Long, productive, & satisfying day at work–the kind where you sit down and settle in a nirvana and then it’s way past quitting time all of a sudden. Too late to go running. Deciding betwee bed or Mega Man. You?
I’m in a hyperlogical mood, huddled over some laboratory work and doing mad scientist stuff.
Wanna hear more?
I mostly hold this view. I don’t believe in a better world, in this life or the next (figuratively speaking, of course; I don’t believe there is a next). There are lot of threads about prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar. Well, I take a descriptive view of morality. There are behaviors that I find personally abhorrent, but I view it as my own personal bias.
However, I can’t quite say I have a zeal for life. I am not exactly depressed, not in the clinical sense. Apathy probably describes my usual mood better.
Why, you scoundrel… of course… leans forward and listens attentively
Perfectly understandable, and nothing wrong with that. The catalyst for making this post was the various “what would you do if you won the lottery?” threads that have popped up on message boards over the weekend. I was quite disappointed to find that the vast majority chose to either retire or continue their life as-is.
Where are the people who will take the money, and pursue immortality, AGI, missions to Mars, and lunar colonies? I plan on pursuing science and private research as a career, myself; I’m going to build a reputation as a formidable worker & leader before making the leap. How nice it would be to find a partner!
Well, I’d be right there with you, but I’m much too busy creating an army of genetically engineered super-soldiers and atomic death cannons to arm them with.
Except why should the big picture be the one that matters. I’ve thought a lot about the meaning of life (well, a lot for a 31-year-old with no formal philosophy training), and while it’s certainly true that when the universe collapses into heat death (or does whatever it does unimaginable numbers of years down the pike), nothing I do while I live will make a difference, why should cosmological time frames be the ones that matter? And it’s CERTAINLY possible to change the world with one’s actions, in a variety of ways, in a variety of sizes. I have to ask why you specify “mad” scientists. What about sane scientists? Perhaps the person I respect the most in the world is my father, who for many years has been the project scientist (and evangelist) for the Spitzer Space Telescope. So when he’s long dead, and everyone who knew him is long dead, there will still be pieces of human knowledge that are there because of what he did. They may all turn to dust eventually (or maybe not… far far future speculation is a dicey thing). But there’s still no reason to say they don’t MATTER. And I don’t think he has some quasi-mystical view of The Edifice of Human Knowledge being some immortal and spiritual entity. He is just a scientist.
So I’m not quite certain I understand your claim, but if your claim is “absolutely nothing you do REALLY matters, so the only logical response would be apathy or falling prey to some intellectual weakness which imbues random actions with the false appearance of relevance, but despite that some people are STILL passionate about things, and that’s rare and amazing”, well, I think you’re wrong that nothing really matters (although of course “matters” is not something that can be easily defined), and I think that you’re wrong about how few people are like that. A good majority of scientists, I’d say, along with many people with creative jobs, lots of teachers, etc. Anyone who is at least partially motivated by a desire to make an impact in the world, not just get rich, kind of fits your criteria, as long (I guess) as they do it for inscrutable and inexplicable reasons, not for “weak” reasons like religion or karma.
I have a feeling I’m still not quite grokking you, however.
One of my favorite images, on the topic of life purposes, is the guy who makes crossword puzzles. He spends 10 hours generating something new (even if it’s just information) which brings FAR more than 10 hours of happiness to other people. He’s creating happiness. That has a lot less long-term impact on the world than (for instance) a space telescope. But I certainly think it matters more than just a speck of dust, although I suppose to really argue an issue like that, we’d have to go back to first principles and define all sorts of the kinds of things that are hard to define, so it’s probably not worth it.
It’s also easy to fall into a Nietzchian trap where you only value people who are Superheroic Great Men of Science, which way leads to all sorts of ugly beliefs and choices.
An interesting question, although perhaps one we’d need a Skinnerian box to really answer. Raise a group of 10 babies with no outside social contact, and see if they (a) develop morals, ethics, the golden rule, “being nice”, sharing, etc. and (b) see if they develop those rules only after trying other rules and seeing that they don’t work, or see if those rules are in any way innate. Biology is a powerful thing… maybe the golden rule comes from our brains and hormones and glands and sex drives, and any other explanation for it is just a rationalization.
In other words, a scientist? I certainly agree that the ability to question EVERYTHING is a valuable one, one of the great gifts of childhood that is very hard to maintain into adulthood.
Why are our primal personalities relevant? The human personality is a ferociously complicated thing, with incredible numbers of competing impulses, from different sources, with different triggers and levels of relevance and so forth. Why pick out several of them (shelter, water, food, sex) and call them more important than the others? Actually, a rare and valuable trait is the ability to accurately recognize ones own motivations, and judge and juggle them rationally. It takes an unusually honest person to say “I want X because of Y”, and not either immediately take X because he wants it, or immediately reject it because it’s only because of Y, but have a fair and rational and auditable process by which whether-or-not-to-take-X is decided. (In fact, I’m quite sure that no one at all can do that ALL the time, but some people can do it more than others).
Oh, and back on the topic of the heat death of the universe, since I’m in a rambling mood, here’s one of my favorite interesting thoughts: imagine that at the end of every year, Time-Life (or some such organization) produces a DVD with a roundup of the top happenings of the years, news events, celebrity gossip, sporting highlights, etc. Well, there are only a finite number of possible DVDs (albeit a ridiculously large finite number). Which means that, even if earth never ran out of resources, and the sun stayed lit forever, eventually humanity would RUN OUT OF NEW THINGS TO DO! Weird.
And the curse of insomnia strikes again… the following may contain many grammatical errors, dropped words & sentence fragments.
MaxTheVool… brace yourself for a round of angst; the background’s necessary to grok my intents.
The OP was made in the spirit of MPSIMS silliness; I don’t -really- want the sadistic, truly psychopathic madman you see in movies and such. However, a “mad scientist” image has a few parallels to my ideal man, mainly the ability to laugh in the face of fate instead of ignoring it or making up stories about it, and the ability to dream big and to act on it. When I put those 2 qualities together, I visualize a mad scientist.
In practical real-world terms, the only difference between a mad scientist and a sane scientist is the grandeur of his pursuits; if his hopes look like something out of a sci-fi novel, then he’s a mad scientist. Why “scientist”, though? I like geeks. They make great friends and we share many of the same hobbies. However, they are dreamers–indeed, most of them cannot be more than dreamers even if they wanted to due to their limited intelligence! Intelligence draws me like moths to flames… but even surrounded by those claiming to have extraordinary IQs, someone who I can truly feel myself with comes only in a great, great while. (Of course, this comes with the caveat that maybe I’m too arrogant or perhaps I’m not actually judging “intelligence”, and there’s always the possibility that I don’t try hard enough to make myself attractive to intelligent people–I look dumb and I play dumb far too often.)
Your father is a very admirable man, and his accomplishments are quite commendable. Thank you for sharing that with us. 
I hold a special love for amateur astronomy–I know the constellations, and I want to spend a week camping in the desert Southwest someday for skygazing.
Onto your post…
It relates to how I am specifically attracted to the so-called mad-scientist. For quite personal reasons, I have great affinity for people who throw away oppressive fates and shrug off bleak destinies. In my mind, the mad scientist, who not only stands straight even in the bleakest of big pictures, but also adapts it to his advantage (such as reasoning away cultural impediments in research) exemplifies this trait the best.
Perhaps I don’t hang out with the right group. After all, my peers, young men who smoke pot and play D&D, probably wouldn’t be the best standard to judge by. Point conceded–not to mention that a pursuit of science can be just as weak a reason as religion or karma.
Nature, in a way, does select genes that codify the Golden Rule. Consider that almost all animals engage in rivalry with conspecifics but such fights almost never end in death, even when mates or precious territory are at stake. It’d still be interesting to determine if the Golden Rule is really all that self-evident to humans, though.
Aye… I’ll be willing to change the title to “I’m so attracted to the zealous scientist type.”
We might actually be quite close in agreement. I presumed that you expressed distaste at forcing self into a mold resulting in someone that wasn’t the “real” personality. Peel off all the layers of external influences and upbringing and your “real” self, your core self without any molding applied, is little better than an animal (Google feral children if you want some very interesting and thought-provoking accounts of children that had no benefit of human interaction–my firm belief is that it is not as much our raw intelligence that separates us from beast as it is our ability to communicate and to pass on knowledge).
Interesting you’d bring that up. I view this as one of the two secrets of success I’ve found thus far–the other the ability to clearly identify & define problems. (e.g., answering the question “why am I feeling blocked in my project?” as early as possible; the steps to solution almost always reveal themselves when the root cause has been identified) Speaking of which, I’ve no idea what the original point of arguing about personalities was and I’m too tired to pinpoint it.
Good mental exercise, but I must nitpick it. You’ve actually touched on why universal data compression is impossible. Say all informations can be expressed as strings of bits, say, 00111001011. For every string of length n, there are 2^n-1 unique strings that can be generated. However, the total number of strings that have fewer than n bits are 2^(n-1)-1. Therefore for every string of length n, at most half of all strings can be compressed–because there are far fewer compressed strings than there are “original” strings. And, the DVD, of course, is a compression of human activities.
Your exercise could equivalently be restated as such: if the DVD held only one more bit of information, it would be capable of recording twice as many activities. Perhaps that could be the geek version of the half-full half-empty glass…
Who has accused you of being “too logical”? That would be a strange thing to say about someone who has wholeheartedly embraced Transcendental Meditation, stores his semen in ziplock baggies, and devotes his life simultaneously to two goals: losing weight, and getting the most food possible out of every buffet in town. I suspect anyone who called you “logical” was just using it as a euphemism for “creepy”.
To dre2xl: damn, I was all set to write the typical “How are you doing?” post, and then JThunder goes and steals my… well, thunder.
Oh well. I’m probably nowhere near as intellectually stimulating as I’d like to think I am.
Logical=creepy :smack:
Thats nice. Would you like to point out some other ways that I am different from the norm? People like you are truly pathetic, I bet you spend your days talking about how terrible society is but at the first sign of trouble the first thing you reach for it tools to point out how people aren’t up to social par. I’m ‘too’ logical, ‘too’ sick’, ‘too’ flamboyant, ‘too’ interested in some subjects, etc. I’ve been accused of being ‘too’ insecure and ‘too’ stoic.’
Again, it doesn’t take much balls to insult strangers on an anonymous internet message board because you’ve fucked up your own life and need an outlet. I feel sorry for your family, if you’re this big of a screw up and asshole on anonymous internet message boards I really pity the life they have to lead with you.
Man, your sad little fits just never cease to amuse, Wesley. But I better step out of the thread, as this isn’t the appropriate place.
I sincerely hope you learn to deal with your problems more constructively. Until that time you’ll just make life worse for everyone around you.
As I said the best you can do is attack me for being different. ‘too’ this or ‘not enough’ of that. You can’t attack me for being a bad brother, or a bad son, or a bad uncle, or a bad charity worker or over anything that truly matters in life. You can just point out how I’m different than an arbitrary social ideal. Sadly that is a theme on this board, in between the talks about how ‘everyone else is an idiot’ and ‘society sucks’ are flames designed solely to point out how people are different from the same social ideals the same poeple pretend to be disgusted by in other threads. At the end of the day pointing out how people are non-conformist is the biggest insult I see people here use.
We all have problems, that is not important. What matters is how you deal with them. I sincerely hope someday you find a more constructive way to deal with your problems because well adjusted people who can deal with life’s problems effectively don’t troll anonymous message boards looking for opportunities to point out how strangers are different from arbitrary social ideals. It’ll probably take a while for that to happen (it took several years for me to grow up and deal with my problems instead of taking them out on others) but sooner or later you’ll grow out of this.
With all due respect, Wesley, accept this bit of constructive criticism.
85% of communication comes via other means than words, and the fact that you posted 3 paragraphs in response to someone’s undeserved insult comes across as defensive and quite contradictory to your “I don’t care” claims. That’s likely quite unintended as you don’t show any actual anger, but obviously people aren’t getting your message so perhaps another method of delivery might be in order? Just a thought.
I do care though. I don’t want to have to deal with this kind of thing, but ignoring it won’t help and pointing out how people aren’t in line with social ideals with responses in kind won’t help either, it’ll just further a destructive paradigm of heartless conformity to destructive social ideals. I don’t want to be insulted or for others to get insulted, but I don’t want to deal with insults by ignoring them or by insulting someone with the same methods.
By and large I don’t know how to deal with insults constructively. This is the best method I have other than just ignoring them.
That’s probably the weak point in your contention. In many cases (not all, but many) someone’s ability to dish it out is proportional to someone’s ability to take it. One rule of game theory is that whatever treatment you inflict on others, you tend to get in return. If they minded those insults much at all, they wouldn’t give them out–they likely never realize that you take them to heart.
Another weak point is that you feel you have only 2 options: ignore or kindly lecture. I see plenty of options. One of my favorite strategies is to turn insults on its head in an absurd manner. For example, on another message board someone said “I’m pointing my finger at you. Guess which one.” My response: “Well, if you really insist… I’ll pull it.” He had a great laugh over that and it disarmed the tension.
Excalibre and Wesley Clark . . . take it to The Pit.
Cajun Man
for the SDMB
What about girls who fit the description except for “skinny”?
(Sorry, guys, I’m happily married )
You mean I spent 4 years in Evil Medical School for nothing?
Most geeks have limited intelligence? Are you actually insulting geeks? Or are you just using a somewhat nonstandard definition of “limited”? I’d say geeks are, on the average, pretty far over on the intelligent side of the bell curve.
Yeah, I’m, uhh, sensing that possibility.
See, THAT I don’t understand at all. I’ve heard enough anecdotal evidence to believe that there are men out there who truly don’t want intelligent women. But I rarely encounter them myself, and I sure as hell don’t understand them. Plus, presumably the intelligent women don’t want those men anyhow…
What about people who never had oppressive fates or bleak destinies in the first place? Or are you speaking in a “all people are nothing but dust in the wind. dude. So we all have a bleak destiny…” sense?
Your sentence would be a lot more meaningful and damning if it included the phrase “do nothing but” between “who” and “smoke”. Although I guess you’re kind of implying that. Unless you believe that recreation is a weakness that the idealized man would not stoop to.
Here’s another interesting thought experiment… what if, instead of raising a bunch of Skinnerian box babies together, you raised a bunch of them in isolation, and then gave one of them the ability to view and influence another, but NOT vice versa. So game theory (you do seem to love the game theory) would not factor into it, as the influencer’s actions would NEVER have any influence, even an indirect one, on himself. Would he choose to be nice to the influencee just out of the goodness of his heart? I think that, in general, he would, because of empathy. I know who I am, and know that I enjoy being happy. So me-being-happy is something I value. If I recognize that another being is similar to me, I tend to identify with that being, so that-being’s-happiness is ALSO something that I value, although not as much as my own happiness (in general). The question is, is that tendency to empathize and identify innate to human nature?
Actually, I don’t think we’re in an agreement at all. I don’t think there IS a difference between external influences and upbringing and some “core” me. A feral child is not a more “true, raw, natural” child than a non-feral child. It’s a child with a different set of influencing factors. Every person is a combination of nature and nurture, and influenced by the people and events of his or her life. They sum together to make a whole person. It’s an interesting (and perhaps useful) exercise to attempt to discern what parts of that person came from what, but even if you could clearly and accurately identify what parts are nature and what parts are nurture, that doesn’t make the nurture parts any less “real” than the nature parts. I am who I am. All of it is real.
Eh, since when does there need to be a point in order to argue about things? (In fact, isn’t arguing about things without any obvious point a very mad-scientist trait?)
Bring your nitpicks, and they shall quail before the power of my rhetoric!
A statement which is true, but (fortunately) almost totally irrelevant, as the overwhelming majority of information generated by people is highly compressible. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to come up with human-generated information that is NOT compressible, except for things like .jpeg or .mpeg files that are already compressed.
I’ll assume that it’s the insomnia speaking, and what you’re attempting to point out is that there are 2^n unique binary strings of length n? I’m not sure where the “for every string of length n” part came from, or the -1, unless you’re saying something far trickier than you seem to be.
Incorrect. For n=4, there are the following strings with fewer than 4 digits:
1
0
00
01
10
11
000
001
010
011
100
101
110
111
and, arguably, the empty string of length 0
resulting in a total of either 14 or 15 strings, which is either (2^n)-1 or (2^n)-2.
Nonetheless, your basic point is correct… the better compression your algorithm provides in the best case, the more strings it actually won’t be able to compress (and will, in fact, make longer).
Well, now you’ve gone from mathematics to metaphysics or something. And while it’s true that for every possible compression algorithm that works on binary strings, there are some strings that can not be compressed, is it also the case that there are possible human activities that can not be meaningfully represented on a DVD? (I suppose you could answer that question in a non-interesting fashion by saying “well, this DVD holds 8 gigabytes of data. Therefore, it can not meaningfully distinguish between different people identical except for the 9 gigabytes of data tattooed in bar code form on their foreheads.”)
Of course, a similar thought is this: the human genome is finite. Therefore, there are only a finite number of possible genetically distinct human beings! Eventually, everyone will have been born!
(I would, by the way, like to meet someone who is actively depressed by the finite-but-ridiculously-incomprehensibly-enormous limits of human genetics and/or endeavors.)
Let’s narrow this down. Is it safe to weed out the angry Christian Scientists and the peeved Scientologists? What about those fuming phrenologists and enraged entomologists?
Let me chime in here to state that if I did win the lottery, I would pursue immortality. And not through cyronics or sissy shiznit like that, I’d invent artificial neurons, baby! And steady-state ones, too, that would not lose their information when unpowered. How would they be powered? By sugar, of course.
On the down side, I’m not good with my hands, so I’d need that money to hire engineers…or is that a plus too?