Intelligence in the intellectual, logical reasoning sense is a evolutionary epiphenomenon. It is only weakly selected for. We can tell this because its distribution in the population is so broad. There are no gazelles that run at half the speed of the fastest[*] but there is no shortage of people with IQs that are half the top and still manage to get along (putting "the top" at around 160 and "the bottom" around 80, which is the lower end of the "gets along OK in society most of the time" range.)

Logical, linear reasoning is a trick we've managed to train our bear to dance.

Some people happen to be really good at it. This can be a problem for them because so much of what humans do, and the accounts they give of it, make very little sense to the untutored mind.

We live in the Age of Bayes, and the Bayesian Revolution over the past thee hundred years (which takes in a lot of time before Bayes himself or the recognition that what we were doing is fundamentally Bayesian) has taught us some really important lessons about ourselves. Mostly how damned stupid we have been, even the highly intelligent. We've spent centuries arguing nonsense, from how three is equal to one for large values of three to the dharma of the tao.

In the past century or so we've been calling out the people who are most "intellectually gifted" and expecting them to solve our problems (in a past age it was the pious, or the people "of good family", etc). This has created a bind for them, because for most of that time we've also had no idea why people do what they do (spoiler: mate competition and selection play large roles, although we are still a long way from any kind of comprehensive understanding.)

There are also ethical constraints on what can be done to solve human problems. The utopian projects of the 20th century, despite their profound irrationality in so many respects, were manifestations of this belief that the human intellect had all the right tools for the job of reforming the planet. It didn't work, and that leaves us in the situation we are in today, where intellect is suspect as well as desired.

As such, it isn't necessarily a shock that people identified as "intellectually gifted" should feel less adequate after exemplary lives. Nor is it likely that's going to change any time soon, as we continue to look to the intellectually gifted to save us from ourselves, while steadfastly refusing to spend any time looking hard in a mirror for the source of most human problems.

[*] this may be false... feel free to fact-check me!

HG Wells' "Kingdom of the Blind" is a better take on the metaphor. Highly recommended. A sighted man falls into a high, isolated Himalayan valley where the population has no eyes. It does not end well.

Your slip into hyperbole here is not helping your case, which is otherwise pretty accurate.

The human heart is very well protected. Humans only have ten of fifteen seconds of consciousness without blood flow. Even granted they were using stone knives, which are insanely hard and sharp, cutting through the rib cage, severing the aorta, the vena cava and the pulmonary veins and arteries is not the work of ten or fifteen seconds.

It is also likely that the victims were too busy screaming to be properly said to eat anything.

So while the New World was in fact dominated by a blood cult that was carried out more formally in the politically organized areas, and it is not impossible that a few still-beating hearts were shoved into a few still-working mouths, the ritual of "feeding the victim their own heart" was a ritual, not a literal thing, and is best described as such.

You probably know all that, but the people who believe the myths about non-European cultures likely don't.

The blood cult was practiced all over the New World, much as the Norse Pantheon is recognizably related to the Sumerian one. Ideas travel. So even amongst the pre-political peoples of what is now Canada the practice of ritual torture, sacrifice and cannibalism was common, as was the denuding of entire landscapes for the sake of game.

The notion that North American native peoples lived in any kind of harmony with nature is simply false. We have overwhelming archeological and ethnographic evidence to the contrary, and anyone who believes otherwise is engaging in Creationist levels of evidence-denial.

You've likely encountered this quote, but it bears repeating:

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press On' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. -- Calvin Coolidge, 30th president of US (1872 - 1933)

...with laser beams! Radical!

Shades of a bad science fiction novel. Or even several bad science fiction novels.

Next up on the news at 9 -- replete from eating Fukashima, Godzilla shows up from the trenches off of Japan to eat the Independence before marching on San Francisco, plates a-glowing...

...and this isn't even the first journal to do this. It's probably happening now because an entire book has just come out walking people how universally abused p-values are as statistical measures.

http://www.statisticsdonewrong...

The book is nice in that it does give one replacements that are more robust and less likely to be meaningless, although nothing can substitute for having a clue about data dredging etc.

rgb

Donations are already taxed for most non-profits. Tax-exemption for donations isn't the same thing as not paying a corporate tax. Bear in mind that it is trivial to set up non-profit organizations and easy-peasy to use them to pass absolutely obscene not-profits straight through to the corporate officers as salaries, who just happen to be the folks that founded the not-for-profit and who own its not-for-profit shares that, in the event that those same officer/owners convert it over to for-profit, will become disgustingly valuable in an instant (see the history of Blue-Cross-Blue-Shield, for example). My wife worked for just such a non-profit until about a year ago. The company president of this not-for-profit company was knocking down seven digit salaries plus seven digit bonuses at the same time they were cutting her income to pay for an IT transition that they mandated. Her "donation" to the company was indeed not taxed -- it wasn't even voluntary. Non-profits need substantial tax revision almost as badly as religions.

You seem confused about the constitution, the bill of rights, and taxation in general, and nobody has suggested taxing people for exercising a civil liberty (certainly not me). What is being suggested is not giving people a tax deduction for money donated to a club. I'd oppose giving a tax deduction for dues paid to the Shriners, the Benevolent and Paternal Order of the Elks, the Masons, the Knights of Columbus, etc on the same basis, even though in some cases some of those organizations do some charitable works some of the time. I'm even borderline comfortable with tax breaks for donations to things like the Salvation Army whose primary focus is charity, although I am most unhappy with the way they pay their corporate officers and don't like the idea that those that they help get the help only at the cost of proselytizing. I could see clear to similar rules for genuine charities stripped of the missionary component set up by religious groups as well.

But the pass-the-hat donations to churches, used primarily to pay to maintain the infrastructure and personnel of the church, no. Taxing that isn't taxing your right to exercise a civil liberty -- nothing in the world is preventing you from belief or worship. It is taxing the money you are giving to a club designed to promote your belief in yourself and others and to support a huge formal infrastructure that yes, absolutely, exercises a substantial amount of power. We have similar laws regulating donations to things like political action committees and candidates for office -- if those laws were fairly applied to many churches they would not meet the criteria for 527 status because they often advocate for specific candidates or positions and are knee-deep in issue advocacy.

Some churches do good stuff some of the time. My niece is a Methodist minister; so was my grandfather. My grandfather, from all accounts, was a sharpster who ran his household until he ran out of money and then went and held a tent revival somewhere to refill his coffers. My niece works in Palestine trying to bring justice for the Palestinians and peace in a land that has almost never known it. But if you donate money to the Methodist church in church, almost all of that money goes to support the church itself and the minister that preaches to you on Sunday. That's the money I don't think should be deductible, because the government has no business subsidizing the support of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, or the people that run them, "cult" or not, and tax breaks are a de-facto subsidy.

If at some time you want to talk about the religious beliefs or lack thereof of our founding fathers, I'm happy to direct you to their own writings in which it was made perfectly clear that most of them were anything from atheists to deists. Jefferson's personal ambition was to establish a state free from religion, not a religious state, a state where one did not have to profess belief in a God at all in order to exercise political rights.

If you look up above, you can see precisely where that plan has been run awry by your own words. You are quite right. Even for atheists like Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson and John Adams and George Washington and Thomas Paine, it was necessary to hide their (lack of) beliefs in a world where political power was solidly in the grasp of the churches. It still is. One cannot get elected as an atheist. Which all by itself says that something has gone very, very wrong with the founding fathers' ideal of religious freedom -- freedom from religion, especially in politics. All you are doing is confirming my reasons for wanting to oppose it -- you suggest that anybody "godless" must be "totalitarian" (bullshit!) or that simply actually enforcing the separation of church and state that the bill of rights requires and getting nonsense like "In God we Trust" off of our currency is somehow threatening to our civil liberties rather than actively enforcing them.

I really do suggest that you consider studying the Bible before you suggest that our rights were endowed by a Creator. The Bible makes it clear that humans have no rights whatsoever. For example, it explains that I can beat my slaves almost to death, or rape my neighbor's daughter as long as I pay her father 20 shekels of silver afterwards and marry her. Numbers 21 is another really excellent passage describing the genocidal slaughter of women, children and old men except for the young virgin women in the Midianite crowd who were given to the troops to rape and enslave as part of the booty -- by Moses, who was surely a righteous man, somebody Jesus was perfectly happy to walk around with up on the mount. Consider that at no time in the history of the world has God enforced a single human right. No injustice, no matter how it cries out to the sky for correction, has ever been repaired by a divine act. Every day acts of unspeakable horror occur -- plenty of them as the result of so-called acts of God -- without any hint of divine rescue or retribution.

No, human rights were invented by humans -- in particular by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Thomas Jefferson, especially by Jefferson who gave them a compelling poetic appeal, one that could rouse passion in the human heart. The declaration of independence is a statement of what the world should have been if God had in fact been on the job, and an acknowledgement that since he's not, since there is no such thing, it is high time that we as human beings pick up the burden for ourselves. If you want heaven, if you want justice, you'd better put your shoulder to the wheel and make it happen here on Earth because there is no divine heaven or hell or cosmic justice before, during, or afterward.

I can do no better than close with a nice quote from Thomas Paine, one of our good old founding fathers:

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

That, my friend, is the common attitude of the founding fathers, most of whom were sufficiently adept at concealing the depth of their antipathy to organized religion that they could continue to hold political power in a world where mankind was already enslaved, where the church(es) already held the monopoly on profit and power. It has taken hundreds of years to break that monopoly. The work isn't finished yet. But the age of reason that Paine called for is gradually bringing it about, because -- and I know you won't like this, but it is simple truth and you should think about it -- reason and religion are fundamentally incompatible. You cannot consistently accept a dual standard for determining probable truth, one for "scientific" facts deduced using observation and consistently applied reason in the actual world and another for "truths" supposedly stated by people whose primary goal was the establishment of a stable religious hegemony that conferred upon them substantial power and wealth and tribal status, which have no observational basis and which cannot ever be verified or disproven by observation or reason.

That's why you are reduced to making up stuff about Creators and trying to tie it into what might have caused the Big Bang or other observed aspects of the visible Universe. Nobody can prove you wrong, to be sure. You could assert that the big bang was the hatching of a giant egg (Hindu), or the expression of certain bodily fluids (Greek) or that it can be mapped in some improbable way into the absurdities at the beginning of Genesis and nobody can possibly prove you wrong. In fact, you can make up a literally infinite number of stories for what might have gone on beforehand. You can support them by means of antique scriptures or just invent them. There really isn't any difference.

Physicists (I am a physicist, BTW) do the same thing -- they try to imagine what might have been going on beforehand. The difference is that their guesses and imagination are tempered by the need for absolute, rigorous consistency with the body of knowledge we have gradually built up that can be verified at any time by any person interested in doing so by the means of performing various experiments or observations, and that physicists do not assert their hypotheses as truth . Physical laws are expressed as probable truth -- in the case of some things, very, very probable truth -- but we always maintain the mental flexibility to change our minds in the event that an experiment comes along that disproves a belief or demonstrates that the belief is not complete.

Where is there any evidence of that rational process in religion? Physics is humble and skeptical where religion is arrogant and certain. In science there is no revealed truth, only truth as we can best discern it when we work very hard and in a completely open and collaborative way. In religion it is exactly the opposite -- all truth is revealed truth, and (with the exception of perhaps the Quakers) such truths are held to be immutable and unchallengable. For most of human history, to openly challenge a supposed revealed truth was to invite torture and death.

You like the idea of freedom. So do I. And the most basic freedom is the freedom to think, to challenge the system of beliefs you were force-fed as a child and indoctrinated in to the point where you find it difficult to challenge them. I suggest that you use it.

rgb

Not at all. I'm perfectly happy for people to believe anything they like. However, I absolutely object to giving them tax breaks on the basis of their belief system or to support an organized supernatural belief system. For one thing, as has been pointed out it clearly violates the separation of church and state (as do many other silly things, such as the references to God on currency, and yeah, I oppose those too because they do not speak for me or for a Hindu who believes in Gods, not (the Judeo-Christian) God, or for a Buddhist, or for many others. The state has no business even obliquely endorsing belief in the supernatural, especially given the lack of evidence for anything supernatural to sensibly believe in.

You clearly seem to have Obama on the brain, BTW. Curious, since this discussion isn't really about Obama -- it is a conservative principle to not force religious belief down people's throats and there was never any constitutional reason to give religions of any sort tax breaks (as I said, the Bill of Rights directly and specifically prohibits mixing church and state).

As for judging organizations about being a cult or not being a cult -- that's what is done NOW, when the Federal Government has to decide whether or not any given group of people who adhere to some absurd belief constitute a religion or a cult. The only rule that is consistently applied is that "old" absurd belief systems are grandfathered in and try to stomp on "new" absurd belief systems with hobnail boots, so anything new is a cult, anything old is a religion. So Jehovah's Witnesses, who were never anything but a cult and remain so today, are part of a religion in spite of the fact that some of their religious practices with their children actively endanger those childrens' lives. Ditto Mormanism. Ditto some of the other offshoots of Christianity with their tinhorn messiahs (there are a bunch of them out west and across the south). But Islam or Methodism or Catholicism aren't cults, because a lot of people believe in them instead of only a few. There's no more evidence for any world religion than any other -- zero equals zero -- but numbers apparently matter.

I disagree. I don't want to distinguish a religion from a cult at all. I want none of them to have any sort of legal protection or legal persecution, provided that they obey the common secular law, which includes taking care of your children and giving them blood-based products (like plasma or a blood transfusion) if they need them medically and so on. Including tax protection.

Look, if you wanted to join a chess club, you wouldn't try to deduct your dues. Why should you get to deduct your dues if you join a God club?

rgb

I'm an acolyte of the Don't Make Up Stupid Theories About Everything Coming From Nothing Because a Big Guy In The Sky Made It So Without Evidence. Especially don't try to sell them as revealed truth (without evidence) in contradiction to all of the other equally absurd and related theories that are sold as revealed truth (without evidence) that were invented by unbelievably primitive cultures to establish political-religious hegemony. As for "all human wisdom that existed in the past is foolishness" -- quite a lot of it was. Not all of it. You know how we can tell which is which?

I didn't think so, but a big hint is this -- NOT because it is written in scripture, NOT because it is believed by a large or small fraction of the human population, NOT because they are the words of somebody famous, NOT even because the "wisdom" isn't overtly inconsistent and hence isn't a priori impossible.

In the meantime, I'm not a big fan of the everything came from nothing theory simply because it isn't terribly consistent with physics. I much prefer everything came from everything, or if you prefer, the gobsmackingly obvious observation that "nothing" is not a state that has ever been observed or that can reasonably be inferred from observations of that which we can measure. But whether or not you yourself think that everything came from nothing (ex nihilo) because there wasn't really nothing, there was God, and God, while not really something, was enough to make something out of nothing or whatever tangled web of irrational logic you want to make up or accept as "ancient wisdom" concerning "creation" in a Universe with an apparent empirical law of conservation of mass energy, otherwise known as the "we have never, ever, seen an act of creation" law) I am highly allergic to giving the name "God" to my own ignorance, allowing it to fill the gaps in my understanding as the easy way out.

What happened before the alleged Big Bang? Was there "nothing"? Was there "something"? Is the visible Universe part of a much larger structure of existence, most of which we simply cannot see? Sure, all of these are perfectly lovely questions and I have no answers to them. How could I? We simply cannot see, and until we can there is no good reason to prefer one "answer" (otherwise know as "hypothesis" since they are only provisional answers) over another and only silly people would spend a lot of time arguing over the enormous range of possible answers, let alone fighting wars and blowing themselves and others up when people refuse to accept one particularly silly hypothesis without evidence or any reasonable hope of obtaining evidence.

But do as you like.

And BTW, I don't have an iPhone. Honestly, I'm not even sure what your implication is when you assert that I do. Are iPhones satanic atheist instruments? Does the fact that Ask Siri is more likely to reveal an evidence-supported truth than Ask the Old Testament grate on you?

rgb

Unfortunately that is not a meaningful statement. I have no idea what a "thermodynamic reexpansion" is versus a "non-thermodynamic reexpansion", for example. Nor is it clear how this would be expressed mathematically as a generalization of Maxwell's equations. Nor does your paper do anything more than repeat this meaningless statement.

There may be something meaningful and interesting to say about the thermodynamics of electromagnetism and space-time, but until you give us a mathematical statement of the physical principles you are trying to enunciate it is going to be very difficult for anyone to understand what, if anything, you are talking about.

You'll forgive me for believing that that is a lie, because this has been explained many, many times. On the balance of probabilities, you are an irrational nutjob who is resistant to any actual explanation or evidence.

That said, I'll waste few minutes of my precious time pretending your question is sincere and you have a non-zero chance of changing your mind.

The reason why we focus on exotic matter is because observational evidence for a source of anomalous gravitational attraction is robust and diverse and alternative theories have either failed to account for it, or have failed other observational tests.

It isn't as if we have a single measurement on one system. We have detailed measurements of the rotation curves of many spiral galaxies. We have the motion of galaxies in clusters. We have the motion of clusters themselves. We have gravitational lensing studies--which probe the dark matter distribution in a completely different way from dynamical studies. We have cosmological simulations that can't explain galaxy formation without dark matter. We have structure in the cosmic microwave background that is evidence for dark matter, in that it can be explained easily with it, but only with great difficulty without, just as hearing a dog bark is evidence for a dog because a dog easily explains barking, while alternative explanations have much lower priors and so are less plausible. To deny this is to deny Bayes.

Did I have to dig deeply into some mysterious literature to find this? No. I had to look at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Do you see why I think your question is dishonest?

So that makes "maybe the measurements are in error" much less plausible than "dark matter exists".

With regard to new physics, the problem is that the low-hanging fruit have been picked, and what remains has a hard time explaining all the diverse observational evidence. It is hard to find a theory that explains all the phenomena that are observed that is not "there is some kind of exotic matter out there". None-the-less, we are actively testing a few such theories. Again from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So now your question has been answered. You need wait no more. You can either change your mind, and agree that dark matter is the most plausible explanation of the robust and diverse observations, or you can explain why you find some alternative hypothesis more plausible. But you can never again honestly ask, "Why don't people take observational error or alternative theories more seriously?"

As others have pointed out, this is false. Multiple species kill for fun.

War is mate competition pursued by other means. The reasons why humans kill each other is because it is an evolved, adaptive, behaviour carried over into a world that we are desperately trying to engineer in such a way that killing is no longer necessary or functional. The problem is that it's still fun: it feels good because we are the descendents of individuals who were selected to be good at it, and part of being good at it was enjoying it, getting an immediate, internal, biochemical reward for behaviour that was also adaptive (that produced more offspring).

As such, sports and other forms of competition that allow us to activate that in-built reward system without actually killing people are really important to keeping human society reasonably peaceful.

Let's repeal the tax-exempt status of all religions! There isn't the slightest good reason that they should be tax exempt in the first place. For one thing, they are organizations devoted to coercing and conditioning the young to believe in absurdities. For another, they wield political power and influence and I don't want my own tax dollars making up the deductions taken by those individuals who are directly or indirectly supporting political positions I don't agree with. For a third, it is semantically and epistemologically impossible to differentiate a "religion" from a "cult". All religions began as cults and are cults still -- they both consists of a group of people who claim special and absurd knowledge of things that cannot be independently and objectively verified or observed and who want to convince others that accepting this "knowledge" as true will grant them equally special status promised, curiously enough, only as a part of the knowledge that must be accepted.

The two words refer to the same thing, at most separated by a scale factor. Either we make pastafarianism a tax-exempt religion or allow special tax concessions to any Subgenius preacher claiming to spread the word of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, or Methodism and Judaism and Islam and Catholicism and Scientology and... (the list continues, and continues) should all have all forms of special status revoked. Religion can be a tax-paid-dollar supported club all it wants, but the idea that money paid into a kitty to be given to somebody to support a building and employee whose sole purpose is to promise people ludicrous rewards or tortures and to believe in magic should some how have the same status as money given to (say) UNICEF or Care is absolutely ridiculous.

So please, sign this petition. If we make Scientology financially untenable, maybe then we can tackle the next 100 cults on the same list.

rgb

That's odd, when I went through the screening and they mis-entered me into the scanner as female, it didn't report any anomaly.

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Continuous commanding and telemetry with a slight delay...

rgb