Ok so,
Let's kill me because I have multiple limb deformations and some psychological troubles.
Let's go back to eugenism and kill everyone sick, weak, "DNA defect" etc...
Let's go back to modern nazi barbarism and pretend to be God and "objectively" judge people based on their intelligence, muscles, DNA instead of their acts.
Let's fall on naturalistic logical fallacy because "everything that is natural is good" - that way we would still occasionally eat our children because some animals do and so it's "natural".
Let's kill terminally or cripplingly ill and cut down on our medicine because of course it is more right than to try to find cure for their conditions and bring them backs as fully functional members of the human society.
Let's isolate and deny genetically ill people health care because of course gene therapy is not natural, just let them die in pain instead.

When people start to think "logically" and like some emotionless machines, they became monsters.

Men is not a part of the animal kingdom and no so called naturalist will try to tell me otherwise, he belongs to the nature but animal principles are not for him.

"Rationalists", why are you so worried about "degeneration of the evolution of men" when it is far more imporatant to help those people who need it to became more functional members of human society?Help those who have their capabilities below average first and then realize your transhumanistic pipe dreams, not by becoming animals again and letting everyone who is not perfect to die, nature will never give better capabilities to us anyways because we simply don't need them, if we want them then help weak first and then genetically modify yourself to perfection.

Eugenics is appliciable only for predatory animals.

I am getting SEVERE CREEPS from what the moral relativism and applying animal kingdom laws to us can do to human soul and reasoning.

Logic is not reasoning, it is just approximation that becomes murderously cruel if applied without a lot of right emotions, good and heart.

Rather than secretly fantatizing about killing disabled and dumb like a psychopath, try to create some scheme by what disabilities can be cured IF YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF SO HELLISHLY SMART!!


Yeah it is ****ingly personal to me because I myself I am suffering from multiple severe disabilities, have severely mentally ill grandmother that is "crazy" but has a good heart and I love her, several of my friends have died of terminal diseases and some sick rationalizing **** on the internet that thinks of himself as smarter than 80 percents of humanity implies that letting us die or even outright killing us would be a good thing.

tommac,
BAUT is supposed to be a dialog. Twenty posts in a row (24 out of 28) does not even come close to qualifying!

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Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

Chill out man ... just discussing ... please read my other threads to see my logic. I like to dabble on the outskirts so I can be lead back into mainstream. Just because I want to talk about it doesnt mean I fantasize about it ... but I think it can be talked about.

I am a bit shocked at your reaction. It seems much more like a religious zealot than a scientist. Not that that is bad but I thought we could at least discuss this stuff without people freaking out.

Well I needed to make up for getting banned. This was my thread that I have an interest in and I went and replied to all of the replies to me. That happened to be many as I guess on some level this topic spiked the interests of others ( Maybe that is why I was banned for trolling ).

My philisophical viewpoint is that I dont feel that certain topics should be out of bounds for discussion. I dont like to avoid looking at scientific statistics and having an open and honest debate about anything.

Politically ... and I will watch how far I go with this ... I think that many groups use these taboo subjects to their advantage.

Why cant anything be discussed maturely? Why cant we all be honest with each other with what we are thinking and discuss those thoughts with others in a mature and responsible way? Why are there certain subjects that seem to put people on edge to even discuss?

If you carefully read everything I wrote on this thread I am not sure if I said anything that was offensive, threatening or insane. But because I dared to bring up the subject I am getting named called.

If the number of people around here who were capable of understanding "Slower Traffic Keep Right" were to rise to 20%, that would be enormous progress.

Lots of subsets of "anything" are prohibited by the BAUT rules. Check 'em out.A rather blanket accusation there and close to a general ad hom.This appears to be subject matter best discussed by PM with the mods.

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Hah ... here in NJ traffic is strange we get stuck between PA drivers and NY drivers neither of which understand the slow traffic keeps right thing.

BTW ... if you ever go to germany ... they are really picky about this. I mean to the point that after you pass you must IMMEDIATELY move to the right or be run off the road. I guess this law is a must when there is no speed limit. I was doing about 190 ( maxed out the fiat that I was in ) and a mercedes pulled up behind me flashing its lights ... almost rammed into the back of me ... it was nuts.

Back here in the UK drivers sit in the fast lane enforcing the speed limit on you, with great big smug faces! I'm the one who gets behind and does the flashing thing (my lights that is before any of you get smart! )

I can't think of a single ATMer who has ever been that prompt in replying to all the questions and point of view that have been raised in a two day absence. Perhaps a defining thought on the nobility of the human spirit is when whatever the odds ... nobody gets left behind, nobody.

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

I thought brits are known for streaking ... not flashing.

After I was banned ... I was ****ed as I was not warned or anything ... I am really not 100% sure why I was banned ... I have an idea but not 100% sure. In any case for the first day I was convinced that I was going to abandon BAUT but by the second day my jones was too strong. i was like a smoker after they quit for a week or so ... once that first cig was lit I was chain smoking.

Tommac- you remind me of me

And again we're back the crux of this argument. Tommac is taking the position the IQ measures something that can be used to rank people as "intelligent" or "dumb." I have argued that it does nothing of the sort and that intellectual capability is inherently non-quantifialble, especially in as simple-minded a manner as IQ tests attempt to do in reducing it to a single number. Again, I can only refer you, Tommac, and others to Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. Two relevant quotes:

Later on the same page

Gould basically documents how through history people trying to measure intelligence went about it backwards. They identified undesirable traits (usually associated with class, race, job, sex, etc) and assumed that these traits were correlated with low "intelligence." They then identified "stupid" people by this external standard and devised tests (usually without realizing what they were doing) that confirmed those biases.

So, to get back to the topic, can one correlate behaviours and characteristics with intelligence. I agree with Gould and say the answer is resoundingly no. To correlate you need something measurable. Intelligence is not measurable in a way that allows for meaningful correlations. IQ tests and Spearman's "g" are no exceptions to this. They are merely the latest in a long line of outdated and/or faulty science that traces back to measuring brain weights and cranial volumes.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

tommac so you are even able to think of killing or letting non perfect people die as a thinkable option?!!!!!!!??????

No, I am not a sciencist, nor a religious zealot.

I am a moral human being that knows where are the borders.

Stop invoking nature, it is called naturalistic fallacy and if we belived it we would still live in caves and eat raw mamooth meat, with average life expectancy of slightly over 30 years.

We are intelligent and we can do thinks as we want to, not how it is in "nature".

Of course according to your worldview I would be better killed before birth, to "spare of me of hard life with disabilities and to prevent defective genes from surviving in our precious gene pool", or what crap do your eugenic/abortion camp belives.
I love my life and I like myself as I am.
I don't like religion, but one thing they got right, is that when you stop to think about people as God's/universe's/nature's children, and start to think of them as laboratory animals, horrible things happen.
And I do not belive in any god, I just think like a human being, not a rationalizing psychopath.
Hell, haven't we learned something from discovering the nazi crimes?
It is surely easy for you to calmly speak about killing and eradicating "defective people", when you are not one of them, of course your opinion is "sciencefic".
No your speech is not insane, psychopathic toughts are usually chillingly sane, but inhuman.

While it isn't a high moral ground, eugenically this is a correct idea.

This may get me in trouble, but Hitler's problem wasn't that he thought he could breed a better race; we know from our domestic animals we can do that. His problem was he thought he knew what a better race was.

Ignoring ethics we can breed a better race simply by not passing on the bad genes - we don't know enough of even the basics to define a better race to breed towards. Too many times we see those handicapped in one way who prove out to be gifted in others (think Hawking) And love of life prevents us from allowing the first option.

We ARE influencing evolution & retaining recessive genes. If things were to be allowed to progress as they are, & we could build an ethical society, this would be a safe path. We are rapidly approaching the point where we will be able to fix those genetic problems.

To me, the problem is those who look on the dark side & insist we are not to be allowed to continue along the medical path. I'm not sure which group I more scared of - the zealots who insist only God can decide who suffers & who doesn't or the pharmacology industry that doesn't actually want cures because palliative care is so much more lucrative.

But I do think it is immoral for any 'authority' to tell me when I can die. If I decide my life isn't worth continuing because of pain, illness or even just because the Govt ****es me off & I can't see a way out, then who is anyone else to tell me I am not allowed to do it?

And if those who love me, enable me to do it if I am incapable, & I'm insisting on the right to die, why should they get charged with a crime?

All these come back to the situation Tommac is talking about - we keep people alive who once would have died - but we aren't adjusting our society to recognise that fact.

If I had congenital defects (& I do, just not crippling ones) the last thing I would want is to pass them on to my child. And if stem cells could reverse my condition to give me a better life, that wouldn't change my attitude towards bringing such limitation on another's life. So we need to recognise that we are altering the way things have 'always been' & adjust our ways to make allowances.

That means, for example, we put a priority on genetic research to alter the inheritance that those we keep alive will pass along.
[/rant]

I have reasonable intelligence, measured several times throughout my life. Yet I've seen those who couldn't pass a basic test move along in their lives better than I have. I can rant & rave about childhood & conditioning imposed by trauma & fanaticism but the fact remains, I have a higher IQ & they have had a better life.

A person with an IQ of 100 who uses it all to live their life is, IMO a better person than one of 150 who coasts along using maybe 120 of his/her ability.

*grins* It's not what you've got, it's how you use it that counts.

On a similar subject, the type of awareness being used also matters. The best description I heard is spotlight & floodlight awareness. Think of a classroom. The teacher claps hands & says loudly 'Children, pay attention!' & (ignoring the recalcitrant Little Johnny types) all eyes swing front & centre & focus on the teacher. Every ear is tuned to what s/he says & that's all they are aware of. (at least for their attention span)

That's spotlight awareness. We are taught it's what being smart is about, it's what is being measured in IQ tests. The ability to focus & be single minded in reaching a conclusion or finding a path.

Now think of driving down the road with a couple of friends. You're having a conversation. At the end of the drive, you realise you've been focussed on the convo all that distance, thinking through the points being made & focussed on the repartee. Yet, at no point in the drive have you been unaware of the road. While conversing, your eyes have noted the signs & traffic lights, seen the other cars, your ears heard the train siren at the crossing & the truck honking at the silly girl about to step in front of him.

That's floodlight awareness. We are told that being non-focussed is not a good thing, yet some of our brightest minds have freely admitted to 'daydreaming' to get their ideas. Edison used to sit with ballbearings in his extended hands, holding them over tin plates. Then he'd try to drift off towards sleep. When he went too far beyond the hypnogogic stage, the bearings would fall & wake him & he would write down what was in his mind.
Spotlight awareness is IQ & good for slugging our way through a situation or problem where we know all we need to know & just have to put it together. Floodlight awareness can give us answers to things we don't consciously have the data to decide, or enable us to reach out intuitively & come up with new solutions that might otherwise take extended periods of time.

So, any correlations of intelligence that don't take into account the floodlight ability are only measuring the ability to focus & not the ability to solve problems. One wonders how our society might be different if we were encouraged to be more in tune with the floodlight of intuition (aka Lateral Thinking) & not so defined solely by our spotlight.

(further reading - check out Edward de Bono's books)

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* Never doubt there is Truth; just doubt that you have it!

The Flynn Effect involves the rise of mean IQ scores over time, said rise varying among different populations.

I believe the Flynn Effect is prima facia evidence that current IQ tests aren't perfect, and that from a small to a medium percentage they measure learned knowledge.

I believe that the Johnson O'Conner tests do a better job of measuring various innate abilities.

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I am Mugs, of the Alien clan of Usa, Nordamerica, a Terran, of Sol.

Mine: "Perception isn't reality. It's merely an abstraction thereof, and quite often not a very good one at that."

Heinlein's: "Staying young requires the unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods." "Freedom begins when you tell Ms. Grundy to go fly a kite."