The real science

[ZenRaiden]

I will first point out the reason I call this the way I do, is because real science is often subject to theory of method.
Here is very fun short article that will probably make you laugh out laud if you see the funny side.

There is way too much serendipity â LessWrong

As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. …

www.lesswrong.com

Here is what I wrote earlier, trying to kind of explain why scientist are not always good scientist.

Scientists are often bad personality type for science.

Here is my reasoning why big five model is the biggest hit of decade and MBTI is falling by way side. First of all part of problem with MBTI is that its monopolized and monetized, so that makes it less accessible. The good news is that MBTI is not that sophisticated so monetization of it does...

intpforum.com

The scientist we think we want...

The ones we actually need....

 

[scorpiomover]

I will first point out the reason I call this the way I do, is because real science is often subject to theory of method.
Here is very fun short article that will probably make you laugh out laud if you see the funny side.

There is way too much serendipity â LessWrong

As we all know, sugar is sweet and so are the $30B in yearly revenue from the artificial sweetener industry. …

www.lesswrong.com

Here is what I wrote earlier, trying to kind of explain why scientist are not always good scientist.

Scientists are often bad personality type for science.

Here is my reasoning why big five model is the biggest hit of decade and MBTI is falling by way side. First of all part of problem with MBTI is that its monopolized and monetized, so that makes it less accessible. The good news is that MBTI is not that sophisticated so monetization of it does...

intpforum.com

The scientist we think we want...
View attachment 7642
The ones we actually need....
View attachment 7643

I don't think anyone is going to want the 2nd woman testing if they have anthrax.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

I've known people (female in particular) who have been alienated from these groups because the sort of people that gravitate towards them. The one I'm thinking of completely changed their educational trajectory.

It is a strange phenomenon. How much of our attitudes as a society, guides these sort of people to these professions, almost like creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Theres being interested in bugs and dinosaurs as a child, then there's being borderline antisocial because "no one understands you".

 

[Black Rose]

I've known people (female in particular) who have been alienated from these groups because the sort of people that gravitate towards them. The one I'm thinking of completely changed their educational trajectory.

It is a strange phenomenon. How much of our attitudes as a society, guides these sort of people to these professions, almost like creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Theres being interested in bugs and dinosaurs as a child, then there's being borderline antisocial because "no one understands you".

I think that since its modern inception science has always been that way.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Sure capacity for introspection is a must, but there hardly is anything introspective about doing science itself.

Have you seen Oppenheimer? Mans fucked constantly. He wasn't socially reclusive even a bit.

The idea of the lonely genius is a myth, only happening incidentally.

The article funny enough points out that most people doing science, in a chef-like Marie Curry fashion were probably voluntarily doing science, because they were getting high on the science.

Makes them sound like regular people basically.

 

[scorpiomover]

Theres being interested in bugs and dinosaurs as a child, then there's being borderline antisocial because "no one understands you".

The prople I know who are anti-social and everyone avoids, tend to be violent. Half are men. Half are women.

The people I know where everyone else "I don't understand what goes on in his mind", seem to be almost exclusively men, and everyone seems to like them, to such an extent, that it would be accurate to say they have thousands of friends.

The people I know where they say "no-one understands me", seem to be almost exclusively women, who seem to attract men everywhere they go.

 

[Black Rose]

I went to Siera Middle School Science Magnet.

I did an essay in 5th grade about science and the transistor and that is why they selected me to go there. I drew this computer:

In 6th grade, we learned the scientific method, did field work taking measurements of the Rio Gand River, and went to a copper mine and the Biosphere in Arizona. Then we went to the Natural History Museum in Albuquerque. We learned about geology and electricity. My science fair project was about botany. In the library, I read the book Dinotopia and all the books on A.I. - We made electric motors in class:

In 7th grade, we did physics and made a roller coaster. The field trip was to San Francisco and SeaWorld Huston Texas. The Science Fair experiment I did was chemistry.

8th grade was about hydroponics. The science fair project I did was zoology (sea monkeys). I was into Star Trek schematics at the time.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

The people I know where everyone else "I don't understand what goes on in his mind", seem to be almost exclusively men, and everyone seems to like them, to such an extent, that it would be accurate to say they have thousands of friends

Never met anyone who says they don't know what's going on in their head, if I had to think of people that do that, it's women.

Also, I'm not saying anti social as in antisocial personality disorder. I'm just saying as in adverse to social situations.

I've met people with Asperger's and autism like qualities, and they are happy to explain all this stuff to you, and socialize, and all that.

I'm just trying to say that there's a difference between being intensely interested in something, obsessed, and capacity for social engagement.

 

[Black Rose]

I'm just trying to say that there's a difference between being intensely interested in something, obsessed, and capacity for social engagement.

Cultures build on the prevailing nature of unity. Thus if someone is outside the group or is inside but pushed out then the tension is on the small differences between what is considered to be the basis of that unity and what is considered nonconformity.

Science is neutral so anyone trying to impinge morals into it has been seen as bad. What happens then is the definition of what science is. Can people relate to it as neutral or do people not have the capacity to be neutral and always look at people of different views as pseudoscientists thus bad?

Not all people have a neutrality to their personality not to amend to the scientific process.

Welcome to Spirit Science!​

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Spirituality to me is about cognition, phenomenology and theory of mind. I appreciate some of the mysticism stuff, many things that were initially from spiritual practice have been confirmed and adopted by science and empiricism. There is just so much we don't know, but at the same time most of the things you see today are form people that don't really have a basis in reality for what they believe.

For example: Thoughts must have properties, can you create thoughts with properties that heal? We know that through experience we can heal, for sure, but that experience translates to a thought in your head, so can we not just create those properties a different way.

If you look up "how to heal spirituality" you're going to get insane garbage. That Spirit Science is a cook and he would be so much more interesting if he just executed differently.

 

[Black Rose]

I once wrote an article about how we all have mental models in our heads of how reality is supposed to operate, the cause and effect, when x happens y happens, and there is a connection between x and y. But then it so happens that there can actually be a possibility that a specific x is not connected to a specific y. The correlation is not causation. As it turns out many such things that do get connected are there for other reasons than we suppose they are, for example: cargo cults. The airplane does fly but not for the reasons the trible people thought they did.

So it is a matter of doing the proper experiments and research investigations to link two events. The brain is full of connections that sometimes do not form real coherent views of reality because the associative nature of what is and is not cannot be properly put in context. And this means when we see other people talking about their experience we will think they are stupid or wrong or bad or mean. And when that happens we start to see them as dangerous and something to be "dealt with".

Discrimination of women is seen this way in the specific cultures surrounding specific scientific disciplines in the professional and unprofessional gathering places of the work being done. I once came across an article that said All artificial intelligence research was racist and sexist. They also said DMT machine elves were this way as well. - Was this person wrong? From their perspective, they were completely right. This culture they had seen was inside a bubble of racism and sexism. That does not mean the bubble is the totality of A.I. research or of psychedelics.

It is our life experiences that we bring to the table and how they are put together inside our world models that shape our opinions of how we think of the scientific communities. Gathering information and analyzing it can never be a completely objective science of reality because objectivity requires a verifiable shared understanding of what the interpretations mean. I might agree with you on some data and that it is organized correctly but then we need to filter it through cross-disciplinary models with different languages and criteria for the standard of verified degrees of significance reliability and proof.

This means that if women have trouble getting into "science" it is because certain cultures of "science" are about fighting on the grounds of what should be and should not be true and in doing so this creates hostility when people start using gender and non-valid reasons for why their evidence for their claims do not hold up to scrutiny. Why should women want to be put in a position where they are attacked all the time about a non-related issue of how science is seen to work which is about their gender and not their actual principled work?

New Age "Science" can be found to be in the same position because all you need to do is say: look it is just pseudoscience. But in actual science what happens is that people do their own work and come to their own conclusions without a caste system or hierarchy or authoritarian gatekeepers. This is why the hardcore Bible people have shrunken so small. All the people who were in that culture left once they "did their own research". The reason new age science suffered no such blow was that no authority had a hold on it. People inside and outside could question and refute it with no fear of a higher power people coming down on them.

Once people start saying only one way of doing science is correct they become outcasts from the people who want to ask real questions. This makes science a decentralized activity. Calling bulsh*t on other people's methods will not stop them. And there will be many people making many discoveries some people will always say they should not be doing on all sorts of intractable grounds. Science will always be about people doing what other people say is impossible and people will always discriminate yet always the majority can gather with their peers to lend credence to the views they share and make the standards by which they understand the organized knowledge of such gatherings.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Just a side note spiritualism is basically mysticism/eastern religions/mix of other stuff

If we look at voodoo, and stuff most of it comes from mixing shit.
When we look at kabala and other mystic traditions, they are basically just mix of transcendental stuff.
If we look at say Indian vedas they seem to be the most comprehensive accounts of all traditions humans have, probably because they were best preserved.
So I think mysticism and pretty much all these topics are real, but most people have very little life resolution or interest in working on these things normally.

What really is happening is that we kind of live in a material world, where we are stuck in rat race which is more demanding for survival than anything beyond that.
What is important though to understand that most spiritual mystical and new age spirit stuff is just copy of copy of copy of copy of someones work from 1000s of years ago.
So of course its dumb.
Because you need to understand it, and obviously people will not understand it, if someone copy pastes some verse from some book and then extrapolates shit that is not true.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

So it is a matter of doing the proper experiments and research investigations to link two events. The brain is full of connections that sometimes do not form real coherent views of reality because the associative nature of what is and is not cannot be properly put in context. And this means when we see other people talking about their experience we will think they are stupid or wrong or bad or mean. And when that happens we start to see them as dangerous and something to be "dealt with".

We either see something as a threat, a passive agent, or an asset.

In my personal history, it volatile. Which is worse than a being a clear threat. You can't be sure if something wise is being said or if you should discard it, look into it more. There's always a promise that it's worth it to engage.



I hate that I'm pulling out Peterson right now, but what he says particularly at around the end has been impactful for me.

I'm not sure how true it is, gradual movement to a blurry picture where we had to imagine the gaps in the details, to a now more refined image is soothing.

This idea that we are, almost like in a pot or cauldron, boiling away impurities of perception, reducing the sauce that is existence from a watered down murky stew to a concentrated, thick, rich solution is so appealing.

I do agree with Zen. Hindu-Buddhist spirituality is the most in depth, it almost seems like a combination of all religions to be honest. Like they could all fit into it.

You only get a similar feel from Western religion by blending a bunch of religious beliefs that aren't typically paired together like gnosticism, hermeticism. Much of that is not preserved however.

Sure, people of the world in the past may have observed the world in a way that was not so different from the way we observe the world. Thinking, sensation, feeling, sure intuition.

But it's not like they're ongoing organized efforts compiling a sort of Bible of mysticism.

Unless you're talking about someone who came out of a temple, where maybe ideas are practiced for hundreds of years, around multiple people, much like the University; these ideas are going to be extremely subjective to the individual with study them.

I'm sure there are some online communities but I haven't checked. Am I being told the story of Krishna from the Gita, or am I getting more someone's past marital affairs?

Well, it's all down to the individual. If I really wanted to I could find what I am describing here, it's just I am not really particularly inclined to do so. I'm not particularly inclined to insert myself in any community of any type. Someone who is, maybe even someone who just does it on whim, would probably benefit greatly. From where I stand though, it's just unlikely, I've received most of the good spiritual advice I'll ever get.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I'm sure there are some online communities but I haven't checked. Am I being told the story of Krishna from the Gita, or am I getting more someone's past marital affairs?

Context and many details matter. We are always getting only ideas, but not the nitty gritty stuff. I like that Buddha said do what works for you. He was not a preacher, he was a teacher. He taught methods how to find your path.
Many religions are rather prescriptive and rigid, in ways they apply to individuals.
But spiritual stuff is almost always a type of thing that applies to you. You can teach principals, but obviously you and I are different entities, still human, but our life is different in some ways, and so we act different, so natural what works for you will not work for me etc.
The thing is all traditions converge on some principals that are universal.
I would not be surprised if some traditions overlap because of borrowing concepts kind of like we do it today, and memes from England are memes all over the world.
We are highly memetic creatures, which means we borrow ideas.
So we could take a guy like Jung then Kabala then say Janaism, Christianity and Lamaism and we would find similar ideas and principals just expressed differently.

 

[scorpiomover]

The people I know where everyone else "I don't understand what goes on in his mind", seem to be almost exclusively men, and everyone seems to like them, to such an extent, that it would be accurate to say they have thousands of friends

Never met anyone who says they don't know what's going on in their head,

They understand what they mean. Almost no-one understands what they mean.

Also, I'm not saying anti social as in antisocial personality disorder. I'm just saying as in adverse to social situations.

Those people where everyone else said that "no-one else understands him", are people who consistenly avoid the limelight. But they seem to be people who are friendly to everyone.

Think of the sort of guy who never goes to a frat party in university, but who says hello to every one of the frat guys and everyone who went to that party every time he walks down the road and goes to college.

Those frat guys can't remember half of the women they slept with. But they remember him instantly, and probably will remember him for their entire lives.

So I can hardly say guys like that are "anti-social".

I've met people with Asperger's and autism like qualities, and they are happy to explain all this stuff to you, and socialize, and all that.

I'm just trying to say that there's a difference between being intensely interested in something, obsessed, and capacity for social engagement.

1) I can appreciate that. But these sorts of people are extremely intelligent. So they have the brains. Autistics show a marked inability to comprehend deceit.

They're not hired as salesmen and in business, because they're apt to mention the faults of a product that would put you off from buying them, because if you knew the truth, you would never buy that product.

They're also often not employed in many jobs, because if the boss' wife comes into the office and she says that he was working late the previous Friday, they're likely to say that was strange, because they were passing a restaurant that evening and saw their boss in the window having dinner with a woman who is definitely not the boss' wife.

In the same way, they're often not invited to parties, because when a good-looking guy is chatting up a young woman, they're apt to ask where his girlfriend is, and blow the guy's chances of cheating on his girlfriend.

2) So they're a liability in any situation where people want to lie, cheat and steal, and get away with it.

The real reason why they're considered to lacking in the capacity for social engagement, is because so much of social engagement is about deceit, and about lying, cheating, stealing, and doing all the sorts of things that are considered definitely immoral by everyone, and they have a knack of saying things that will stop people from being immoral.

So in a corrupt society where most people believe that to get what you want out of life, or even just to get what is fair, you have to lie, they stop those people from lying.

However, in a moral place where everyone wants to be upfront and honest, they are extremely welcome, because they say very intelligent things, and so usually contribute positively to the conversation.

3) Evolution:

Those same qualities that make them so unable to comprehend deceit, also mean that they are unable to be that deceitful themselves, even for their own benefit. So their traits are disadvantageous for them. So from an evolutuionary perspective, those traits should have become less and less common over time, until none of them were left, barring 1 in a million mutations.

I suspect that's why there are so many of them, and why evolution hasn't weeded them out. Any society in which autistics would be likely to be weeded out over time, is a corrupt society where people would lie, cheat and steal, screwing each other over all the time. In such a society, each person who gains, screws over 20 to 1,000 other people. So as a whole, that society becomes worse and worse off, until eventually there is no society anymore.

So any society that perceives autistics as having disadvantageous traits, such as a lack of capacity for social engagement, are are likely to disappear over time, is doomed anyway. It's just a matter of time until their society collapses.

The other societies, are the moral ones, and in those places, their honesty and intelligence would be of great benefit, and so their genes proliferate in moral societies.

4) Thus, overall, you are likely to find many people considered to be autistic, in any society that used to value honesty and intelligence, but now only cares about lying, cheating, stealing, etc. The fact that they are looked on negatively, means that that society is going to get worse and worse, as everyone tears each other apart, and is DOOMED.

Which countries now say they have a lot of "autistic" people?

Which countries are there lots of people who say that people are very selfish and dishonest?

Which countries are there lots of people who say that things were much better in the 1990s than today?

I think you'll see that there's a strong empirical correlation between them.

 

[Black Rose]

Which countries now say they have a lot of "autistic" people?

Which countries are there lots of people who say that people are very selfish and dishonest?

Which countries are there lots of people who say that things were much better in the 1990s than today?

I think you'll see that there's a strong empirical correlation between them.

I do not think @EndogenousRebel was saying autistic people we messogenist against women. I think that in general science is unfriendly towards women because in more appropriate terms, people in science communities can be jerks because that is the norm of such groups.

 

[scorpiomover]

Sure capacity for introspection is a must, but there hardly is anything introspective about doing science itself.

There isn't any more. Most modern publicised scientific discoveries are low ratio empirical correlations, things like "in a scientific study of 300 obese people, 30% of them had gene variant X". FYI, 30% of lobotomies worked as well.

Have you seen Oppenheimer?

I learned from U-571, that there's zero connection between American-made films and real life.

The idea of the lonely genius is a myth, only happening incidentally.

Galois. Cantor. Abel. Dirac. The list goes on and on and on.

Oh, yes. Don't forget Darwin. He was such a social butterfly, whenever anyone came to see him, he would run into the garden and tell his wife to tell them that he was ill.

Dirac spoke so little that his friends would make bets about the number of words he'd use in an hour.

Also the reverse: Gauss had 13 children. Feynman was a known lothario.

The article funny enough points out that most people doing science, in a chef-like Marie Curry fashion were probably voluntarily doing science, because they were getting high on the science.

Makes them sound like regular people basically.

Most scientists TODAY, are regular people, often with a huge ego.

Manufacturing moved to China in the 1970s. Before then, there were plenty of high-paying executive positions, like in Mad Men. But once Western companies moved their factories to China, most of the big-paying jobs were gone. So if you had a degree and you wanted a decent paying job, there were few options left: one was finance. But people in fintech are ex-physicists, really, really, really smart people. Another option was science, which is where a heck of lot of such people ended up.

Before the 1970s, science wasn't very well paid, from about 1400 onwards. If you wanted a job in science, you either had to get employed by a duke teaching his children science, like the scientist in "Richie Rich", or you had to get a job teaching in a university, and for much of that time, university lecturers were required to be celibate.

 

[scorpiomover]

Which countries now say they have a lot of "autistic" people?

Which countries are there lots of people who say that people are very selfish and dishonest?

Which countries are there lots of people who say that things were much better in the 1990s than today?

I think you'll see that there's a strong empirical correlation between them.

I do not think @EndogenousRebel was saying autistic people we messogenist against women.

If you re-read my post, I didn't mention anything about misogynism.

FYI, I've known several men who have strong Aspie/Autie traits, and who are generally regarded as either having Aspergers or Autism. None of them are considered misogynistic by the women who know them.

You entirely misread my post. Please re-read it.

But in short, the societies with a lot of scumbag liars, are also the societies which think of autistics as lacking in social skills, and any society with lots of scumbag liars will rip each other off, and end up destroying so much that they tear their society apart.

I think that in general science is unfriendly towards women because in more appropriate terms, people in science communities can be jerks because that is the norm of such groups.

Is it the norm nowadays for jocks to be jerks? Yes.
Is it the norm nowadays for businessmen to be jerks? Yes.
Is it the norm nowadays for politicians to be jerks? Yes. MP expenses scandal.
Is it the norm nowadays for bankers to be jerks? Yes. Banking scandal.
Is it the norm nowadays for journalists to be jerks? Yes. Hacking scandal.
Is it the norm nowadays for directors to be jerks? Yes. #MeToo.
So it seems to me that scientists are not really behaving differently to anyone else.

Also, judging by what I have heard/read, there really aren't many top professions that aren't unfriendly towards women, especially lawyers, Hollywood, most creative industries, and Silicon Valley, despite that they are all left-wingers.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Have you seen Oppenheimer?

I learned from U-571, that there's zero connection between American-made films and real life.

I assume you don't like Nolan from past conversations.

We Need to Talk About Those 'Oppenheimer' Sex Scenes

Perhaps the most surprising element of ‘Oppenheimer’ is its sex scenes, the first ones filmed by director Christopher Nolan.

www.rollingstone.com

The movie is mostly based off of the biography "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer". I'm not saying it's not a dramatization, but being smooth with the ladies is something Oppenheimer is known for.

The idea of the lonely genius is a myth, only happening incidentally.

Galois. Cantor. Abel. Dirac. The list goes on and on and on.

Oh, yes. Don't forget Darwin. He was such a social butterfly, whenever anyone came to see him, he would run into the garden and tell his wife to tell them that he was ill.

Dirac spoke so little that his friends would make bets about the number of words he'd use in an hour.

Also the reverse: Gauss had 13 children. Feynman was a known lothario.

This is moot, because I can just start naming intellectuals that were successful socially. People who are more introverted do tend to be at the frontiers I think. Still if you consider the frontier as all of science, you are doing a disservice to like 80% of people that are stuck doing less popular science.

The article funny enough points out that most people doing science, in a chef-like Marie Curry fashion were probably voluntarily doing science, because they were getting high on the science.

Makes them sound like regular people basically.

Most scientists TODAY, are regular people, often with a huge ego.

Manufacturing moved to China in the 1970s. Before then, there were plenty of high-paying executive positions, like in Mad Men. But once Western companies moved their factories to China, most of the big-paying jobs were gone. So if you had a degree and you wanted a decent paying job, there were few options left: one was finance. But people in fintech are ex-physicists, really, really, really smart people. Another option was science, which is where a heck of lot of such people ended up.

Before the 1970s, science wasn't very well paid, from about 1400 onwards. If you wanted a job in science, you either had to get employed by a duke teaching his children science, like the scientist in "Richie Rich", or you had to get a job teaching in a university, and for much of that time, university lecturers were required to be celibate.

Nice tangent.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

But spiritual stuff is almost always a type of thing that applies to you. You can teach principals, but obviously you and I are different entities, still human, but our life is different in some ways, and so we act different, so natural what works for you will not work for me etc.
The thing is all traditions converge on some principals that are universal.
I would not be surprised if some traditions overlap because of borrowing concepts kind of like we do it today, and memes from England are memes all over the world.
We are highly memetic creatures, which means we borrow ideas.
So we could take a guy like Jung then Kabala then say Janaism, Christianity and Lamaism and we would find similar ideas and principals just expressed differently.

It's a no brainer right. We all observe the same reality, so we see the same phenomena. It's just that assumptions and beliefs overlay these observations and change how they appear to us and others.

It becomes confusing when the belief is treated as more important than the observation. That's why what plants these beliefs is very important. Traumatic experience, some YouTube video, a year in Nepal? We should ask ourselves these questions about people today, and the people where these ideas originated.


I think it was you who said it before, that Jung is just really good at describing things and making it sound profound, so I'll give you that we might be stretching thin a practical argument.

But basically, from what that video says, people didn't distinguish for example astrology as something different from astronomy. Hence their sense of reality was tied to things that they believed and made up.

We can say such a thing today and cognitively understand what that means, but it would take a lot of perspective shifting to FEEL what that means.

We have people who you might say believe such a thing today, and I would say such a thing is not same as it was in the past. Today, we basically have a catalogue of belief systems that we can subscribe to and adopt. For them it was tantamount to physics that everyone in the land also believed.

I think that just like people like Freud, who made huge impacts on the world, with ideas that all really have a tinge of a super biased worldview, many of the ideas are probably not viable, and should be discarded. Maybe if Freud had more time to unpack his own traumas and pasts we could see how his less adopted ideas fit in with the more adopted ideas, he might have an even greater impact. There in lies the problem.

 

[scorpiomover]

Have you seen Oppenheimer?

I learned from U-571, that there's zero connection between American-made films and real life.

I assume you don't like Nolan from past conversations.

I LOVED Inception.

I also thought his Dark Knight trilogy was a very clever and very intelligent version of Batman. Christian Bale did a very good job of portraying Batman's character as being incredibly close to Batman in comic books, right now to his extreme lack of emotion, and his schizophrenic separation of his Batman self and his Bruce Wayne self.

But his films have a way of revealing the things that make me uncomfortable.

The thing I didn't like about U-571, was that it was completely historically inaccurate. Made everything seem like the Americans cracked Enigma.

Since Bletchley Park's work was declassified, documentaries about Bletchley Park showed that the Americans were getting their info about German troop, ship and air movements, from the British, because it was the British who were cracking the Enigma codes, right to the end of the war.

So it gave the impression that the Americans won the war, when actually it was an equal effort.

We Need to Talk About Those 'Oppenheimer' Sex Scenes

Perhaps the most surprising element of ‘Oppenheimer’ is its sex scenes, the first ones filmed by director Christopher Nolan.

www.rollingstone.com

The movie is mostly based off of the biography "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer". I'm not saying it's not a dramatization, but being smooth with the ladies is something Oppenheimer is known for.

I looked him up on Wiki. He had a few affairs. Even got a married woman pregnant, who then left her husband to be with Oppenheimer. But I didn't get the impression that he was like Henry VIII, who fathered 50 children with mistresses.

The idea of the lonely genius is a myth, only happening incidentally.

Galois. Cantor. Abel. Dirac. The list goes on and on and on.

Oh, yes. Don't forget Darwin. He was such a social butterfly, whenever anyone came to see him, he would run into the garden and tell his wife to tell them that he was ill.

Dirac spoke so little that his friends would make bets about the number of words he'd use in an hour.

Also the reverse: Gauss had 13 children. Feynman was a known lothario.

This is moot, because I can just start naming intellectuals that were successful socially. People who are more introverted do tend to be at the frontiers I think. Still if you consider the frontier as all of science, you are doing a disservice to like 80% of people that are stuck doing less popular science.

The people I was citing were doing very unpopular maths and science at the time. But their science became incredibly powerful much later, after they were dead.

Galois invented Group Theory and solving polynomial equations higher than quadratics (which any school-kid can do) by the time he was 21.

Cantor proved there were multiple infinities. His work is the basis of Set theory and the theory underlying modern computers. Also the basis for ideas such as multiple dimensions and the multiverse.

Abel died at 26. Mathematicians said about him that he invented enough maths to keep them busy for 500 years. Pretty much all of modern science is based on the maths that is based on his work.

Dirac came up with the Dirac equation that completely describes the behaviour of electrons. He proved the existence of anti-matter, and is the basis for countless Science Fiction programmes.

Dirac also postulated the idea of the Dirac Sea, that all of matter and space is composed of trillions of subatomic particles. Dark matter is a direct consequence of his theories.

The article funny enough points out that most people doing science, in a chef-like Marie Curry fashion were probably voluntarily doing science, because they were getting high on the science.

Makes them sound like regular people basically.

Most scientists TODAY, are regular people, often with a huge ego.

Manufacturing moved to China in the 1970s. Before then, there were plenty of high-paying executive positions, like in Mad Men. But once Western companies moved their factories to China, most of the big-paying jobs were gone. So if you had a degree and you wanted a decent paying job, there were few options left: one was finance. But people in fintech are ex-physicists, really, really, really smart people. Another option was science, which is where a heck of lot of such people ended up.

Before the 1970s, science wasn't very well paid, from about 1400 onwards. If you wanted a job in science, you either had to get employed by a duke teaching his children science, like the scientist in "Richie Rich", or you had to get a job teaching in a university, and for much of that time, university lecturers were required to be celibate.

Nice tangent.

I was making the point that modern science and technology has diverged drastically from the way things used to be up until the 1960s.

In the past, scientists published papers on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and philosophy. The amount of things even one scientist discovered, is astounding. Any one of them

From what I hear, modern science is highly competitive. Most of it is about bidding for grants, getting your name mentioned by other scientists (the Erdős number), and such things.

Nowadays, it's basically 90% politics and networking to advance your career.

From what I heard at university, there are still plenty of polymaths who are geniuses around. But they tend to be not good at academic politics and advancing their career, and often end up working at MacDs.

 

[ZenRaiden]

But basically, from what that video says, people didn't distinguish for example astrology as something different from astronomy. Hence their sense of reality was tied to things that they believed and made up.

True...

We can say such a thing today and cognitively understand what that means, but it would take a lot of perspective shifting to FEEL what that means.

Exactly. How I feel and how I think can simply be different. Feelings and ideas work like a zipper. One over other one of another, they add up, to form a single, but they can be separated.

We have people who you might say believe such a thing today, and I would say such a thing is not same as it was in the past. Today, we basically have a catalogue of belief systems that we can subscribe to and adopt. For them it was tantamount to physics that everyone in the land also believed.

I am not sure I follow.

I think that just like people like Freud, who made huge impacts on the world, with ideas that all really have a tinge of a super biased worldview, many of the ideas are probably not viable, and should be discarded. Maybe if Freud had more time to unpack his own traumas and pasts we could see how his less adopted ideas fit in with the more adopted ideas, he might have an even greater impact. There in lies the problem.

Exactly.

 

[scorpiomover]

Many religions are rather prescriptive and rigid, in ways they apply to individuals.

That is how religions are portrayed.

But spiritual stuff is almost always a type of thing that applies to you.

I wish. The spiritual stuff I read, is incredibly abstract. It's extremely difficult to get something directly practical from it.

You can teach principals, but obviously you and I are different entities, still human, but our life is different in some ways, and so we act different, so natural what works for you will not work for me etc.

That's actually a principle that is taught in some religions.

The thing is all traditions converge on some principals that are universal.

We would hope. Then we wouldn't be missing out by choosing to read the books of some religions and not others. If that wasn't true, then to get all those principles, we'd have to read all the books of all the religions.

I would not be surprised if some traditions overlap because of borrowing concepts kind of like we do it today, and memes from England are memes all over the world.
We are highly memetic creatures, which means we borrow ideas.
So we could take a guy like Jung then Kabala then say Janaism, Christianity and Lamaism and we would find similar ideas and principals just expressed differently.

I've read a lot of ideas that were repeated in multiple disciplines. I've even read the same theorem, but taught as 3 different theorems in 3 different fields of maths.

Then again, I've also read ideas that Jung wrote, that I've never come across anywhere else. I've also come across a lot of ideas that I read in Kabbalah, that I haven't come across anywhere else.

 

[Black Rose]

If you re-read my post, I didn't mention anything about misogynism.

FYI, I've known several men who have strong Aspie/Autie traits, and who are generally regarded as either having Aspergers or Autism. None of them are considered misogynistic by the women who know them.

You entirely misread my post. Please re-read it.

I was saying @EndogenousRebel posts had no relationship to your post's premise that autism had anything to do with what he was saying about science communities and women. When he mentions women and science communities you brought up autism for some strange reason?

 

[ZenRaiden]

I wish. The spiritual stuff I read, is incredibly abstract. It's extremely difficult to get something directly practical from it.

Yes, because we are told that meditation will dissolve all problems, otherwise we would not sit still for no reason.
So lots of things people are hooked on have to first sound profound and worth the buck.

That's actually a principle that is taught in some religions.

If so then that is good. Because it means they will not shoe horn someone into something they are not.

We would hope. Then we wouldn't be missing out by choosing to read the books of some religions and not others. If that wasn't true, then to get all those principles, we'd have to read all the books of all the religions.

I wanted to know all things, but then I realized that I cannot.

I've read a lot of ideas that were repeated in multiple disciplines. I've even read the same theorem, but taught as 3 different theorems in 3 different fields of maths.

Then again, I've also read ideas that Jung wrote, that I've never come across anywhere else. I've also come across a lot of ideas that I read in Kabbalah, that I haven't come across anywhere else.

Yup, but what makes you believe that others don't have what you are looking for.
For instance I found that kabala and buddhism share some universal concepts.

 

[scorpiomover]

I was saying @EndogenousRebel posts had no relationship to your post's premise that autism had anything to do with what he was saying about science communities and women. When he mentions women and science communities you brought up autism for some strange reason?

His post read to me as if he was talking about alienation and anti-social people, not feminism and male domination of science. He seemed to think that people who were anti-social were people who were misunderstood. I pointed out that I have known lots of people who were misunderstood but were very sociable. He then explained that he was talking about people who were popular, like the people who would be prom king and prom queen in high school. I then explained that those people weren't really popular. They were just people who knew how to manipulate others to get their way. Really, most people hated those sorts of people.

Upon looking at earlier posts, I can see that you and other posters were making some connection between male domination and science. I didn't see it as different to any other field, as at the time when women were excluded from science, they were excluded from lots of areas that had nothing to do with science, like business. So I didn't really see that had anything to do with science more or less than anything else.

 

[scorpiomover]

I wish. The spiritual stuff I read, is incredibly abstract. It's extremely difficult to get something directly practical from it.

Yes, because we are told that meditation will dissolve all problems, otherwise we would not sit still for no reason.
So lots of things people are hooked on have to first sound profound and worth the buck.

I was talking about other things, not meditation.

I've also read about meditation, and been taught a lot about mindfulness. That stuff is taught in very practical ways. You can find videos of how to do meditation on Youtube. Meditation is more like exercise. Going to the gym one day, won't make you stronger. But if you go 3 times a week, over time, you'll become stronger, and then 6 months later, you'll be much stronger and be able to lift heavy things and punch people when you're not in the gym as well.

That's actually a principle that is taught in some religions.

If so then that is good. Because it means they will not shoe horn someone into something they are not.

Yes. But it's not taught in every religious orientation. So there are still lots of people who shoehorn.

We would hope. Then we wouldn't be missing out by choosing to read the books of some religions and not others. If that wasn't true, then to get all those principles, we'd have to read all the books of all the religions.

I wanted to know all things, but then I realized that I cannot.

Yes. But that's part of abandoning perfectionism. We can't know everything. But then, most people don't know that much, and yet lots of them still manage to live their lives and get what they want out of life.

I've read a lot of ideas that were repeated in multiple disciplines. I've even read the same theorem, but taught as 3 different theorems in 3 different fields of maths.

Then again, I've also read ideas that Jung wrote, that I've never come across anywhere else. I've also come across a lot of ideas that I read in Kabbalah, that I haven't come across anywhere else.

Yup, but what makes you believe that others don't have what you are looking for.

Maybe some people do. That's what makes me keep looking.

For instance I found that kabala and buddhism share some universal concepts.

Me too, which made me realise that religions often teach things that even atheists agree with.

But I've also come across some pretty universal concepts that I didn't see anywhere else. So again, perfectionism isn't an attainable goal. We try. We learn some. We improve in some ways. But there's no point in knocking myself for not knowing some things. we just do what we can, and hope that's enough.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I was talking about other things, not meditation.

I've also read about meditation, and been taught a lot about mindfulness. That stuff is taught in very practical ways. You can find videos of how to do meditation on Youtube. Meditation is more like exercise. Going to the gym one day, won't make you stronger. But if you go 3 times a week, over time, you'll become stronger, and then 6 months later, you'll be much stronger and be able to lift heavy things and punch people when you're not in the gym as well.

What things you have in mind?

Meditation is good, and I have done lot of improving with it. It has worked wonder for me, even when I did not quite get how it works.

Yes. But it's not taught in every religious orientation. So there are still lots of people who shoehorn.

That scares me because I want to be me.

Yes. But that's part of abandoning perfectionism. We can't know everything. But then, most people don't know that much, and yet lots of them still manage to live their lives and get what they want out of life.

Yeah I still unconsciously am perfectionist, but I have many times done things in order not to be perfect, and as consequence things that seemed daunting at first now seem rather simple.

Maybe some people do. That's what makes me keep looking.

Me too.

Me too, which made me realise that religions often teach things that even atheists agree with.

I am no longer atheist.

But I've also come across some pretty universal concepts that I didn't see anywhere else. So again, perfectionism isn't an attainable goal. We try. We learn some. We improve in some ways. But there's no point in knocking myself for not knowing some things. we just do what we can, and hope that's enough.

Yeah.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

We have people who you might say believe such a thing today, and I would say such a thing is not same as it was in the past. Today, we basically have a catalogue of belief systems that we can subscribe to and adopt. For them it was tantamount to physics that everyone in the land also believed.

I am not sure I follow.

I'm basically questioning if people can even fathom believing and different things in that time period.

Why? You have a point when you say that principles converge on similar things

For lack of a better word, I'll use meta. We can be meta about things. I'm proposing that for the people from which these ideas originate from, the idea of opting for, or even atomizing their own belief systems is entirely foreign.

When your system for philosophy, religion, physics are all tied together it is pretty much impossible to discard one idea for another without making a boatload of concessions.

We can describe what qualities an action, whether it's large scale political, economic or just a small personal decision that was made.

So then in this world where we have gotten so good at categorization that we can have a libertarian communist and an anarcho capitalist, I'm asking why is it that most spiritual hooha can't be teacher to reality?

I think that even among the most credible things in Hinduism, they kind of conceptualized complexes in the Jungian sense. They also conceptualized the idea of individual identity being a myth, which modern neuroscience can't help but corroborate.

But even these ideas fail to reach everyone's ears like anarchism and utilitarianism which are completely absurd ideas at their maxims if you think about it.

What is it that is hard to reach about these spiritual ideas so that people accept them? Maybe people talk about mindfulness and balance or whatever, but I get a sense that a lot of the stuff is just dead in the water because it's attached to such an arcane belief system.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I'm basically questioning if people can even fathom believing and different things in that time period.

People believed a lot of things. The pantheon is obsolete by modern day standards as explanation. Now I don't actually believe old mythical stories were taken literally, especially by the smarter people. But over time some people might have adopted these stories and made them a religion and venerated them or even believed that Mars is literal God of war.
Not all abstractions are equal if you know what I mean. For instance if we look at Christmas and how people understand it fluctuates wildly in what it is from family to family.

But even these ideas fail to reach everyone's ears like anarchism and utilitarianism which are completely absurd ideas at their maxims if you think about it.

Ideas are absurd as long as we don't see how they connect to reality.

What is it that is hard to reach about these spiritual ideas so that people accept them?

I don't actually know that. My guess is that there are many reasons, one of which is spirituality is something that is still evolving. Growth hurts.
Without growth there is no point in doing things. But spirituality is not about masochism. Its about the difference like when your teeth grow or when your teeth are being pulled. One is suffering the other is suffering to grow.

So for instance if I want to do push ups, I must accept that there is some reaction of the body.
When you do spiritual stuff then there will be reactions to the mind.
I think same way one can do push ups one can do spirituality, but unlike push ups there seems to be no perfect manual for spirituality.
Its almost like you are trying to hit a target that does not exist.
Spiritual people realized there is only one thing you can consistently hit, that is yourself.

And then there is the question why?

.... and then that is spirituality.
because without beating the drum you don't know how it sounds.

Maybe people talk about mindfulness and balance or whatever, but I get a sense that a lot of the stuff is just dead in the water because it's attached to such an arcane belief system.

Because if I tell you to do something, but I have not done it then how could it work?
So the west does not have many spiritual teachers.
Then there are traditions that were done consistently for 5000 years lets say if not more. So they were constantly streamlined and passed down and improved.
We have 100 years of computers and 100 years of flight.
Imagine if we did those things for 5000 years from now.
But then imagine some guy tells you to sit still and empty your mind or be mindful, to reach balance and you expect to reach some tangible result, almost like a kid with crayons trying to teach you how to built airplanes, because they can make a drawing of it.
So this is easter spiritual tradition

And this is how its taught in the west.

 

[Black Rose]

But then imagine some guy tells you to sit still and empty your mind or be mindful, to reach balance and you expect to reach some tangible result, almost like a kid with crayons trying to teach you how to built airplanes, because they can make a drawing of it.

This is the face I can see:

This is the face I can draw:

This is God telling me I suck at drawing:

 

[ZenRaiden]

This is God telling me I suck at drawing:

Yes, that is what the mind tells people when they engage in any activity.
Because minds are like that. That is ego.
I tend to think so too, but then I never create anything of value when my ego is around.
Once I think "hey this is art" the ego does not act, and my drawings are objectively better.
But better is a term I would not use. Better would mean I have improved.
I would rather say my mind was not blocked by ego, so my mind could function in state of flow so my mind was not concerned with the outcome and so it allowed it self to shape the way it does when I do art.
So there is art and then there is "art".
And here is the funny thing, look at your drawing and tell me what makes it suck?

 

[Black Rose]

And here is the funny thing, look at your drawing and tell me what makes it suck?

I compare myself to my family and friends and other people in general.

So like my sister draws photorealist pictures, she should go to art school but she became a secretary selling car insurance. My brother can build anything but he lives alone in an apartment playing video games because even if he could run a farm he does not have the social or business skills to make a farm work. Me, I wanted to understand computers yet no matter what I did I had no experience with technology other than toys, toys I could not replicate. - I decided to study intelligence and psychology instead.

So not being good at drawing is not a big deal but then I ask questions about why my brain is not like my sister's and brother's brain. The part of my brain that translates patterns is broken. Specifically digit patterns. So I cannot add or subtract numbers larger than 100. Also, the connection between vision centers is low bandwidth, it takes me 2 minutes to locate the correct mustard on the shelf in the store. In shooter games, I always lose unless I can use tools to avoid fast short distances with other more peculiar intervals. I can type at 14 words a minute.

So what I concluded was that an asymmetry exists in my cognitive profile. The things I can and cannot do are obvious to me. I know my limitations mentally. The issue is really about tool use. I am good with tools, not speed or patterns or vision. So shapes matter allot in what I want to do. I am good with shapes. I think in symbols and shapes and words. - I cannot memorize shapes that well though. Which is why I think drawing is difficult. I can put things together and take them apart with no problem. I cannot remember the order in which I must do so in planning ahead, I always forget some part. The mistakes I make are many and I need to review them over and over before I do anything because I miss many, many details.

Emotionally what I have been doing is observing myself observing myself. Lots of pain that needs resolving. It is neurological damage. Spiritually the reason people miss out on mindfulness is because of distractions. They need something in themselves to anchor and search their bodies and unify the experiences they have. This can be done by body awareness exercises and redistributing pain in the system to place focus on tightening and releasing tension and being quiet enough inside to do so. To get quiet people need to anchor themselves in the body.

Science I think requires the self-reflection as @EndogenousRebel said. Spirituality requires the mind/body to vibrate everywhere all at the same time and be one and release pain deepening the awareness in all aspects of self. This happens fast and slow.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I compare myself to my family and friends and other people in general.

Yes.... well all meant is mindset defines the outcome sometimes.
Or perception.

 

[Black Rose]

Natural Science has been made fun of for the longest time by the science communities. (New Age, Crystals, Homeopathy = It's not real trust the Science bro)

But Natural Science seems to be better than pharmaceuticals.

Many ADHD kids get pharma but then do school shootings.

The same is true of autism, schizo, and all else.

I learned that aspertiene is a neurotoxin and yet pharma meds do much the same.

As I was told, there is no blood test for mental illness but psychiatry is mostly pseudoscience if you are poor and cannot afford anything other than government-run services. In reality, most problems are in the blood, and brain scans do detect the actual source of most mental illnesses. Dr Amen of Amen Clinic said mental illness is not real only brain dysfunction is real.

Real Homeopathy:

Ashwagandha VS Lions Mane The Ultimate Comparison​

Real Crystals

What is Light Therapy? Does it Help?​

Sound Healing

Acoustic levitation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

How Sens.ai Works​

 

[Black Rose]

The most interesting thing about science I think is Archaeology I believe in my opinion.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I have heard something nice recently, and it makes sense, that our minds cannot be separated from the body or the environment or the past.
SO If I am being treated by doctors today they often separate the mind and the body, the environment etc.
So obviously those who take holistic yet pragmatic approaches often get different and even better results from those scientist who divide things into categories that no longer correspond.

Humans to me are like robots, that when they get bugs in the system usually many parts of the system become corrupt so many things need to be fixed.

Doctors often look at one problem fix it and ignore the rest as if all else was impacted only by that one spot.
Its convenient and sometimes work. Its also efficient and reduces strain on the system.
But it leads to no new way of healing. Its a very industrialized system.

 

[Black Rose]

Doctors often look at one problem fix it and ignore the rest as if all else was impacted only by that one spot.
Its convenient and sometimes work. Its also efficient and reduces strain on the system.
But it leads to no new way of healing. Its a very industrialized system.

​

An Introduction to Falun Gong (English)​

Humans to me are like robots, that when they get bugs in the system usually many parts of the system become corrupt so many things need to be fixed.

I think that robot is a misnomer.
It means forced laborer in Chechenien.

As I see it to be free is to be more than an input output device.

The middle is important, serenity and self-determination matter to any being's life.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

In the past, scientists published papers on mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and philosophy. The amount of things even one scientist discovered, is astounding. Any one of them

From what I hear, modern science is highly competitive. Most of it is about bidding for grants, getting your name mentioned by other scientists (the Erdős number), and such things.

Nowadays, it's basically 90% politics and networking to advance your career.

From what I heard at university, there are still plenty of polymaths who are geniuses around. But they tend to be not good at academic politics and advancing their career, and often end up working at MacDs.

Considering being a polymath in the 1500 means having a high school education I'm not sure that's that impressive. It was easy for a single person to hold the entire summation of human knowledge, at least in their overview.

First international science conferences were held in 17-1800s, politics have have been apart of that since it's inception.

There's this idea that we stand on shoulder of giants. This is true to some extent. Here in the state, COVID shutdowns set back progress of math curriculum at least 2 years. Meanwhile you have people who grew up in a purportedly more chaotic time who distilled knowledge extremely clearly. Truly exceptional.

My impression is that these people merely had a scientific intuition embedded in them. Again I don't negate the idea that people that are on the frontiers of science are of a specific kind. That being said, such a mentality has always be problematic. It's almost like the attitude you have is creating the problem you're addressing.


---

I don't actually know that. My guess is that there are many reasons, one of which is spirituality is something that is still evolving. Growth hurts.
Without growth there is no point in doing things. But spirituality is not about masochism. Its about the difference like when your teeth grow or when your teeth are being pulled. One is suffering the other is suffering to grow.

So for instance if I want to do push ups, I must accept that there is some reaction of the body.
When you do spiritual stuff then there will be reactions to the mind.
I think same way one can do push ups one can do spirituality, but unlike push ups there seems to be no perfect manual for spirituality.
Its almost like you are trying to hit a target that does not exist.
Spiritual people realized there is only one thing you can consistently hit, that is yourself.

I don't necessarily see it as painful, or even necessarily as growth. To me it's about connecting with something that is already there. I don't deny that it is a progressive thing, something that you slowly embark into until it surrounds you, but I see that spiritual experience as a thing that comes into your life, and you may still be an impulsive person who ruins it with bad decisions.

Perhaps there are multiple routes in spirituality, but if I had to illustrate how my process has been, I would say it's like learning to surf, but understanding that the waves are out your control. It's such a weird activity when you think about it.

For this reason there is a culture around surfing that is very pernicious. The main attraction is surfing waves, but yet there are only few of them, and if someone else takes that experience from you, you'd be angry af.

So why approach that activity at all with the main draw being surfing? I can't really describe it, but perhaps the waves, although the most fun, shouldn't be the primary thing.

People believed a lot of things. The pantheon is obsolete by modern day standards as explanation. Now I don't actually believe old mythical stories were taken literally, especially by the smarter people. But over time some people might have adopted these stories and made them a religion and venerated them or even believed that Mars is literal God of war.
Not all abstractions are equal if you know what I mean. For instance if we look at Christmas and how people understand it fluctuates wildly in what it is from family to family.

There is a happening that is upon us. It has been happening to us since we can remember.

We have to remember that before written text, that our main way of transferring information was orally. For all we know there were cultural nuances that indicate the nature of a story more transparently.

Was Mars a real person? Or did he serve as a proxy for a ruler at some point in history? Or was he just straight up fictional? As a way to pass down wisdom or relevant information? Entertainment? I think the answer is a combination.

Things change when we have text, and of course mass communications.

Post-modern idea of hyper reality is relevant all the way back then. The medium is the message. So who knows. I was going to write more but I forgot.

 

[Black Rose]

Was Mars a real person? Or did he serve as a proxy for a ruler at some point in history? Or was he just straight up fictional? As a way to pass down wisdom or relevant information? Entertainment? I think the answer is a combination.

Mars was energy, anger, passion, and strength.

Athena being wisdom means you had wisdom when the energies entered you.

Energy is in the body so nothing exists separate from it, but the Greeks could not understand what matter was so they came up with the term "Atom" to represent the four energies of fire, air, earth, and water.

So yes we cannot think the way they thought because all things were inside themselves to them. The brain was not where intelligence was located. It was to cool the lungs and heart with "rationality". - The spleen was where courage came from.

And that was just the Romans and Greeks, there were also the Egyptians the Mesopotamians, the Vedic cultures, and the people in the ancient Americas. China was way different culture also.

Oracle bone - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[birdsnestfern]

Black Rose, SOUND HEALING! I have done some Tibetan Sound healing, I like it! Thats the one where you have a different sound for each Chakra. I really like that one. Its the vibrations rearranging things, super nice. And Falun GONG, omg, we are a lot alike spiritually anyway.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Mars was energy, anger, passion, and strength.

Athena being wisdom means you had wisdom when the energies entered you.

I mean I used to think about it like that. These personifications of ideas of natural phenomena, I suppose does make sense and I'm pretty sure that it did serve as a philosophical exercise for its time.

The Bible is kind of just proto philosophy.

Aries and Mars were both heavily criticized by the people of the time. The stories all make him look bad pretty much. It doesn't make sense to me that they would look at a natural phenomena and think of it in terms of something other than just existing.

I guess in opposition to something like the Tao te ching, it's more simple to think, meanwhile this Greek mythology is very easy to identify with. So the population has something to do with that?

 

[scorpiomover]

Considering being a polymath in the 1500 means having a high school education I'm not sure that's that impressive. It was easy for a single person to hold the entire summation of human knowledge, at least in their overview.

In the 1500s, there was no central heating. If you wanted to keep warm, you had to make a fire yourself. There were no microwaves, If you wanted to eat hot food, you had to cook the food yourself. Captains of ships had to know trigonometry, in order to navigate the stars. Architects had to know trigonometry, to build buildings. Then there's algebra, invented by Muslims. Then there's astronomy. Then there's medicine. A lot of the surgical tools we have were made by the Romans.

Roman concrete is much stronger than modern concrete. We don't even know how they did it.

Roman roads built 2,000 years ago, are still better roads than any built in the last 100 years.

Show me a high school graduate who knows all of that.

First international science conferences were held in 17-1800s, politics have have been apart of that since it's inception.

Science was only invented in the 17-1800s?

There's this idea that we stand on shoulder of giants. This is true to some extent. Here in the state, COVID shutdowns set back progress of math curriculum at least 2 years.

What has COVD shutdowns got to do with the progress of maths curriculums? Also, why did they hold back maths by 2 years? Why not 1 year? Why not 3 years? Why not 4 years?

Also, why would that hold back maths, when a week into the lockdown, businesses were holding meetings via Zoom?

Also, Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, because his work was based on the work of Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the mathematicians that preceded him. What has that got to do with maths curriculum being held back by COVID shutdowns? Newton became so smart at maths and science, because he was bed-ridden for a year. So your argument would suggest that because of COVID shutdowns, all the students should have become maths prodigies like Newton.

Meanwhile you have people who grew up in a purportedly more chaotic time who distilled knowledge extremely clearly. Truly exceptional.

Well, if being a polymath in 1500 only gave you the knowledge of a modern-day high school education, then high school graduates would also have distilled knowledge extremely clearly. Are most high school graduates in your country "extremely clear"?

My impression is that these people merely had a scientific intuition embedded in them.

What do you mean? Do you mean that they were born knowing science? Is knowledge innate? If so, then why go to school and university?

It's almost like the attitude you have is creating the problem you're addressing.

It's generally true that people who go around telling people that they're clever, usually say the dumbest of things. Arrogance breeds ignorance, because if you think that you already know everything, you don't bother to learn anything.

 

[ZenRaiden]

I don't necessarily see it as painful, or even necessarily as growth. To me it's about connecting with something that is already there. I don't deny that it is a progressive thing, something that you slowly embark into until it surrounds you, but I see that spiritual experience as a thing that comes into your life, and you may still be an impulsive person who ruins it with bad decisions.

I don't either, but I think its a journey that is painful in sense that for people who grow up in touch with themselves being not in touch with themselves is wrong, with me it is the opposite. Its like when I am not in touch with myself I seem to be OK, and when I try to get in touch with myself I struggle. I would not call it painful in a way like pain, Id call it like when you sit on your arm and the blood is not the for minutes, and then you stop sitting on your arm and the blood comes rushing in and you suddenly feel that odd painful sensation where the numbness is becoming a feeling.

Perhaps there are multiple routes in spirituality, but if I had to illustrate how my process has been, I would say it's like learning to surf, but understanding that the waves are out your control. It's such a weird activity when you think about it.

Yeah I think I agree, spirituality is inward control.

For all we know there were cultural nuances that indicate the nature of a story more transparently.

I tend to think "it does not make sense" then "we have not understood it" so any time we assume our ancestors were weird or primitive or idiots, I tend to think, no, we are the morons, we did not understand it.

Was Mars a real person? Or did he serve as a proxy for a ruler at some point in history? Or was he just straight up fictional? As a way to pass down wisdom or relevant information? Entertainment? I think the answer is a combination.

How many ways can we think about the apple. IN all ways, including pushing them up the butt. That is the beauty of human mind.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Considering being a polymath in the 1500 means having a high school education I'm not sure that's that impressive. It was easy for a single person to hold the entire summation of human knowledge, at least in their overview.

In the 1500s, there was no central heating. If you wanted to keep warm, you had to make a fire yourself. There were no microwaves, If you wanted to eat hot food, you had to cook the food yourself. Captains of ships had to know trigonometry, in order to navigate the stars. Architects had to know trigonometry, to build buildings. Then there's algebra, invented by Muslims. Then there's astronomy. Then there's medicine. A lot of the surgical tools we have were made by the Romans.

Roman concrete is much stronger than modern concrete. We don't even know how they did it.

Roman roads built 2,000 years ago, are still better roads than any built in the last 100 years.

Show me a high school graduate who knows all of that.

Mis-applied hyperbole on my part if you want to get literal.

The curriculum of a high-schooler (where I live) includes calculus, chemistry, physics.

I'm pretty sure any engaged highschooler would be able to go toe to toe with those Romans, yes.

First international science conferences were held in 17-1800s, politics have have been apart of that since it's inception.

Science was only invented in the 17-1800s?

I meant communities of scientists. I said this because you seem to have been romanticizing a notion of science as something sacred before modern times.

There's this idea that we stand on shoulder of giants. This is true to some extent. Here in the state, COVID shutdowns set back progress of math curriculum at least 2 years.

What has COVD shutdowns got to do with the progress of maths curriculums? Also, why did they hold back maths by 2 years? Why not 1 year? Why not 3 years? Why not 4 years?

Also, why would that hold back maths, when a week into the lockdown, businesses were holding meetings via Zoom?

Also, Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants, because his work was based on the work of Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the mathematicians that preceded him. What has that got to do with maths curriculum being held back by COVID shutdowns? Newton became so smart at maths and science, because he was bed-ridden for a year. So your argument would suggest that because of COVID shutdowns, all the students should have become maths prodigies like Newton.

Your inability to engage with what I'm saying because you're piece-mealing it into quotes is not lost on me.

I'm saying that the people who constructed these original ideas must have been really impressive because they did not live in the abundant luxury of today.

Meanwhile you have people who grew up in a purportedly more chaotic time who distilled knowledge extremely clearly. Truly exceptional.

Well, if being a polymath in 1500 only gave you the knowledge of a modern-day high school education, then high school graduates would also have distilled knowledge extremely clearly. Are most high school graduates in your country "extremely clear"?

I wonder what they taught in your highschool classes? They must have skipped over all the people who dedicated their lives to domains of science to bring us true knowledge.

The point of my statement is draw to the fact that the ideas aren't necessarily complex. We found them over time, and once we did, a highschooler could do it.

My impression is that these people merely had a scientific intuition embedded in them.

What do you mean? Do you mean that they were born knowing science? Is knowledge innate? If so, then why go to school and university?

Yes they were born knowing science and spoke the scientific method fluently.

 

[scorpiomover]

Mis-applied hyperbole on my part if you want to get literal.


The curriculum of a high-schooler (where I live) includes calculus, chemistry, physics.

Maths, physics and chemistry are the hardest of the sciences, in that order, and the IQs of people in those fields are the highest of any subjects, in that order (the top mathematicians have an IQ of 170. The top physicists have IQs of 160. I don't know about the average chemist). So if they were really that competent, would you not agree that the average high-schooler should be much more intelligent than the average scientist who has an average IQ of only 120. Is it the case in your country that the average kid in high school has a higher IQ and shows more intelligence than the average scientist?

I'm pretty sure any engaged highschooler would be able to go toe to toe with those Romans, yes.

Then why are so many roads falling apart with potholes everywhere, when the Roman roads that were built over 1,000 years ago, are the best roads around?

I meant communities of scientists. I said this because you seem to have been romanticizing a notion of science as something sacred before modern times.

I liked to learn about people. In university, I read the biographies of mathematicians. I've read the Who's Who section on physicists. I've looked at the Wiki on Euler, Poincaré, Priestley, and hundreds of others. The scientists in earlier times seemed to have written in several fields, and make 2, 3 or even several major breakthroughs in each one. Even one of their discoveries would make any modern scientist famous for ever in their field, and yet they made dozens.

No-one told me that these people were that smart or that capable, not my teachers, or the media. I've only heard one person wax on about Newton, and from what I've read, he really underestimated Newton. But reading about people without being told to, has been a real eye-opener for me.

Your inability to engage with what I'm saying because you're piece-mealing it into quotes is not lost on me.

I'm saying that the people who constructed these original ideas must have been really impressive because they did not live in the abundant luxury of today.

I heard that according to historians, the average person's lifestyle in the 1990s, was as good as Henry VIII's, and he was so rich and powerful, probably only 3 people in the whole of Europe were as rich and powerful as him.

But that means that nearly everyone in his time didn't have anything like the abundant luxury of today.

Scientists who had a job, had far more than most, because they were either employed by a presigious university that educated the sons of dukes and earls in university, who were fabulously wealthy at the time, on the level of an A-lister with $400 million, or were employed by dukes and earls as tutors to their children, and who used to live in their palatial mansions, eat the food made by their chefs, and had to dress in rich finery so as not to upset their children or the duke/earl when he passed them in the corridor.

So if you think that scientists in those times must have been really impressive just because they didn't live in the luxury of today, you must have been 10 times more impressed by the yokels who lived with far, far less.

I wonder what they taught in your highschool classes?

Calculus, physics, chemistry, human biology, French, German, Latin. Things like that. We were consistently in the top 3 of school league tables. Ironic, because my school had very little money, and the other 2 were Haberdasher's and Henrietta Barnet, both of which are extremely expensive private schools.

They must have skipped over all the people who dedicated their lives to domains of science to bring us true knowledge.

No-one mentioned most of them in university. Even what I picked up from documentaries seems to be only a small fraction of what I've read about them. It seems that the Western world teaches very, very little about what people and scientists were really like.

For instance, I was watching a programme about archaeology of people in the 1500s. Did you know that the remains of their teeth show they all had "perfect bite"? That means their teeth were perfect. They didn't even need braces. No-one brushed their teeth back then, or flossed. How is that possible, when nearlyeveryone who doesn't brush their teeth and floss on a regular basis today, has lots of cavities, and so many people have either braces or horribly shaped teeth?

The point of my statement is draw to the fact that the ideas aren't necessarily complex. We found them over time, and once we did, a highschooler could do it.

I seriously doubt that.

1) In my country, over 10 years ago, there were so many DIY accidents, that the law was changed to require that landlords get a professional electrician for even the most basic of DIY.

2) Now, basic physics including basics of electrics, are something that gets taught to everyone, even before you did GCSEs. So even high school dropouts learned that stuff.

3) The average person in the UK graduates with knowledge that is years ahead of the American school system. I've conversed with Americans over this. The American school system only catches up at PhD level, which means that PhDs in the USA have a gruelling workload. In my country, even when it comes to basic electrics.

Put together, it means that the vast majority of people in the USA and the UK, have such a poor grasp of electrics that they've been taught, that if they do even the most basic of DIY, they're highly likely to kill themselves or give themselves a nasty electric burn.

I've even read in the news about people who attacked paediatricians because they think they are paedophiles, just because the words sound a bit similar. Seriously. How can anyone think that they're alike? One saves children's lives. The other abuses children. They're the opposite of each other.

Yes they were born knowing science and spoke the scientific method fluently.

I appreciate a bit of sarcasm. But in this case, your sarcasm is implying that you were flat out wrong. So I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.

But I appreciate the humour. Thanks for the joke.

 

[EndogenousRebel]

Maths, physics and chemistry are the hardest of the sciences, in that order, and the IQs of people in those fields are the highest of any subjects, in that order (the top mathematicians have an IQ of 170. The top physicists have IQs of 160. I don't know about the average chemist). So if they were really that competent, would you not agree that the average high-schooler should be much more intelligent than the average scientist who has an average IQ of only 120. Is it the case in your country that the average kid in high school has a higher IQ and shows more intelligence than the average scientist?

I'm pretty sure any engaged highschooler would be able to go toe to toe with those Romans, yes.

Then why are so many roads falling apart with potholes everywhere, when the Roman roads that were built over 1,000 years ago, are the best roads around?

You are setting two different goal posts here.

I'm talking about what a what a highschool education can get you.

You're talking about what most high-schoolers could do.

So if you think that scientists in those times must have been really impressive just because they didn't live in the luxury of today, you must have been 10 times more impressed by the yokels who lived with far, far less.

Not really, people will get creative and survive off very little if all they have is very little. I'm impressed by people who managed to ascertain higher truths in the wild, while we have many people who can't figure out why anything works in a controlled environment where they are meant to learn.

For instance, I was watching a programme about archaeology of people in the 1500s. Did you know that the remains of their teeth show they all had "perfect bite"? That means their teeth were perfect. They didn't even need braces. No-one brushed their teeth back then, or flossed. How is that possible, when nearlyeveryone who doesn't brush their teeth and floss on a regular basis today, has lots of cavities, and so many people have either braces or horribly shaped teeth?

They had a better bite because their food was typically tougher. They had fewer cavities probably because sugar was very scarce for them.

The point of my statement is draw to the fact that the ideas aren't necessarily complex. We found them over time, and once we did, a highschooler could do it.

I seriously doubt that.

1) In my country, over 10 years ago, there were so many DIY accidents, that the law was changed to require that landlords get a professional electrician for even the most basic of DIY.

2) Now, basic physics including basics of electrics, are something that gets taught to everyone, even before you did GCSEs. So even high school dropouts learned that stuff.

3) The average person in the UK graduates with knowledge that is years ahead of the American school system. I've conversed with Americans over this. The American school system only catches up at PhD level, which means that PhDs in the USA have a gruelling workload. In my country, even when it comes to basic electrics.

Put together, it means that the vast majority of people in the USA and the UK, have such a poor grasp of electrics that they've been taught, that if they do even the most basic of DIY, they're highly likely to kill themselves or give themselves a nasty electric burn.

I've even read in the news about people who attacked paediatricians because they think they are paedophiles, just because the words sound a bit similar. Seriously. How can anyone think that they're alike? One saves children's lives. The other abuses children. They're the opposite of each other.

The way school is played out you don't need to LEARN much. It's mostly about MEMORIZATION.

Also, because teachers know this, they don't bother with conveying comprehension. For example in math, they would much rather give a formula for something that is easy to apply to find the correct answer than use a method that would assist with comprehension of why the formula works in the first place.

Yes they were born knowing science and spoke the scientific method fluently.

I appreciate a bit of sarcasm. But in this case, your sarcasm is implying that you were flat out wrong. So I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.

But I appreciate the humour. Thanks for the joke.

I had made my initial post to jive with the initial post. Science, and STEM in general is very alienating for what I see as no reason. I'm not sure what conversation you're wanting to have, but it seems like you have trouble pivoting to that without starting an argument.

 

[scorpiomover]

I'm talking about what a what a highschool education can get you.

You're talking about what most high-schoolers could do.

The point about public education is to educate so many people that you can reasonably get x % of the population who are educated in physics enough to be phyisicists, y% of the population who are educated in chemists enough to be engineers, etc, because the Law of Large Numbers shows that with millions of students, the statistical (actual) average gets extremely close to the probabilistic (theoretical) average. So when you're talking about millions of high-school students, the 2 are almost identical.

Not really, people will get creative and survive off very little if all they have is very little. I'm impressed by people who managed to ascertain higher truths in the wild, while we have many people who can't figure out why anything works in a controlled environment where they are meant to learn.

As I said, the LLN points out that you can get that sort of situation with very few students, like if only 1 in 1 million people become scientists in the year 1500. That would be surprising, and is probably because those individuals were unique. But because of the LLN, the fact that those people were able to rise to positions like that so often, out of all the people there, means that the system itself was designed to ensure that those who were exceptionally good at science, would be encouraged to become scientists, and many of the barriers in their way would have been consistently removed, so that you'd get that many smart people who were scientists.

But with 330 million people in the USA, what you get is almost perfectly correlated with how they were taught. With an 80 year-lifespan, that's 4 million people in a single year, which is more than enough to see a very high correlation with only the students across the USA who are the same age.

So what that shows us, is that if you get many people who can't figure out why anything works in a controlled environment where they are meant to learn, out of millions of people, then that's because the controlled environment in which they were taught, and the way they were taught, taught them to not figure out why anything works.

This is how I figure things out. I read things. If it makes sense and is thus useful, I apply it to situations I come across, like this one. I noticed that most people don't do that, which is why a lot of people find me annoying, because I actually try to apply the things I have read/watched, and it often serves well to resolve arguments like this. So they are successful in their arguments with others. But often, not with me.

They had a better bite because their food was typically tougher. They had fewer cavities probably because sugar was very scarce for them.

Then maybe eating tougher and less sugary foods is better for children and adults? Maybe if we had laws banning the sale of soft foods and sugary foods, people would have much better teeth?

The point of my statement is draw to the fact that the ideas aren't necessarily complex. We found them over time, and once we did, a highschooler could do it.

I seriously doubt that.

1) In my country, over 10 years ago, there were so many DIY accidents, that the law was changed to require that landlords get a professional electrician for even the most basic of DIY.

2) Now, basic physics including basics of electrics, are something that gets taught to everyone, even before you did GCSEs. So even high school dropouts learned that stuff.

3) The average person in the UK graduates with knowledge that is years ahead of the American school system. I've conversed with Americans over this. The American school system only catches up at PhD level, which means that PhDs in the USA have a gruelling workload. In my country, even when it comes to basic electrics.

Put together, it means that the vast majority of people in the USA and the UK, have such a poor grasp of electrics that they've been taught, that if they do even the most basic of DIY, they're highly likely to kill themselves or give themselves a nasty electric burn.

I've even read in the news about people who attacked paediatricians because they think they are paedophiles, just because the words sound a bit similar. Seriously. How can anyone think that they're alike? One saves children's lives. The other abuses children. They're the opposite of each other.

The way school is played out you don't need to LEARN much. It's mostly about MEMORIZATION.

Then these ideas are necessarily complex, at least enough that most students with a high school education can't understand them well enough to do them competently, not without being taught how to understand them as well as memorise them.

Also, then the polymaths in 1500 were really super-smart, because they not only understood them, they also understood them well enough to figure them out before anyone even knew of them.

Also, because teachers know this, they don't bother with conveying comprehension. For example in math, they would much rather give a formula for something that is easy to apply to find the correct answer than use a method that would assist with comprehension of why the formula works in the first place.

Why can't teachers just be told to spend more time on comprehension then? It's true that if they did that, then high school students would learn less. But the things they learned, they could at least understand well enough to do them competently.

But given the way they learn things nowadays, since they lack the comprehension to use them properly, almost everything they learn would not be beneficial to them or anyone else, and so current public school education is not worth much at all, right? (This isn't aimed at anything you said, BTW. It's a general question about the education system).

I had made my initial post to jive with the initial post. Science, and STEM in general is very alienating for what I see as no reason. I'm not sure what conversation you're wanting to have, but it seems like you have trouble pivoting to that without starting an argument.

I had already thought about issues to do with that, and came to certain conclusions about it, that would address that question.

I might have come across as attacking your post, when really it was that I was coming from a different angle that took it for granted that that question had already been answered. So I apologise for any misunderstanding.

 

[Black Rose]

Why can't teachers just be told to spend more time on comprehension then?

quantity over quality

too many students and not enough teachers

-

some people learn by watching what others do

some people learn by experimenting

some people need to think before doing anything

Just following the instructions on how to do something will not lead to novel creativity. Novel creativity is about thinking about something you personally have never thought of. So the generation of ideas is an important part of learning.

I have a hard time learning because I am slow following the instructions that well and I do not memorize well. I like to think allot and come up with new ideas.

Generally, the school does not teach you how to come up with new ideas. Schools are for making you capable of following rules by learning skills.

To come up with something new you have to try many different things. that requires resources schools do not have. Schools also take people and place them in positions as categorized by what rules they are capable of learning. The best rule followers are placed in higher positions.

 

[ZenRaiden]

Because science is about why.
Most of education is not about why.
Its about how.
So if something works no one really cares about why.
Most people are fine knowing it works.
Not why it works.
Even how has degrees.
How something works can be explained multiple levels.

We are taught there is certain way to do something.
And to follow through.
Imagine if all scientist follow through to how they were taught.