Sagat

Be careful when trying to untangle correlation and causation: it may well be that poor people and criminals are more likely to turn to religion. After all, atheism is mainly found in more educated populations.

There are a ton of events which rival the Holocaust in horror. In fact, genocides are being committed as we speak.

It's too easy to claim that citizens are not involved in what the government is doing. One reason these agencies are so bold is because Americans themselves are completely dismissive of the rights of foreigners, thanks to the old manifest destiny attitude.

Diversity isn't a magic pill that automatically improves everything. Students should be selected based on their merits. If this results in non-diverse samples, then so be it.

Sorry, if you are not putting your life on the line, you do not deserve to call yourself a "warrior" or any other term which implies duty and honor.

they did not have the same chance to develop an ethic framework as adults had, because they had less years to learn.

Many people die without ever having found an ethical framework. In fact, it's possible to make ill-designed ethical frameworks of your own that can have disastrous effects on society. Believing that time is the equivalent of wisdom is unwise.

The reason "nihilists" aren't taken seriously is because they like to rely on an overly simplistic understanding of the world and ill-conceived metaphors.

There are a number of alarming studies (as some other poster said, take a look at N. Carr's book) that show that screen time, especially in our formative years can have dramatically negative effects on brain development. So it's possible that some people who ended up zombified by the internet could actually have had significant lives. There are plenty of people whose otherwise adjusted lives have spiralled into failure due to drugs, so why couldn't the same thing happen with other dopamine releasing activities? I think the fact that people have literally died from screen overuse lends credence to the idea that there is some danger to integrating computers in every part of our lives and it's not necessarily our fault if we fall into the depths of online time-wasting.

In any case, I don't really like the idea that those people would been useless anyway as if it were in their nature to be unmotivated. Maybe I'm a bit naive but I believe good nurture can offset much of the problems of nature.

Not necessarily. If like at least half of users you spend your time watching videos, memes and your facebook feed, you aren't going to become more literate or understand anything.

People can choose things but that doesn't mean you should sometimes try to steer them in an other direction. That's the whole point of morality and other coercive measures which all have a different place on the scale of subtleness.

If you are interested in such things, I suggest reading Transcend by R. Kurzweil. He takes the supplement craze up to 11.

It's named after Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Duh.

Obey the Musk!

They're just jealous of Bill Gates.

What he said.

1. Those are all allegations. In fact, the whole DSK mess is extremely unclear and the case presented against him is highly suspicious, although it is clear that he is a bit seedy. Some believe it to be a political machination for a number of reasons.

2. One politician's behavior means ALL politicians of that country behave wrongly?

That's what scared me the most about that book: it's so plausible it's almost inevitable.

Maybe in the future, true power will be the ability to escape monitoring?

Really suspicious looking site, bro.

There's a huge difference between being spied upon by your own government and being spied upon by some manifest-destiny-following foreigner.

Please don't apply american fundamentalist puritan standards to everyone, please.

It's true that most people don't care about most things since they operate inside a small, simple world without being concerned with the things outside of their immediate experience. Not that it's necessarily a bad thing; many individuals have gone insane trying to solve the problems of the world. I myself only want a quiet life without hassle.

Societal and technological change are the result of the work of a small minority, which may very roughly correspond to the 20/80 Pareto principle. You can't expect everyone to be involved in complex conundrums. So it doesn't matter if the majority don't care about an issue. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do something about it.

You would want to be filmed at all times, and have that footage available to everyone? That's insane and I suggest reading Dave Egger's "The Circle".

Wow thanks a lot for indiscriminately lumping together Western Europe in a single, confusing category.

I have trouble taking psychology and psychiatry seriously. They are the softest of the sciences and mostly based on cultural norms anyway. Consider the fact that homosexuality was labelled a mental disorder in the DSM not long ago. This is evidence that they make it up as they go along.

France isn't really that open minded about sex. Although most people are secular, you still have the whole judaeo-christian morals hanging around in the background, subtly changing everybody's behavior. Eh ouais.

What if it evolves in the wrong way? Plenty of emerging middle classes in developing countries are now looking to join the American-style unsustainable lifestyle movement.

The problem is that not everyone is making less progeny. Japanese and European populations may be in decline, but African, Asian, Arabic, and Hispanic ones are growing at a brisk pace.

So yes, it's pretty bad for some people to limit births. You are essentially diminishing your influence and putting yourself at risk of being swallowed up by other cultures.

Why waste people's time like that?

Who is that? There are no google results.

I wonder who Satoshi is and how much he's worth now. Not many people can put on their CV that they created a new currency.