religion or another.
I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive. As a general rule, religiosity goes down as intelligence goes up. Consider William Craig. The man is a Christian philosopher and I would say he is quite intelligent. But he also tends to stray from much of what the Christian bible teaches. Now compare him to the highly devout and evangelical Ken Ham who would deny such basic truths like evolution.
What you're seeing is US Southern Protestant fundamentalism: an evolutionary dead end (is that why they deny evolution?), which would never have come into being in the first place were it not for Henry VIII, William Cecil, and John Knox -- and Cardinal Richelieu taking the Protestant side in the Thirty Years' War.
Look at a more serious religion, and you'll see better results: Scholastic Catholicism, or the Mu'tazili and Ash'ari schools of Islam, or almost any form of Buddhism.
Catholic doctrine is to deny random mutation (god is twiddling bits manually) and insist adam and eve were real. That along with a host of other silly stuff the believe (virgin birth).
>As a general rule, religiosity goes down as intelligence goes up. //
Which tells us nothing about theistic belief. It would be foolish to conflate the two IMO; as appears to be happening in this exchange.
You say "mythical intelligent religious person" - few people could be considered more religious than Newton, you presumably consider him not to have been intelligent? What's your yardstick for intelligence?
Or did you mean "mythical" in the sense of "I'm going to ignore examples I know of because they contradict my position"?
I'm a very religious guy and consider myself reasonably intelligent. As I get older and learn more, I find my faith in God also increasing.
Godel was much smarter than me and appears to have believed in some divine being. Kant was also smarter than me and was religious. There are a litany of historical religious philosophers (Christian and otherwise) who belie your point as well.
Unless your point is simply that religiousity is currently out of favor with the self-professed intelligentsia. To which I'd respond: so?...
The GP said such people were mythical, that's not a statistical claim it's an absolute claim. One counter-example destroys such a position.
Inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence may be true, just not sure what it tells us. A statistical appeal to authority??
Many more people are theistic or spiritual than are religious -- I doubt any statistics exist for that, but again proving a truth that tells us nothing about the basic proposition seems pretty worthless.
You appear to think reasoning about a position requires someone to come to your conclusion.
Re the anecdotal nature of the data-points, are you disputing that the mentioned people are intelligent. What in particular is questionable about those data-points, they don't disprove the aforesaid conjecture but they do cast doubt on the implied conclusion being drawn.
I doubt that was meant, either. There have been studies, most show that intelligent people are less likely to be religious. The more education, the less religion. Etc. It is, of course, a statistical thing.
(I grew up in Sweden and can tell you that to get a large fraction of (mentally healthy) people to be religious, they need to grow up in a religious environment -- without anyone really contradicting that world view. It was a bit of a shock for me the first time I went to Ireland for vacation, since I knew that a large part of the locals were really religious, but they were sane.)
I'll copy the points of interest from the original post verbatim and reply in kind.
> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.
I offered myself as a simple example. I'm neither the smartest guy nor the best Christian, but I consider myself reasonably intelligent and I try hard to live by my beliefs. I also offered several other historical counterexamples.
I don't see a statistical argument here. But it could be my religion showing.
Many of the founders of modern philosophy believed in some form of a Supreme Being. I would venture to say that this is true of most of human history up until the last 20-30 years. Whether from cultural influences, expectations, or otherwise, many of the smartest people in history have had some religious belief. That religious belief may not have been mainstream or consistent with the dominant theology of the era (see America's founding fathers and the prevalence of Deism), but there is a conspicuous absence of outright atheism.
Even in more modern times you see very intelligent people with some form of religious belief. From Newton, to Einstein, to Godel, to C S Lewis: these were very smart people who also had belief in some form of God. You don't have to agree with everything they thought or said, but you would be wrong to say they were not intelligent.
In short, intelligent religious people certainly aren't "mythical."
> As a general rule, religiosity goes down as intelligence goes up.
The thesis that there is an inverse relationship between religion and intelligence is not evident when you look at the arc of human history. And if you take the most charitable view: "Of people who are alive today, there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and intelligence" there is no proof of causation.
For the sake of argument, I'll consent that there is a growing divide between "religious" and "intelligent." Given that the preponderance of evidence suggests that intelligence is largely hereditary, what would explain this shift?
One could argue that expanding our understanding of the universe is responsible for this divide. That as people know more they believe less. But that doesn't appear to pan out when you look at a longer view of human history. Did the Newton's of the past become less religious as their knowledge increased? I don't see it.
It seems more likely that this divide is unique (or at least more sharply pronounced) in today's society. It could be that this is because it is more acceptable in today's world to be harshly critical of belief in general. That is, while there have always been fighting between sects it was not socially acceptable to be hostile towards belief in general. This is an interesting argument, but is not dismissable nor provable.
It could just as easily be that the growing availability of universities and colleges (that are widely more liberal than the general population) impacts impressionable 18-22 years olds who are branching out on their own for the first time. That a growing proportion of intelligent people are being exposed to anti-religious zealots in the form of their mentors at a very impressionable time.
Show me the statistical argument for one vs the other and we can have a debate centered around numbers. Flaming me for providing counterexamples to an offensive and hyperbolic comment hardly seems like a rational counterpoint. To point your question back to you: what does it say about your position that you can't reason about it?
>> Even in more modern times you see very intelligent people with some form of religious belief. From Newton, to Einstein, to Godel, to C S Lewis
I already discussed the problems with arguing single data points for statistical correlations. See my comment on the brother comment of yours.
Again: There seem to be less correlation between intelligence and rationality than we usually think. (At least, as I thought when I was young enough to still have hair. :-) )
(So I am not going to touch the personal arguments. Let me just note that your examples are flawed.
Newton was, well, quite crazy. :-) Also, he was hardly modern, he lived long before evolution was known. Before that, you really needed some form of designer to explain life.
C S Lewis' analytical self reflection don't impress. A bunch of years ago, I read part of a biography and how he chose religion in WWI. His motivation was flawed. Literature insight is something else than rationality.
That said, some of my intellectual idols are religious. E.g. Knuth and Larry Wall.)
Reading the link you provided (and admittedly not doing any other research on the subject while on the company's time), this struck me as relevant:
> Controlling for other factors, they can only confidently show strong negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity among American Protestants.
So... American Protestants. Okay. In the scope of living people, that's... quite specific.
>> I already discussed the problems with arguing single data points for statistical correlations.
My use of these examples was not to counteract a statistical argument, but the opening sentence:
>>> I always hear about the mythical intelligent religious person but somehow, they remain elusive.
The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples. It was a simple exercise in showing that religious intellectuals are not a mythical creature.
Re intelligence -- most examinations are done in the Western Protestant world, for obvious reasons. (I.e. in the Muslim world it can be all the time ay up to suicide to admit to atheism...)
>> The rest of your rebuttal also appears to misunderstand my use of the specific examples.
I discussed that and referenced it with "See my comment on the brother comment of yours."
I think I wasn't clear, so sturgill missed my trivial point -- I meant that it was not rational to believe in supernatural phenomena without good support.
And intelligence is probably less correlated with rationality than you'd naively think, so of course you'll find highly intelligent people that believe in anything. For instance, I've talked to a guy with mental issues that believed in lots of conspiracy theories. And so on.
(And many hundreds of years old books are not good support; there is better support and more witnesses that Elvis lives. And so on. This is a really old discussion.)
Newton was a product of his times. Einstein seems to have been more agnostic, at the very least his definition of God is very different to most religions.
Newton lived only 300 years ago. Newton is a culturally relative choice, here. Why didn't you pick someone from 3000 years ago to site as intelligent? I mean, the difference between Newton and Einstein is actually very large, and the difference between Einstein and a brilliant physicist today is similarly large.
The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do, and holding belief in a deity is not one of them.
PS: Those guys are dead. You haven't met him either. They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.
>The only things that Newton did that were intelligent were things that modern physicists are still unilaterally willing to do ...
> They had less information available to them than we do today by a large margin. Their opinions and beliefs are inherently less trustworthy due to that.
i for one congratulate you for being smarter and more Knowledgeable than both Newton and Einstein.
Graduate-level physics students routinely do more complicated work than either of those two did at the height of their careers, and with a better understanding of why. Just as they Einstein did relative to Newton, and Newton to Aristotle, and Aristotle to countless people before him.
You cannot use Newton or Einstein as an example of a knowledgeable perspective and simultaneously ignore the fact that there exist more knowledgeable people today. That is a fallacy; you could just as well cite Aristotle or Thales or Zoroaster. They get worse as they get older, and that's not a coincidence.
I think you really know the obvious counter arguments yourself:
1. You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)
2. Do you remember that quote about "standing on the shoulders of giants"? Those two are a couple of the giants we stand on the shoulders of, today. That doesn't imply a claim about intelligence, more than being able to get through a science university education.
> You argue through authority, for a subject where believers are infamous for throwing out their reasoning capacity (even becoming creationists)? :-( (Is this some meta level humor?)
No, i think that the categorical statement of
bleachedsleet (five levels up the tree) is a bit offending, to me it sounds exactly like if he was claiming absolute authority on the subject, which he obviously can't.
showing a counterexample is not a bad argument, at least not in mathematics.
1. Don't make bad arguments just because you think someone's position is insulting. (As my point 2 noted, it was a flawed example.) If nothing else, you're not helping your cause...
(Regarding 2: For instance, there is mental disease. For another, if you raise children with one specific set of answers and they don't see any criticism of those answers, you can make most of them believe in anything all their life. Including creationism.)
You seem to be under an impression that holy books are just collection of facts that you accept or don't. That's not how it works. Approaching it with that makes as much sense as asking soccer players why they don't just start with the ball inside the goal and save the time. That's completely missing the point of the whole thing :)
There are many that view holy books as a collection of historical accounts given by visionaries or in witness of visionaries - those that view it as "merely" a book of facts to take or leave can still hold this view, and can still be religious. Devoutness comes in many forms. Blind belief in the Bible, for example, isn't something I've really encountered in my religious upbringing - not really all that common to encounter outside of specific examples made a mockery of on Facebook or political rally (grew up in California, likely different in bible belt).
Doubt is often encouraged, though min got the better of me and I've since been pretty distant from faith-based living.
If it's about reading moral stories then why identify as $religion at all instead of reading a variety of religious texts (and other sources) and taking the pieces you want?
Why be in a soccer team if you can just buy a ball and kick around as much as you can? ;) Again, there's more to it than reading the books. Some religions don't even have books, in fact. People had religions way before they had books. And if you think there one answer to the question "why belong to a religion" you still miss the point by a wide margin :)
Personal happiness means nothing. You're going to be a corpse pretty soon, and if all you've got out of life is personal happiness, we'd all be better off if you were put there sooner.
There's no point in being happy if you can't share it, and you can't share share stupid with people smart enough to see through it. Being ignorant fundamentally limits the happiness you can create in the world.
I think HN is having the same effect as Wikipedia here. Someone makes an obviously biased and unsubstantiated claim, and others downvote them bring it back to center, even though some are not religious.
you make absolute no sense??? do you want everyone make money from books? it is obviously impossible... but these sites bring entry level to lowest in history, which makes competition higher and thus product becomes better. i cant see what is your alternative? make writing a book almost impossible so only chosen people can do it?????
