andrewducker | Morals

you're now being prejudiced against people with lower IQs.

Yup. Definitely. No objection there from me. When it comes to making decisions about my life (and pretty much anything else, but especially my life), I'm definitely in favour of smarter people making the decisions rather than stupider people.

Well, actually, I'm in favour of _me_ making them, but I'm happier taking the advice of smart people than stupid people.

And personally, I see a far better world nowadays than there used to be. Less people dying aged 35, less disease generally, more people with an education, cheaper food, better food, access to incredible information sources, amazing travelling ability, monumental communication ability.

True, this is still largely confined to the first-world, but it's spreading slowly and I'd much rather live now than at any time in the past.

I know that you don't mean this, but the 'IQ' test is not a fantastic measure of actual intelligence.

I'll assume you use the term 'IQ' that as a convenient shorthand.

You'll get no complaints from me about not wanting stupid people to in any way run my life.

Yes. I believe that IQ is a fairly good way to measure pattern-matching type intelligence, but it's not great by any means.

Just a handy way of saying "the majority of people are dumb as sticks, possibly dumber"

Just a handy way of saying "the majority of people are dumb as sticks, possibly dumber"

An exceptionally true statement and the primary reason that I distrust democracy. Most people believe the obvious lies that politicians tell them, and then in the next election they either believe the same (now even more obvious) lies or they believe the other politician's equally transparent lies - it's completely pathetic. I've seen polls that boil down to the fact that many people support Bush because he talks tough and that makes them feel good about themselves and the US and that many people voted for Ronald Reagan because he had an honest face. We desperately need to start engineering our species for increased intelligence and then educating most people so that they can actually think.

More suicide, more depression, more violent assaults, more weapons of mass distruction, more terrorism, larger scale wars, guns, nuclear waste.

I don't agree with the 'less disease'. Try telling that to Aids-ravaged Africa. And I don't think SARS has vanished yet either.

I was thinking more in terms of 'recent' though. The things you mention *are* good, of course. But I feel like we're at the apex at the moment, or at least a plateau. There's a possibilty we could continue advancing, but I don't see it. Governments are more concerned with money than with combatting the green house effect. They will instigate wars over oil. Religious fanatics have always existed, but now the means to cause large scale damage are more readily available than ever before. People are becoming more and more dissatisafied with life - where's the point in living longer if you're not happy? In general, humanity seems to be on the brink of heading on a course of self-destruction. For every advance we make, we also make a dreadful mistake. I guess I said it all here.

See, I see all of those things as having been that way throughout all of history.

This week we don't have the black plague, rickets, cancerous sores or syphillus klling us all off. The majority of the population of the first-world is well-fed, and there's progress in pretty much every country that isn't wracked by civil war.

There is more potential for fanatics to cause damage, but the world is slowly becoming less religious, so i hold a little hope there.

I don't believe the world is going to plateau, but then I do believe in the likelihood of the singularity, which puts me out on the fringes anyway.

I do agree that there are problems with people being demotivated, and I think that the focus on meaningless work will have to change, but compared to spending your whole life slaving in the fields in order to have enough crops to not starve to death, I think it's an improvement.

"but compared to spending your whole life slaving in the fields in order to have enough crops to not starve to death, I think it's an improvement"

Minus the 'starving to death' bit, that's *definitely* subjective. A lot of people would be happy to do that, and are. A lot of people work 12 hour days for illegal wages so as not to starve to death right now. Just 'cos they're not in the fields doesn't make it any less hard.

We have AIDS, SARS, increasing heart disease and cancer rates. Woo. Probably others that I can't think of too. Yeah, medical advances mean we live longer, but there are just as many health hazards out there as there ever was. 'Progress' is pretty ambiguous, too.

This whole argument is subjective, so we should probably stop. Suffice it to say, you think humanity is progessing in leaps and bounds, I'm not convinced.

I think there are some pretty non-subjective ways to measure the ways in which humanity has progressed medically, at least. Average life spans, infant mortality rates, and average height, for example, have all changed really incredibly drastically. We haven't done away with death, thank goodness, but I don't think there is any way you can not say that medical care is incredibly advanced compared to even relatively recent history, and that health hazards are dramatically reduced.

And SARS as a new disease in comparison to advancements like penicillin is really in another league. There are many questions about SARS, including whether it is a real disease or just a collection of flu-like symptoms. Think the death rate is high? There may be an explanation for that. And here is a comparison of the death rate with other "plagues". :D

To which I reply - give it time. Yeah, we've been progressing. What I was trying to say was, how much longer will that continue?

500 years ago lifespans were (on average) pathetically short, 80+% of people were illiterate even in the most literate nations (China then being the most literate nation on the planet) and in most places 95+% of people were illiterate. Almost no one would travel more than a hundred miles from their home, malnutrition affected everyone except the wealthy to at least some degree, a minor infection could mean death or mutilation, the status of women was shockingly bad in every state-level society on the planet, the rate of death in childbirth was between 10% & 15%, and there was nothing resembling reliable birth control.

Some of this is significantly different in the Third World, and all of this is vastly different in every nation in the First World. The lives of the First World poor suck, but they are far better than the lives of any poor person more than 100 years ago and in many ways significantly better than the lives of wealthy people 500 years ago.

Would you honestly rather live anytime more than 100 years ago than in the present day? I'd enjoy visiting the past but only if I was absolutely certain that I could get back to the present.

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