Ask and answer stupid questions here! - Page 412

On March 18 2016 02:49 Yoav wrote:


Because your premise is incorrect. Hyperintelligence is correlated with thoughtfulness about religion, not any particular religious theory. Historical factors do mean that at the current time, science in particular is a field where religiousity is lower. Part of this is just connected to the fact that, regrettably, being a scientist is positively correlated with all sorts of things that are negatively correlated to religiosity: whiteness, growing up with wealth, being male, having a lower emphasis on family, living in an urban setting, etc. But most of it is just the fact that science and religion have been falsely seen as being at odds for a regrettably long time. I will also not address the fact that if you include both scientists and other thinkers, many of the greatest minds even of our secular age are distinctly religious (Einstein, Collins, Lewis, Tolkien, Niebuhr, etc.)

I won't get into the arguments at stake there, but I do think it's important to recognize that you can isolate the historical factor by asking, have great scientists always been less religious than the general population? Sokrates, Newton, Pascal, Mendel, etc. were all deeply religious. Gallileo and Copernicus developed the ideas of modern science premised on the notion that God must have created the universe ordered and beautiful, with knowable rules. Many of these guys were contrary to the establishment in whatever place they were in (the local pagan authorities legit killed Sokrates). They were determined and deeply thoughtful. And all of them ended up with some idea of a power beyond the material universe that gives it purpose.

On your other point, I think arguing that organized religion is flawed is very reasonable. Very, if I may use the word, Christian. But more harm than good? I'd really hesitate to say that especially after you discount wars that were clearly secular though given religious auspisces. (30 years war: the great religious war of European history! except that it was fought between Catholic France and Cathoic Austria/Spain with minimal Protestant involvement.)

On March 18 2016 03:31 WrathSCII wrote:
Are you considered a "PC Master Race" if you play a 1998 game only...?

On March 18 2016 00:34 ThomasjServo wrote:
If you could go back in time and coordinate one thing to ensure your personal wealth in the present what would the best way to go about doing this?

Rules include:

No Biff Tannen, giving yourself almanacs or interacting with yourself in the past.
No outside help or coordination with relatives, friends, family. This has to benefit only you in the year 2016.
Your goal is to pop back from the past and have access to what you set up shortly after you return to the present, as few hoops as possible.

On March 18 2016 01:23 Simberto wrote:
I am going with a moderate time jump, 50 years or something like that.

1) Grab money that you can spend in the past, either directly, or grab some gold and turn into money in the past.
2) Go to past, buy stuff that is really cheap and is going to be worth a lot in the future (Try to take stuff that doesn't directly violate the future you would expect just to make sure, so no buying the Mona Lisa) (This can be a lot of random shit, baseball cards, land deeds, pay some artist that you know will become famous in the future to make specific art for you that you know is not popular known in your time, stamps, signed first edition stuff)
3) Put stuff in a box, pay an attorney or attorney office (research this guy in the future, make sure noone he knows had a sudden unexpected influx of wealth over the last 50 years, make sure his office never burned down, stuff like this) to deliver the box to you 30 minutes after you plan to return from the past.
4) Go to the future, be rich.

On March 18 2016 16:44 RvB wrote:

better yet is to buy derivatives and use as much debt as you can handle to buy them. Profits will be insane.

On March 18 2016 19:58 Simberto wrote:
The problem i have with that is that it has a reasonably high chance of being incompatible with the past that you remember. If you buy too much Apple Stock, that can change the stock market, or how apple acts. And even if you don't, i think banks usually send some sort of feedback to you every year or so about what your money is doing. And you would probably remember getting feedback about your growing money bag over the last thirty years. And someone might at some point want to try to figure out who that gigantic account of apple stock belongs to. Additional problems with the fact that you are not even born yet when the account is opened, which might lead to problems with actually claiming that it is in fact your account.

Of course, all of this can be dealt with or might not be a problem, but i still think that "box full of comics/baseball cards" might be the simpler solution.