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Outlooker

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Posts posted by Outlooker

  1. A website with a quick glance at the data:

     

    http://www.climatedata.info/forcing/gases/carbon-dioxide/

     

     

    Here the c(CO2) of the past:

     

    stacks-image-feda935-800x524.png

     

     

     

    I see a pattern here comparable to that of plastics-pollution of the oceans:

    Almost all of it stems from China and India, while Western populations are led to believe/feel the West is the leading polluter,

    using this lie then as a pretext to necessitate higher taxes (and bans of plastics, like the ridiculous plastic straw ban in California, which does nothing but

    soothe "liberal minds" and adds costs to Western consumers):

     

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plastic-tide-10-rivers-contribute-most-of-the-plastic-in-the-oceans/

    https://www.verdict.co.uk/yangtze-river-plastic-pollution/

     

    Western countries pollute negligibly, because we recycle, use landfills, and ecologically safe garbage-incineration plants.

     

    Again:

    I'm also all for keeping the environment as clean and healthy as feasible, but I prefer effective and efficient measures, not propaganda frauds that are just pretexts to redistribute income and wealth.

     

     

  2. I think that should be of interest to some some of you:

     

    1538694302251-0.jpg

     

     

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies

     

     

     

     

    That's China's effort.

    Most of you probably know about the already public US' efforts due to traitor's info-leaks, but it's related information so I'll post it, too:

     

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_ANT_catalog

    https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/nsa-ant-catalog/

    https://www.eff.org/files/2014/01/06/20131230-appelbaum-nsa_ant_catalog.pdf

     

     

    So far for software security patches for trying to get some measure of security.

     

     

    EDIT:

    Suddenly after release of the article all parties deny that anything anywhere anyhow happened.

    Going back to business is probably more profitable than causing a public mess...

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-amazon-apple-supermicro-and-beijing-respond

  3. May I suggest two different kinds of keyhole-based reconnaissance?

    The naked-eye-peeking-through version seems already established and is nicely quaint - a keyhole-shaped shroud - and useful enough.

     

    But there could easily be a more advanced version for a more professional thief based on an advanced tool, something like a periscope - after all, DM's steam punk elements already have a lot of tech, including a looking glass/scope;

    the more advanced tool would be a short thin tube with a mirror shard on its one end, and a lens on the other. The tube would be used on the door, put through the keyhole, and then a more or less freely rotatable camera view

    could simulate the looking through the tube and perceiving the situation on the other side of the door from the perspective of the tube's end.

     

    This method would have the advantage of making able to see not only what is straightly behind the door, but also (by rotating the "tube/mirror") what is right next to and even above and under the door.

     

     

    If my description is not clear enough, I mean a steam-punk version of something like this:

    45%20degree_enl.jpg

     

     

    voltcraft-bs-30-sd-hand-endoskop-mit-sd-

     

    Technically like a Thief 2 scouting orb a bit behind the door on elevation of the key hole.

    • Like 1
  4. I'm bringing this thread up because I happened on a piece of information I think is highly relevant and instructive regarding Sotha's OP question about survival preparedness;

    it appears to be valuable advice on what to expect during civilizational breakdown based on genuine experience from the breakdown of the UdSSR/Bosnia between 1992 and 1995.

    The picture is somewhat large, so I put it in here:

     

    1537425609910.jpg

     

     

    Further, climate change may not be all that terrible, after all - at least the rising CO2 concentration has lead to a global growth spurt of trees:

     

    https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth

     

    https://psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago

     

     

    And while this is not directly connected to the issue discussed, this little video still is somewhat associated and more reason for optimism; it shows a solar-powered agricultural robot that automatically

    picks or individually sprays weeds in a field, greatly saving on herbicides compared to whole-field spraying:

    https://twitter.com/danieljpeter/status/1042398755495075843

     

    • Like 1
  5.  

    Operating with Citizen Kane clichés is highly disturbing Mr Outlooker.

    But I tell you only this: everybody can say so until things hit the fan in your life personally.

     

    I've come to think that people only signal morality publicly to convince others better that they are valuable allies.

    Much like when in public, under other people's eyes who judge us, we behave "better" than when in private: We do not pick our noses, keep our farts in, keep better posture, wear cleaner and better clothes than when in private.

    Same with attitudes, especially socially signalled ones: We try to signal, here too, that we are better, more "moral", than we really are. It's just a show we do more or less automatically, which comes with our social instincts.

     

    But in reality, people try to enslave or kill each other, and value their own well-being, own life much higher than other's.

     

    Thought experiment:

     

    A burning house, you can only save two people due to time restrictions:

     

    A] Your own child B] another person's child ---> you safe your own child obviously

     

    Let's make it more interesting:

    A] Your own child B] two children of other people; or

    B1] 10, or 100, or 1000, or 1 million other children

    Now, that's not quite as easy anymore, isn't it?

     

    Let's make it even more interesting:

    A) Your own child, or even yourself B] any number of other persons- BUT

    now you can be sure that your decision will forever stay unknown to all other people (if you are religious, even to God) -

    you can be sure to be totally free from social judgment for your decision, that is, social pressure

     

    Social pressure, your social instinct to signal being moral to others, has a large impact on how you feel and decide.

     

     

    We find this scheme not only with picking one's nose or signalling moral behavior when being under social surveillance (the gaze of others), but with everything - women are promiscuous, but publicly pretend to be chaste; people are dishonest, but publicly pretend to be most honest; etc.

     

     

    So, people are actually not at all like they say or signal socially. We know it about ourselves, and if pointed out, see it in others, too.

     

     

    But what if I told you that people actually do not care for the lives of others at all, that it is only a public show put out to invest in reciprocation, so that they appear as valuable allies deserving of trust and social investment?

    YOU yourself have already killed people - by omission, because your own well-being is more important to you than even the survival, the very life of others:

    Reality is such, that you could have donated half your lung, half of your liver, or one of your two kidneys to other people and therefore have saved their life, with minimal risk to your own life.

    You did not (as practically everybody else, too), you preferred to keep your redundant kidney and therefore caused the death of at least one person already.

    This is obvious, and people prefer to avoid this topic, because they prefer to live in the illusion that they are very "moral", "good" people.

    (Interestingly, if exposed to social pressure, like being exposed to a person dying from kidney disease, activates empathy, especially when, as pointed out above, a great number of people are watching you, for example if you were to find yourself in a TV show and you are asked, millions watching, if you would donate your kidney or condemn the poor sick person to death by refusing it - then the likelihood would be much greater that you would donate a kidney, to comply with your public image as a "moral" person, while you privately would hate and regret your decision afterwards.)

     

    See here:

    Miles-Wagner.jpg

    Somewhere others, children, are dying, because you prefer to not want to donate a piece of your redundant organs.

    As soon as it gets personal, this fact becomes much more unpleasant, doesn't it? This is because your empathy is activated, and because you start to feel social pressure from social judgment of others.

     

     

    The same principle not only applies to millions of sick people dying from the indifference of other people for their suffering and survival, their very life;

    but also for, example, genocide and mass killings: People SAY, in public, when under social surveillance, that they care, to signal morality, but they privately do not; a new car, or new computer, or an school exam is much more important to them than the deaths of millions and millions of people far away, especially when those people are genetically different (=not family) or perceived as low-status (=unlikely to ever become useful for ourselves).

    The Whore of England's, "Lady" Di's, death - a high-status female, salient due to media reporting - activated the deep sympathy (mass crying, oceans of flowers and stuffed teddy bears, oceans of candles, emotional mass hysteria) of millions and millions of people (mostly females, though) in GB and word-wide - while the deaths from famine, easily and cheaply treatable diseases, and genocide (Hutu/Tutsi) - the suffering and death of millions upon millions of people is ignored, usually only registered with annoyance and disgust, in an attempt to forget about it as quickly as possible, for example by distracting oneself with indulgence in a pleasurable undertaking (video game, food, ...).

     

    I'm just pointing out how I see it is - I am not saying that this is "bad". I just want to demonstrate that what people actually do and are, and how they publicly pretend to be - even self-deceive themselves to be - is completely different.

     

     

     

     

    And I propose that must be so, because

     

    1.) people must actually try to enslave and kill others in the social war for reproduction and getting resources (making it through natural and sexual selection - all people alive must be those who successfully achieved both)

     

    2.) people must pretend to be better than they really are ("moral", altruistic, caring for others) to better convince others that they are valuable allies deserving investment (social pressure, because we are a highly social species).

     

    Therefore, morals are a big deception, social and personal propaganda to unify the conflicting behavioral goals of 1) and 2) - and this is the reason hypocrisy is so common it's the norm, but a hidden norm.

     

     

     

  6.  

    "Many computers crash, and therefore the once noble computer is now a useless unreliable piece of garbage."

    You're making both a spotlight fallacy and a category error.

    The fact that you can demonstrate flaws in a system does not mean the system itself is inherently flawed. Many systems (including science) are designed to self-correct for flaws.

    I said "many scientists"; and I did not say that all of science is flawed, or that the principle of science is flawed generally; and indeed, as you say, it is self-correcting, as long as it is not totally corrupted, which it is not.

    But if you mix a bit of feces in a cake, the whole cake becomes like feces.

    And if there is some fraudulent science, we cannot trust scientific results generally anymore naively for making our decisions, which we have to make in the present, and endure their effects right now or soon,

    while the hopefully auto-corrective principles of the scientific process may take much longer to produce the corrections, the truth, at last.

    Therefore, 100% trust in scientific findings and reports is not sensible, and cannot spare us being sceptical, that is, to try to think for ourselves.

    Indeed, one method for this, an easy 1st step, is to try to base one's judging on a broader base of scientific data, hoping that it's probable that only a minority of it is fraudulent or just wrong.

    But this is often already quite a lot of work - it questions scientific results to get closer to the truth.

    Which, incidentally, is a core aspect of the actual scientific method - not trusting results and prevailing data and explanations, and attempting to gather one's own, and to verify oneself.

    But, realistically, this is impossible with a great many of scientific findings, because for lack of resources or the impossibility to recreate the exact conditions of past experiments (like in social science or medicine).

     

    I feel we work ourselves up over semantics; we think alike in that the scientific method is indeed superior, and, in it's idealized form, as an idea, is optimal, at least the best we have for finding truth.

    I just want to stress that until it produces truth, it temporarily can (and often, perhaps usually in some fields) produces falsehoods; and that this problem is amplified by incentives of some scientists to knowingly produce false science.

    But the central usefulness of science is for helping us to make more successful decisions, and those have to be done right now or soon, and we have very often not the time to wait for science to produce perfect truth.

    For example, a doctor has to try to save the life of his cancer patient now, and the only options he has, from all of science, are all imperfect, a mix of truthful correct findings on the efficacy of a treatment option, along with wrong or fraudulent findings.

    Science will take it's course, all right, but we cannot wait until then in practice, until truth and untruth are perfectly proven.

    Therefore, in executing decisions, we cannot attribute a 100% chance that scientific finding or even consensus among scientists is actually 100% true.

    The - ideally temporary - flaws in actual science available in the present make it necessary to weigh probabilities and value of evidence ourselves;

    unless real objective truths are found in the very end of applying the scientific process, real-world decisions are therefore still subjective and may ignore or contradict at least some of current scientific findings and prevailing scientists` opinions.

     

    Example:

    Quite a lot scientists predicted a catastrophic mass epidemic from mad cow disease, about 20 years ago, that would destroy the brains of millions of people that had eaten beef.

    There was no scientific consensus.

    Still, governments and industry had to make a decision, on destroying the cattle stock and meat products or not. They weighed probabilities, NOT scientific results, as there was no agreed-on science available, and it appears today their decision was correct.

     

     

  7. Because it seems to me many here do not question the honesty of the scientific process, just let me add a study I happened to come about just today:

     

    DkcxVFXUYAIQetb.jpg

     

     

    More:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/health/obesity-malaysia-nestle.html

    https://www.bmj.com/content/362/bmj.k3472.full

    https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/07/18/629575118/medicaid-under-the-influence-how-drugmakers-sway-medication-options-for-patients

     

     

    Beware those scientific studies -- most are wrong, researcher warns

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/beware-those-scientific-studies-most-wrong-researcher-warns-164336076.html

     

     

    Hidden conflicts in FDA drug approvals? pharma $ to FDA advisors – before and after advisory meetings that recommended drug approvals. “Pay-later conflicts of interest” have gone largely unnoticed & entirely unpoliced.

    http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6397/16

     

    DhTScY8V4AENXGI.jpg

     

     

     

    FDA repays drug industry by rushing risky meds to market

    As pharma companies underwrite three-fourths of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s budget for scientific reviews, the agency is increasingly fast-tracking expensive drugs with significant side effects and unproven health benefits.

    http://www.foxnews.com/health/2018/07/01/fda-repays-drug-industry-by-rushing-risky-meds-to-market.html

     

    https://idmprogram.com/scientific-opinions-for-sale/

     

     

     

     

    And on and on it goes, endlessly.

    Many scientists have become prostitutes, just like journalists, and therefore the once-noble institution of science has become a cesspool of falsehoods.

  8.  

    However, there is no logical connection between that fact and the conclusion that "science" can no longer be "generally trusted".

    I see a logical connection, though: True science, pure and perfect scientific process, is just an inaccessible ideal, because science does not exist outside of human brains as a model of or tool to understand reality.

    And humans are biased, make errors, and, most importantly, can be motivated to produce untrue results presented as science deliberately.

    It has happened, is happening, and will keep on happening.

    Simple examples:

    The tobacco industry influenced research, researchers and public reporting and presentation of research significantly, to facilitate selling their product.

    This is now more or less generally known. At the time, however, many people believed in the fraudulent science that appeared to have proved that cigarette consumption is not unhealthy; and the matter was confused further by findings that turned out to be true that nicotine itself had indeed positive effects on at least some health parameters.

    Another better known example is the work of the scientist-prostitute Ancel Keys who deliberately misrepresented scientific findings in ways so that the public was kept unaware of the fact that sugar consumption is associated with disease, like cancer, heart disease and atherosclerosis, so that the sugar industry was able to keep selling their addictive drug - sugar - to the public. The sugar war still wages in public propaganda, while the actual science has been settled long ago: Regular consumption of significant amounts of sugar causes multiple deadly diseases, sugar is a full-blown addictive drug, and this is true in laboratory test mammals as well as humans.

    And the same as with cigarettes happens again: An alliance of addicts who hope to find absolution of their drug use and an industry that influences science and media reports leads to generating a wrong idea in the heads of the public that is the opposite of scientific evidence.

    And if that happened and happens so easily in those examples, it is prone to happen in other cases, too.

     

     

    1) Climate change has been identified as a real problem by science, but now there is fortunately at least some building momentum to tackle it.

    Yes, by climate engineering. Just stopping to use fossil fuels will not happen, until other energy sources are utilized. Even then, fossil fuel is just too cheap, unless you can offer people free energy in other forms, they will just dig out and burn free energy from the ground.

    2) what will happen during our lifetime is probably something between two extremeties: a) Venus-like greenhouse-effect-outta-control (very unlikely), or b ) no significant change (very unlikely).

    Change is certain, change is the only sure thing, the only constant.

    The question is if humans cause some of that change - which is settled: Yes. By building infrastructure, we change the albedo (roads, houses, cities) and cause many other examples of changed microclimate at least.

    The next question how much of the overall change is from human activity. Probably impossible to tell.

    The next question is if climate change will hurt human interests. Probably impossible to tell, too, because we cannot predict the scale and effects of future climate change.

    The next question is if potential negative effects on humans from climate change can be minimized by actions we hope (but cannot know) to minimize climate change caused by human activity. The answer is a clear No! because much of the CO2 has already been generated, and humanity will not stop burning fossil fuel until other, at least just as cheaply available energy sources are available. Just cutting back a little on fossil fuel use will not do anything, only spread the CO2 production over a somewhat longer time.

    Electric cars or higher taxes on fossil fuel etc. will not change anything. "Climate change" as a political slogan is just used to sell such cars or facilitate tax increases - a pretext for making people accept and do things certain interest groups want.

    Highest probability event is loss of inhabitable land in some areas (floods, drought, extreme weather). Food supply get hit, economy may go into recession.

    Too difficult to predict. We only can try to adapt. Desertification etc. happens, and did happen. Loss of farmable land happens. But as the climate changes and makes some parts of the world unfarmable, other areas of land open up,

    for example the rising temperatures in Greenland open up vast spaces of fertile lands for agriculture:

    https://edition.cnn.com/2012/12/04/world/greenland-secrets/index.html

    3) The effects will hit poor regions of the world hardest. Western societies are so ultra wealthy, we will probably just take economic impact and then adapt. We will probably need to have harsh immigration control because people will flee areas affected areas (famine, wars, etc). The hardest impact in western countries will hit the poor population (food, fuel, etc prices go up.) Those who are well-off take the smallest impact.

    So what? Outside the industrialized countries misery and death were and are quite the norm. I do not worry about, for example, whole of Africa. If 90% of them died, I would not care.

    And, I feel I should point out, most people in the West would not.

    See, how did you feel about the news reports about the

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_genocide

    I am sure you were not significantly stirred by the deaths of millions of Negroes. In comparison, if you had suffered a dent or big scratch in your car, or bumped and broke your toe, or broke your TV, you would have felt a much higher emotional

    activation than just learning that a few millions of Negroes died by killing each other.

    Or, every day, for over a decade, the US alone drone-bombs and kills people all over the world, amounting to dozens killed every single day:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes

    Again, you do not care, and I don't either.

    It's just facts, and we can ignore it, because those people are irrelevant to us.

    The situation changes for most people if propaganda is activated and their emotions, sentimentality exploited:

    Say, this are killed Africans:

    maxresdefault.jpg

     

    Emotional reaction: Fear and disgust. Most people do not care for them, only want to be sure they stay away.

     

    Compare the effect of this picture for public reporting of Negro affairs:

    5013025683_c87f472b7e.jpg

     

    The big eyes and other child features as well as the other emotional cues trigger sentimentality in the observer of the picture, activating instincts that lead to a much higher probability to accept personal costs to help those blacks,

    for example by accepting higher taxes for foreign aid or donating money to charities.

     

    But both picture show the same kind of people, the same basic problem. Being exposed through by media of the first, people will not do much, while being exposed of the 2nd, will feel sentimental emotions and open their wallet or accept political actions they would not otherwise agree to.

    But both pictures show the same kind of people - those poor, little children will grow into the dangerous and unreasonable predators in the first picture.

    By aiding them, one would just feed the snake that would late bite you.

     

    Remember:

    There have been great and many "humanitarian crises" in the recent past, killing, even genociding millions - and the gates of the West stayed shut!

    Only now, as elites decided we must have mass immigration due to economic needs, suddenly they found their dear hearts, and not having mass immigration, even protecting borders, is suddenly impossible, immoral, "Nazi".

    Moral feelings can be exploited by media, empathy being prevented or enforced, to make people accept political measures of their leaders.

     

    4) As long as one is among the well-off westerners, you are relatively safe. But that should not mean one should ignore the environmental effects entirely.

    Governments watch and analyze world affairs very carefully and sophisticatedly, have no doubt about that.

     

    We all should learn to conserve resources, consume less and teach our children to value the Better Things in life (I.e. things you can not buy). This is useful even now, because when you consume less and waste less, you save money, which is always a good idea.

    No. I do not want to "conserve resources", just so some people I do not care for elsewhere have it maybe somewhat better. I want to live and expand, and that means using up resources, in competition for those resources with other people,

    and the loser in that competition will get exterminated. This cannot be prevented, ultimately, anyhow.

    And the saving of money is only a thing because of high taxes, for example, for using water. Water is never used up, only eternally recycled. We have more than enough water, but it is artificially made expensive by taxes, which are then used not on the water supply, but for other things. In Northern Europe, saving water is idiocy, we have more of it than we could ever waste, it literally falls out of the sky. Saving water here will not even prevent people to die of thirst elsewhere.

     

    Also:

    If you want to reduce significantly the ecologic impact of humanity, then cull humanity. I will not accept a falling or just slower rise of my living standard so that billions of Africans and Asians can rise theirs.

    If you remove those Africans, or at least isolate them on their continent, you prevent another billion of people having an environmental impact from consumerism.

    Ideally, we should reduce humans being alive to perhaps just one billion, who then could live with high living standards and consumption levels while having minimum ecologic impact.

    But if you have ten billion humans, as we are headed to, they will even have a huge ecological impact even when their average living standard were very low, compared to current Western standards.

    So, if you care for environmental aspects or human life quality, the best policy is the same: Reduce the number of humans. Implications should be clear.

     

     

    5) I think my personal strategy would be: work hard to remain among privileged westerners,

    No hard work even necessary: Just by being born in Europe you have won the jackpot. Our social welfare system will make sure you will do quite well even if you, individually, should become lazy.

    It's unjust, but this is how reality is. Other people are born crippled just by luck, and some people have been born as Africans. We have been lucky and successful. We should not feel guilty for it,

    not feel guilty to be better, better off, even genetically superior. Let not guilt-trip other to manipulate you into submission, into defeat - they are not doing it for "justice" or "morality", but for their own

    selfish gain.

     

    but also -in everyday life- reduce ecological footprint and research ways to save energy, conserve resources and recycle/reuse as much stuff as possible instead of throw-away culture. Buy robust and repairable items instead of cheap disposable ones.

    Again:

    Why? You seem to me to kind of feeling guilty that you even exist! Get rid of that guilt! Is it inborn or has it been educated, "brain-washed" into you by leftists?

    You have an unalienable right to exist, to try to keep existing, to try to keep reproducing - by preventing others from achieving survival and reproduction, if need be.

    Do not restrict yourself of necessary resources to facilitate the well-being or even survival of others! They would not reciprocate, especially if they are genetically very different to you - invest in yourself, your own people, your family; not in those who are not like you, who hate you for being better, as this is the usual attitude of the inferior towards the superior.

    This is what life, including human life is! Why are you attempting to move towards suicide by caring too much for others unrelated to you?

    You are the descendant of a long line of ancestors, from the beginning of life itself, who successfully managed to beat other organisms and humans for survival and reproduction, by killing them by being stronger or more clever than them!

    If you accept harm to yourself or your family because they can guilt-trip you for being superior into defeat, you are acting most wrong, I think.

    I feel you should be more self-confidently selfish.

    As I posted elsewhere,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest

    makes sense, but only after one's own needs, one's own optimized survival is maximized.

    Sure, wasting resources should be minimized absent free energy, but there is a limit to it, and to live, to exist, to reproduce, we just need resources, and more are better than less, and because there is a war for resources and mates, for life and survival, anyway, I, at least, will not accept restricting myself significantly just to further the survival of others, especially others I could not care less for because I think they are or will become enemies, if treated well.

     

    The most important prepper -thing I might do is to buy are big Jerry can of fuel to the garage for emergencies. A water purifier might be a good idea too, because extreme weather may increase probabilities of the drinking water to go temporarily non-potable (via sewage floods, etc). Good quality hiking equipment and wilderness survival skills are also good to be available (if you like hiking and being in nature like I do, I need them anyway.)

    All reasonable generally, to a degree. A huge catastrophe nobody could survive, because we need a working economy and industry, medical supplies, food and energy. Just getting over temporary problems by having some stored resources, energy etc. is generally a good idea; but overdoing it would be a waste of resources, because resources spent preparing for a low-chance catastrophic event are resources that are wasted if the event never materializes. Another argument I heard from others:

    Those in a good bunker surviving a global nuclear holocaust are going to be the most miserable, because they will just die most slowly. Therefore, do not invest in huge bunkers, invest in prevention of such a catastrophic event - which, individually is rather impossible, but I feel we have mostly competent governments, especially in the West.

     

    In the OP you wondered if you should prepare to kill other humans:

    Should one invest in guns and ammo instead of stocks and funds?

     

    I think some weaponry is good to have, otherwise others that know of your stock of supplies in an emergencies could just take them away from you easily by force.

    Resources you cannot protect are resources you not really have.

    Especially with the widespread rioting, criminal shootings, hand grenade attacks, Muslim and Negro ghettos full of guns, and mass arson and mass rapes going on in Sweden due to low-quality human mass immigration you should be safer to be in a remote area, with secret supplies of your own, and equipped with deadly guns.

    Swedish dark-skinned immigrants are on a killing spree even now, in a time of plenty of resources and social welfare - I think you know what to expect from them if resources were to dry up: Sotha and his family becomes their prey - so prepare, but wisely so: What nobody knows you own is very difficult to take away from you, the aggressor being neighbors, the government, or the immigrant brutes.

    Whatever you have to do, in the end, only survival counts; getting exterminated for acting moral is insanity, slave mentality. The winner takes it all! Such is reality.

     

    6) For solving the climate change, there is not much more an individual can do

    Exactly. So do not get manipulated into accepting higher taxes, or stopping to want to use plastic bags.

    Even if the whole West were to vanish suddenly, the problem would persist.

    Better prevent using other regions of the world from using fossil fuels, sabotaging or warring them, so that they cannot rise to the level of wealth, and thus economic impact, we ourselves enjoy.

    If not anybody can have it, I want to be among those who can, by any means.

     

    In western democracies, scary amount of responsibility is put into the hands to the voters. Instead for voting populists or people who only drive the interests of your power group, we should vote for well-informed people who make decisions backed up by science, not just random thoughts of the day.

    Does not work like that, voters are egoistic and stupid, because the majority is, because human nature is so. If you doubt this, experiment yourself: Make a list of easy issues you feel everybody should understand. Then go in a public place, like a shopping street, and ask random people about those things. You will find an astounding level of ignorance.

    Many higher-cognitive-ability people do not really understand how it is to be on the other side of the bell curve. Do not think those people are just like you, can do what you can intuitively. They are more like you were if you were extremely tired or drunk. People with IQs in the 60s to 80s, like Africans, are practically hopeless.

    (Note that highly capable people of African descent indeed exist - they are just very rare, and therefore cannot be the basis for one's general judgments on dealing with racial issues.)

    And those people are voters. Neither their ignorance or their voting power can be taken from them - but it can be dealt with, through propaganda.

    Not one single political issue in a modern democracy was ever really decided by the voters, and much less understood completely by them.

    In propaganda, in democracy, you can only work to control voting with extreme oversimplifications of issues in public discourse; and it works, because the ignorant and lower-IQ people are always in the majority. This is how democracy really works - without the majority being easily manipulated ignorants democracy would be unstable or even impossible, because the very high level of complexity underlying actual political and economical decisions is impossible to explain to the public.

    7) Believing populists who offer ultra-simple solutions to ultra-complex problems ("everything is the EUs/immigrants'/jews/nazis/used car salesmens fault") gets us confused.

    But this is how democracy works, it cannot be different. Without oversimplification of issues, there can be no public discussion of issues.

    And "populism" is exactly what, according the naive definition of democracy, political leaders should be: "Populus" means people, nation, community - exactly those who are officially the deciders in democracy, and populists are those who carry through with the opinions of the people. If you want to avoid having populists, you must avoid having a democracy, at least on the outside.

     

    Using "othering" gets us confused ("everything is the elites/researchers fault." or "the elites/scientist conspire against the common people.") Fact is that humans are mostly the same: they have the same needs, the same fears, the same biases. When you see an elite or other "othering" group and want to hate them, it might be a good idea to remember that they are human just like you.

    Yes, human like me, and therefore prone to want to kill them if need be just like I am prone to kill them. People often have opposing interests. Then there is conflict, and it may become deadly.

     

    Closed mind gets us confused ("I'm not gonna listen to this data because the source is an expert, and I do not like experts nor the message. I prefer to listen what matches with my pre-existing beliefs.")

    Yes,

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

    Being distrustful towards leaders and specialists gets us confused.

    No. You cannot just trust them, because they have biases and interests of their own, therefore consciously or unconsciously hurting your own interests.

    Never really trust naively.

    Or, in Reagan's words: "Trust, but verify."

    Trust is only good when dealing with honest people, and you only know if they are really honest after the event, and if they turned out not honest, you may well end up dead.

     

    (If you distrust sources with detailed information (specialist) or sources with broad big-picture or information (leader), you only have your own cognition to rely on and will probably get incorrect results.

    Perhaps, perhaps not. I prefer to try to do the thinking myself, and rely on "authority" as little as possible. That has, until now, served me very well.

     

    For most reliable results, always use multiple sources and know that all sources are not as equally reliable.)

    With current internet surveillance and manipulation technology, even just from regular marketing or public relations people, much of a wide range of information and search results is already manipulated.

    There are whole companies specializing in making information disappear on the internet, or making things so that a very one-sided information environment is presented even to the skilled user of search engines.

    For example, the West's "hornet nest" strategy papers for dealing with the Middle East surge of young Muslim men by making them go at war with each other (ISIS etc.) to let them kill each other to remove them as a threat to the West have been wiped almost completely, even from Wikileaks; the evidence that the West delivered large amounts of weaponry to them and stirred up hatred among them to make them kill off each other more quickly was wiped from the net as well, etc.

     

    The only way to get clarity is to rely on science. The thoughts in your mind may be true, or they might be totally (utterly and horribly) wrong, and you cannot know which is the case.

    True science is indeed best, but only an ideal. In reality you only deal with science through human activity, and this is often biased or motivated to deceive.

     

    The only way to know which thought is true is to test them using the methods given by science. Not everyone is a specialist in complicated fields of science, and like Spring said if the message of the specialist does not make sense to you, it probably means you do not understand the topic, rather than the specialist does not understand their own field of expertise.

    Dangerous, I think, because you leave the "critical critical thinking" to others.

    And, usually, in reality of science, there is no bifurcation into "what all scientists think is true" and "what everybody else thinks is true"; actually, on a great many issues, you have different scientists holding conflicting opinions on what is the truth.

    It's about echo chamber frenzy, cherry picking the story that catches your fancy and not about what is really true.

    Wishful thinking is human nature, and was always been in effect. Rationality is going after truth and acting on it even if it makes one uncomfortable.

     

     

     

    One of the greatest problems we have is our attitude towards consumption.

    The best fundamental way, I think, to deal with that, absent free energy, is to limit the number of humans. This will, while allowing all existing humans a high standard of living, minimize economic impact of humanity so we can achieve sustainability.

    This means that billions of Asians and Africans have to vanish, in my opinion, or at least get prevented from enjoying rising wealth.

     

     

    Another point that goes in a similar direction is pressuring people into buying later versions of products they already have. Apple releases a new phone every year, which forces people who want to be "up to date" to buy it every year, even though their current phone works perfectly find

    Apple grew to being the biggest company of human history by exploiting envy and the universal human trait of status competition.

    Apple products are luxury products. Being wasteful is exactly the purpose of luxury products, to signal high social status.

    Actually, of course, most Apple products are bought by poor people who desperately attempt to signal to be rich people, thereby making the really rich people rich and richer by the actions of poor people attempting to appear rich.

     

    Much stuff is produced with a limited lifespan, so people will keep on buying new stuff. These are examples of wasted recources, but it is in line with our current cunsumerism and is one of the most important threats to our recources.

    If it is all recycled consumerism is nothing bad, and even useful or necessary to drive the economy!

    Imagine you had a car, phone, TV that were "perfect". You only had to buy it once. Good for you.

    But ten, forever, all researchers, engineers and factories that make products would have to close down forever, people getting unemployed forever, just because they did the "moral", but insanely stupid decision to produce a perfect product that never breaks. No thanks, I prefer even the most extreme forms of

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

    over such a system.

     

     

    @Outlooker: to pick up a quite old post: I am well aware that a catalyst is not used up (especially, with turnover numbers over 2000; these are really impressive). I am a chemist myself, so I understand the science behind it quite well (just wanted to clarify, as I sometimes got the impression, you doubted that I knew what I was talking about), but even if ruthenium is used as a catalyst, you would need several tons of it in an industrial process. As I said: I am not 100% sure how much ruthenium we have on earth (and I would exclude future recources in space for now until they can actually be harvested), but limited amounts, especially of rare elements, is a factor we should keep in mind regarding recources. Additionally, as I do not have access to the article, I have no idea how the ruthenium has to be treated to function as a catalyst. It is very rare that you can simply throw the metal in there as is. Commonly, you would need some organic framework or at least a high surface etc., wich would need further recources (be it chemicals or energy).

    Again, this is exactly my point: Yields, efficiency and availability of some limited-supply catalyst are irrelevant if energy becomes "free", because we can easily afford even low-yield methods for air-to-fuel technology.

    The ruthenium-catalyzed pathway is just one of many methods available, so no need to concentrate on it so much. Many different, though mostly less efficient, methods already exist.

     

    Also, out of curiosity: May I ask in which field you work? You appear to be neither stupid nor uneducated, so I assume that you also work as a scientist and given your opinion on "soft" sciences and even medicine, I assume that these are not your fields of study. I am just curious, which background you have.

    Short:

    Studied physics, became ill (autoimmune liver disease) which ended studies. I looked for a cure, and found one, out of sheer luck, by combining some findings from unrelated studies on animal experiments that modeled the liver disease.

    I experimented on myself with the treatment, and managed to get better, most importantly avoiding need for a liver transplant. I sold the treatment for quite a lot of money, and received additional income from its application from a licencing agreement allowing its application.

    I then studied chemistry, mainly to get into weapons research, as this was a long-time interest I held. I did my diploma on (then) exotic boron-based propellant chemistry. It turned out to not be as exciting or interesting as I had hoped, and I got quite frustrated, but pushed through. Due to the quite specialized kind of research work I ended up doing I was selected to work with this company:

    https://bayern-chemie.com/

    contributing a little bit to build that

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_(missile),

    concretely parts of it's novel hybrid boron-based engine design, which allowed for much higher ranges at higher speeds, but was very challenging due to the nature of boron-organic compounds combusting very differently from hydrocarbon-based fuels, causing all kinds of problems with corrosion, including clogging of fuel lines exposed to higher temperatures necessitating additives and actively cooled fuel valves, RF-reflectance of the exhaust particles (important for military application) etc.

    After 1,5 years, however, I decided to quit that job, because I wanted to return home to Saxony, where I was born and live now, and because working for a wage made no longer much sense, because the income from my liver-disease treatment license and capital income is greater than I could ever get from a regular job.

    I was always interested in investing theory and practice, from being an early teen, and invested in stocks, and while not becoming exactly rich, I managed to make it a bit profitable for me even while in school; now, this is all that I do anymore, basically only caring about my investments.

    While I just like learning and keep up doing it just because I like it, and a more general understanding of the world and its affairs also helps with investment, I desired to do something with my hands, too, and have got a wood working shop built in my house, and now learn and practice wood working, for example trying to build furniture and improving my house with wood-paneling to cover the walls and and build other things, too - currently I am fascinating with CNC wood working.

     

    A common example is the "vaccines cause autism" discussion. It was spread and is still in the head of many people, even though it was debunked years ago.

    But autism incidence increases indeed, and there must be some cause.

    And while I do not know much about vaccines, or even their association with autism, it is established fact that vaccination causes crippling diseases and even death;

    the net benefit from vaccination is just much larger than the tragic, rather rare, side effects vaccines have in a few people (like the ambulance car analogy I gave in an earlier post).

  9.  

    If scientists are speaking about something in their area of study and it doesn't appear to make sense, the odds are better that you have missed something, than the scientists not knowing "how things work" in their own field.

    It's not quite that simple.

    Chances that scientists report fabricated or misleading findings rise with the economic and political impact of their subject of study.

     

    Fraud and misleading studies are less likely in scientific fields of "hard science", in which any other scientists easily and quickly can attempt to confirm or disconfirm a finding just by trying to recreate an experiment.

    Conversely,

    cheating and fraud can be expected to happen in fields where the exact recreation of an experiment is impossible (e.g. medicine, when it is impossible to redo the exact same experimental setting with the same kind of patients) or

    too difficult/expensive.

     

    And there is no shortage of already exposed academic fraud and systematic problems in the scientific process:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish

    This leads to p-hacking (deliberately choosing experimental results so that they support a finding), or just slicing up a finding into multiple studies, so that the publication list of a scientist is longer and he looks more productive and important.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair

    This is probably known generally already, just as an reminder than most of "social science" is not science, but a political cult (exploited by socialists/Marxists)

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

    In many fields of science, especially social science (including psychology), but also medicine and climate science, attempts to recreate old experiments lead to zero-effect findings or even opposite results.

    This proves that many scientists in the past produced false or even fraudulent science.

     

    https://twitter.com/RetractionWatch

    This is an somewhat regularly updated thread of some findings that failed replication.

     

    https://twitter.com/realpeerreview

    This is an account that exposes outright fake science (gender studies etc.), which openly abuses the reputation of science as a means to reveal truth for political machinations.

    CwGtuRkWEAAWsVA.jpg

     

    feminist-glacier.SAGE_Publications.jpg

     

    Czl2KcbXAAAN1lw.jpg

    Science has the reputation from past successes that it produces magical results - and truth. This reputation is exploited presently to further economic and political ends of interested parties by abusing science and scientists to provide public justifications for political measures or to sell economic products - at least some scientists have become prostitutes than can be simply bought.

    Therefore, science as a human activity can not any longer be generally trusted.

     

    Additionally, much that carries with it the dignity of being "science" is outright comical garbage, because it was abused for political and ideological ends, example pictures above.

  10. the world will probably end up turning humans in to food

    This is true already and has been for a long time.

     

    Humans end up in the earth or being converted into ash; most of their bodily matter is released into soil and groundwater, as well as the air.

    If you cremate a human body (which should today be the most common means of getting rid of, quite literally, human waste) 90% or so of it is released into the air as CO2 and water.

    Both substances are taken up by plants to produce nutrients, which animals and humans eat.

    Estimating the degree of distribution of such ex-human bodily matter in the air, we are all currently breathing in or eating up quite a lot of matter that once were people.

     

    So, humans turn to food all the time, and we are all eating them regularly.

    And we breath them in, even if we are not living directly downwind of a crematorium.

     

     

    If anyone is interested:

    I can also prove that humans are manipulated by radio wave emitter antennas that control human behavior, practically globally.

    And tin foil hats won't offer protection! :mellow:

  11.  

    Why would you assume anyone should be responsible for or bear the consequences for immoral behaviour committed by someone else?

    Again, morality is based on the actions you take, not the actions of other people. If you murder and rape, then you deserve the punishment, not anyone else.

    Steal a car; if caught, the car is taken away from the thief. He cannot enjoy the fruits of his law breaking; removing the success from the thief is part of punishment.

    Rape and produce a child; the child is not killed, the evolutionary, reproductive success is not taken away from the rapist; removing the success from the rapist is not part of punishment.

    The rapist's success therefore persists, and he is more successful than a law-abiding man who never achieved reproduction and thus is evolutionary exterminated.

    The rapist's genetic traits live on in future generations, the moral man's genes died with him.

    This "moral" problem exists because we tend to perceive rapist and his child as separate beings; in reality, they are closely connected.

    Morality exterminated the moral man. Morality therefore was deadly, like a disease, therefore "bad".

    Immorality let the rapist reproduce successfully. Immorality enabled life, therefore immorality here was "good".

    The same applies to murder.

    If a murderer reproduced, but prevented his victim from doing so, the murderer is evolutionary successful, but prevented success of his victim.

    Even if the murder is executed, he still evolutionary "won" over his victim, because he ended the victim's genetic line while keeping alive his own.

    Is our moral system here inconsequential, because the moral trespasser succeeds because our moral feeling prevents us from killing his children, letting him keep the profit of his crime?

     

     

    Note that our line of moral reasoning is not universal - other cultures handle things differently.

    For example in China it was custom over millennia that one's family was held liable for the actions of one of its members; that meant that if a son could not pay debts, his family's property was seized, or even

    his family members sold as slaves; likewise, if a murderer could not get caught, one of his family was prosecuted/executed in his place.

    This produced an anti-individualistic, collectivist moral system and culture.

     

    Our own culture holds moral rules that seem inconsistent to me.

    Example: Adultery. Morally it is forbidden, but a great many people do it eagerly. Genetic screening shows that women secretly have 2-30% illegitimate children, having cheated their husband/partner.

    (Around 2% in the upper class, up to 30% in the lower class; the problem is so widespread that in many countries paternity DNA testing is regulated or even illegal to keep the "social peace").

    In public everybody tries to appear morally holy, in reality most people cheat or hope to successfully cheat somehow.

    But consider incentives:

    A man must have the desire for cheating, because cheating men are expected to have more offspring, making the trait of cheating common in men. Non-cheating men should get eliminated evolutionary.

    A woman needs a man for two things: Resources/protection and genes. Men with both top resources/status and top genes are rare, even more rare are such men who accept to limit their

    providing resources to one single woman. The ideal man for women therefore practically never exists.

    One may argue that the top priority for a woman should be to want the best for her child.

    For this, she needs two things: Maximum resources (social stability, protection, money, fatherly investment) and top genes. Both in one man is very rare.

    Therefore, for the best of her child, a woman MUST CHEAT: Then she can maximize "fatherly" investment and maximize genetic quality.

    So, there are two sets of morals, derived from two conflicting interests:

    The morals of the man (men can cheat sexually, women are forbidden to cheat); and

    the morals of the woman (women can and should cheat sexually, men may, too, sexually, but must dutifully transfer all their resources to their officially designated woman).

    So:

    As far as I can understand it, those who really act moral (and not only say so and pretend) must lose in the struggle for evolutionary success.

    Perhaps that is one of the reasons those confusing morals exist, to sabotage other people, the competition in achieving success?

    It would fit in with other evidence:

    Women seek to sabotage other women by pointing out their beauty flaws to men or publicly questioning their fidelity;

    men seek to sabotage other men by pointing out their physical power, resource, or status shortcomings to women.

     

    A view of morals as an attempt to sabotage the success of other people makes some sense to me:

    After all, most people pretend to be moral, and proclaim the importance of morals, but actually behave contrary to those morals if they feel they will not be detected.

    Also: If people really had morals, and the best of others in mind, they would, in countries with socialized healthcare, not allow themselves to become obese, alcoholics, smokers, or get STDs - because their behavior

    is imposing costs on all other people, who have to pay for the increased healthcare costs from such behavior. Instead, people mostly are doing what pleases them most personally, irrespective of the costs to others.

    Yet, the abusers of the healthcare system are usually the first to argue for the morality of a universal healthcare system. All they are really doing is maximizing their personal benefit by imposing costs on others, and then call

    that morality.

    I call that pursuing egoistic self interest under the pretext of morality.

     

    I think evidence also suggests that the chance for being found out breaking legal or moral laws is higher in low IQ people; prison populations have low average IQs.

    The motivations of people in prison and those having evaded detection committing a crime and therefore escaping imprisonment seem the same to me: Getting rich quickly from crime.

    If laws and morals punish offenders differently based on detection probability dependent on cognitive ability, morals and laws appear to be means to oppress cognitively less gifted people.

    Again this makes morals look like social weapons to sabotage the success of other humans.

     

     

    It depends on your definition of success. Morality, broadly defined, is a code of behaviour designed to increase the survival rate of social groups.

    Yes, groups with superior internal cohesion and loyalty against other groups should win in inter-group conflicts, like war.

    An external enemy unites individual group members, increasing warfare capacity. This seems true along kinship/family/village/city/nation/race/religious lines; I think even the whole of humanity could unite for some time, as long

    as an external enemy (space war, aliens) were to happen. But without external threats there is only one group, and then no "groupness" exists - only individuals.

    And individuals compete with each other just like groups with other groups. If the warfare is not between different groups, it is between individuals in groups. Also the objectives stay the same:

    Social status, resources, power, reproduction.

     

    Success, in its most basic form, is ensuring one's existence and furthering one's existence.

    All life must keep itself alive, and for that it needs resources and (advantageous) reproduction.

    This is the basis of life, all of an organism's behavior should facilitate this somehow or it is wasteful behavior, which should be or have been evolutionarily deselected.

     

    All social groups in the animal kingdom have at least rudimentary forms of morality, and everyone in the social group benefits from it. The fact that you live in a society that considers murder immoral results in you being massively less likely to be murdered, or to suffer the murder of those you love.

    So, animal's morality is an instinct. Both humans and animals have an inhibition to kill their babies. Human morality is at least partially, genetically hardwired instinct, too. We just feel it's wrong to kill our own babies, and call that instinct moral behavior.

    The instinct is there, as well as the morals, because those humans who did not kill their babies obviously out-reproduced humans who did or did not care.

    But instincts can be conflicted - in animals, and also in humans, it can be evolutionary advantageous to kill OTHERS' babies. Male lions, for example, kill all cubs from another male lion, if they take over his pride. This makes the female lions immediately fertile again and helps spread the successful male lion's genes compared to that of his genetic opponents.

    If lions had morals, they would perhaps have different ones, dependent on their interests: Dominant male lions would feel killing others' cubs as moral, while submissive males might feel it's immoral.

    Just like rich and poor, or ugly and beautiful people tend to hold different moral preferences, due to different interests.

     

     

     

    Random murdering seems unrealistic. Murder costs energy and is risky, so murdering someone should have greater benefits than costs.

    It seems optimal for the individual to not being murdered by others, while being able to murder others whenever personally beneficial. Official morals of that kind are impossible, because the hypocrisy is obvious.

    If morals are a function of self-interest, the general moral should be that murder is immoral, while everybody is hoping to find a way to murder without getting caught.

    This would also explain the general fascination with detective novels and crime shows in TV, or the fact that people have an public set of morals, and a 2nd, private set of morals they actually are following, but can't execute most of the time due to

    social surveillance from others.

     

    It seems there is a conflict and hypocrisy because deep down, people desire two sets of rules, one for themselves, and another for everybody else. What people really seek is unfair privilege (getting rich, having better or more resources than others, or more or better mates) over others, and making this inequality somehow appear as moral and therefore legitimate.

     

    One one hand, people want to appear honorable, to pressure others into being honorable, too, and therefore compete with less than their maximal capacity.

    You can find this in real war, which is in reality fought with the goal of being as unfair as possible - generals seek to maneuver troops so that locally the fighting front gives their own troops at least a 3:1 advantage in numbers over the enemy;

    or everybody seeks weaponry to kill others while being immune to their weaponry (desire to have guns vs. swords, or better, longer-ranged or machine guns, or stealth bombers etc.). If honor were really a goal like publicly advertised, than war would be more like sports: Fair 1:1 or team groups with rules and attempts to pit opponents of equal strength (weight classes) together.

     

     

     

    You have that benefit, even if you flout the rules and murder someone yourself.
    Well, not if the rules get found-out murderers executed.

    It doesn't take a genius to discover that the best possible option for any individual is to have a society where everyone ELSE has to follow the code, but you don't. You get all the benefits but none of the drawbacks.

    (I missed that part due to not noticing it by not scrolling down far enough in the sub-window. You argued the same, more concisely, as I have above.)

     

     

    That's why consequences are needed--either legal consequences, or social ones (shaming, guilt, etc). It's why empathy is so important. It's why justice needs to be "seen to be done"--because if enough people get the idea that they don't have to follow the rules, the rules collapse and suddenly no one has any benefits anymore.

    That's also why we have such a desire for "ultimate justice", so that even if you THINK you can get away with something, there is an invisible eye in the sky that will see it and punish you later. That has been a tremendously useful tool in many societies.

    Exactly. This is how moral systems are upheld, or attempted to. But the all-seeing eye of God I would not call a desire - many people, I think, would prefer their privacy very much instead - perhaps to feel free to do exactly what the surveillance intended to prevent.

     

    But I question if these rules were ever meant to be rally universally valid for everybody. We know from history and from recent and current events that a lot of people high up in the socio-economic hierarchy "sin" or violate the exact rules they try to propagate. Even the Popes had orgies. Everything that seems moral appears to be actually immoral inside.

    Is the moral system then not a failure? Most people or even everybody tries to evade or violate the morals rules secretly, or hopes so.

    The only real hopes of keeping it up seem to come from religious doctrines or socio-psychological pressure methods, which do not work well if people are too smart or too well educated and religion loses its grip on society.

     

    Perhaps people never really accepted morals.

     

    Or, few people did or tried to adhere to them, but not for the sake of morals, but out of the old motive of social competition: They tried to live moral, that is, self-sabotage, and STILL become more successful than others - like a boxer that binds one arm on his back and still wins his fights. Then, morals would signal superiority, because somebody who still succeeds despite being hindered by morals is clearly superior, allowing him to access superior allies and mates - and enjoy the extra humiliation of his inferiors ("He not only got rich and successful, he also got so absolutely honestly!!").

     

    If morals were indeed benefiting everybody, would it be possible to make everybody adhere to them? For if not, those that cheat would be preying on the compliers?

    Or, is the "soft" law of morals besides the "hard" law of the justice system "soft" on purpose, to allow for some wiggle room, some permissiveness? Like a law that is expected to be violated - as long as it is done secretly or rarely, to maximize social cohesion and benefit and individual freedom? Like prostitution, which may be officially forbidden and inexistant, but secretly tolerated as long as it stays publicly invisible and not too widespread, so that civilizational achievements and social stabilizers like marriage can stably exist because men have a tacit means to deal with their otherwise incompatible biological urges?

    So, morals are expected to be uphold publicly, but secretly, at least sometimes, to be violated? And that being so far the optimal system to achieve social and civilizational stability?

     

    Is immorality not a general problem, but only when it becomes too widespread, the rule rather than the exception?

     

    Could a society exist or even thrive in that all morals are required by (hard) law, and all violations totally and perfectly persecuted by torture (I see financial fines or imprisonment as a means to cause suffering and therefore as torture) or execution?

    Somehow, for example by total surveillance of everybody? But then, who watches the watchers? They each other?

    Would there be maximal freedom? Or is personal freedom maximized, when law (or morals) are not perfectly and inescapably policed? Have we until now avoided the first and had the latter system because technical infeasibility or by having doubts about building such a totalitarian, righteousness-maximizing oppressive system?

    If morals are so completely good and advantageous, why not make them into an inescapable, totalitarian system?

     

    (I am getting tired and a bit confused, I feel I understand less and less.)

  12. I also think that I would be prone for severe depression if I would perceive the world without values, selflessness, friendship, justice, morals, and all the other good stuff that makes life worth living.
    So, looks like we live in different worlds and that's fine. I'll prefer my side of thinking as it seems to me more... beautiful.

    Doesn't this mean that you perceive reality through a filter, so you see a prettified illusion instead of reality?

     

    I am not sure what the benefit would be in obtaining even more cynical and cruel perception of the same world.

    Not cynical. Precise, truthful. Attempting to recognize reality as it really is (which is difficult and probably impossible, because our senses and mental organs only evolved to get our genes better into the next generation;

    our brains are modeling computers, that construct a simplified internal model of the outside world - reality - and then use this model to make survival-enhancing predictions, that is, our brains are prediction machines;

    whenever something happened that we consciously or unconsciously did not correctly predict, we are surprised, or even shocked, and thereby motivated to attempt to update, correct our internal world model to enable better predictions. This seems true for things so diverse like one's own body movement, social interactions, or even stock market predictions, or looking for and trying to exploit business opportunities, or something so basic like trying to get sex. We try to make sense out of everything to better predict and therefore better obtain resources/survive/reproduce.

     

    The benefit I think I try to get out of this is to attempt to get a more realistic view of reality, "truth" if you want to call it that, just for the sake of it - perhaps my desire is just another evolved instinct to further survival and reproduction.

    I am certain I welcome unpleasurable truth over pleasurable illusion. I just hate to be cheated, even by my own mind, my own feelings, instincts, my own being. I want to know the truth, the "real" truth.

    I guess we get to choose our own interpretation of thw world we inhabit. But thanks again for the discussion, it is interesting to see different point of views.

    Yes, thank you, too.

    And I want to add that I am not sure I am right in anything, I might as well be mistaken, but I just want to attempt to understand reality; and much of it, explained by the "conventional" models and explanations makes just not really sense to me. There is too much conflicting information and hypocrisy, too much difference between what people say and preach and what they are actually doing.

  13. Hm... I am starting to pick up interesting value differences. Would never kill even one person for 1M money, because I would have to live with my conscience afterwards.

    I just remembered this argument:

     

    Do you want to exist?

    Do you think it is "right" that you exist?

     

    Do you condemn rape or murder?

    If yes, if one of your ancestors raped and murdered to make you exist today, do you feel like you should not exist or even kill yourself for your moral convictions?

     

    If you think no,

    then what if somebody today murders and rapes to produce offspring in competition for reproduction with other humans?

    Should the resultant child be killed? Because, it is an "immorally" produced child?

     

    I conclude from this that only success matters, and all morals is just illusion, deception, self-deception, a propaganda and political tool.

    Morals always seem to work against the self-interest of at least one involved party. Perhaps the more naive, more stupid, or more slave-mentality-prone party.

    It's moral to boldly die and kill in war, but suicide due to chronic pain or murder for self-interest is forbidden.

    It's moral this or that, but all morality seems only to get the moral actor to get the brown end of the stick.

     

    As we are on a game-related forum, let me post a game-related quote; you may substitute "honor" for "morals":

    71193b691c3ae442e70c2e773e92756c.jpg

  14. Hm... I am starting to pick up interesting value differences. Would never kill even one person for 1M money, because I would have to live with my conscience afterwards.

    I think you are living in a fairy-land of ignorance, and I think I can prove it to you:

    First, almost all people that murdered and killed in the past, be it in civil or military affairs though they were incapable to kill. They were proven wrong, their predictions of their own capacities and preferences turned out different than they thought.

    Most of the wrong prediction of their kill ability resulted from a sheltered life: If you have enough and are content, indeed there is not much need to kill or murder.

    If the environment and circumstances change, readiness to kill changes as well.

    Have you starved almost to death already? Can you be really sure you would not attempt to murder another person for food in this situation?

    Lower intensity example:

    Would you eat human flesh?

    Those people did not think they would if you asked them, but they did:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguayan_Air_Force_Flight_571#Cannibalism_revealed

    If you are in dangerous situations to your life that you are kind of evolutionary prepared for, your thinking and feeling changes.

     

    Another, more fundamental example, which should demonstrate to you that you would kill other humans:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plank_of_Carneades

     

    You may argue that these are extreme examples.

    But regular existence is also a battle for survival in socio-sexual and economic survival. It's a lower intensity immediately, spread out over time, but still human existence, the meaning of human life, at least in practical terms,

    is to kill other humans, because not everybody can successfully reproduce, and not everybody that does with the genetically most superior mates.

    Therefore, successful survival and reproduction means extermination of other humans.

    Love is a selection mechanism to kill off inferior life, for inferior life is not loved.

     

     

     

    I strive for truth and integrity and for what I perceive to be right. I think most people I know seem to be like that, and it seems to be a norm.

    Usually if I identify people with psychopathic tendencies, I withdraw from them, because they are selfish and dangerous if their agenda conflicts with mine. (I've encountered a few cases.)

    Why are so many people existing that rape, murder, steal, cheat?

    I think for the same reasons that other traits exist in humans, for example social anxiety:

    This were the exact traits that allowed our ancestors to survive and reproduce successfully. That is the reason we now have those psychological traits, just as the reason we have such nice hands or eyes is that simply all others

    who lacked them died out. It's that simple, it seems, evolutionary.

    If those people exist, their traits must have been highly successful in evolutionary natural and sexual selection.

    These traits, then, are exactly what human nature is, are exactly what allowed human life to survive. As such, I cannot think that those traits are "bad", or "dangerous" generally - dangerous and bad for the defeated human competition in

    the war for survival and reproduction, but those traits of selfishness etc. are what made human life possible in the first place - otherwise it would not exist.

     

    Consider altruism. Selflessness.

    It can't exist.

    Because, as metaphor, "the cow that gives her milk freely to everybody who asks for or needs it first kills her calf and then herself."

    Therefore, all apparent altruism must be deception, or even self-deception.

    And this is what evolutionary psychology found.

    People pretend socially to be highly altruistic and moral, to signal a high value as potential ally for reciprocation of investment (you help me, I help you).

    They even self-deceive to be altruistic, because this self-deception allows for even better deception of others.

    If you watch, however, what they are privately really doing, you find selfishness. Pure selfishness; but because we are a social species, humans profit from signalling, and even self-deceivingly believing about oneself, that they

    are altruistic.

    J.P. Morgan famously said:

    quote-a-man-always-has-two-reasons-for-d

     

     

     

    I do not crave for more money, because I think I have enough of it for basic needs and happiness.

    But scientists are usually well off, so they are not that easy to influence.

    Here in Germany we have a rather large "academic proletariat" - most academics in universities are paid only pocket money. Job offerings are badly paid and time-limited. From this results an intense competition among scientists for jobs,

    for otherwise they lack the money to start a family etc.

    This is exploited economically and politically, and therefore scientists are often extremely biased, just like journalists. It's report things your employer likes, or you will find yourself out on the street, living of social welfare money,

    suffering low social status; and anyway for every scientist and journalist with a real job there are hundreds just waiting to get his job. This gives great power to the employers and politicians (who decide on many levels who gets employed from tax monies for scientific public jobs).

    There is not even a need for open "conspiracy" - the journalists and scientists know all too well how to behave, or they find themselves unemployed, which basically means for them defeat evolutionary in natural and sexual selection, that is, basically evolutionary extinction. This causes a kind of secret, but highly intense pressure on journalists and scientists to "behave well" according to the interests of the higher-ups.

     

     

    In my current state, if my employer would require of me something conflicting with my values, I would not do it. Same applies for my colleagues, typically.

    I cannot easily believe this. Human nature and all my experiences tell me differently. "Values" do not let one keep one car, house, family, does not feed one's kids.

    Therefore, I think you seem to have lived a very happy, sheltered life, isolated from harsh reality.

     

    If it really was a struggle against my fellow students, why did we then help each other out?

    Maybe because you were in a situation in which you already all were already quite winners? Because it made sense to invest in others, because you then could expect reciprocation if you were to need assistance yourself?

    This is wise investment to make allies, and "tit for that" - if you had noticed that one of your fellow students were really much dumber than you, so he would highly unlikely prove beneficial for you in the future, would you have

    invested in him as much as in a potentially more useful, as more capable, future ally?

    And you certainly did not invest, "help out", those of significantly lower class compared to you, say, unemployed alcoholics or people with IQ lower than 90 etc. - for you instinctively, automatically, emotionally did the "social math" and

    decided that any investment in them would cause you greater costs than gain, so you avoided those people, and only sought the proximity and socialization with people more like yourself or even better ones.

    So, your "helping out" was just very skilled social investment in potential future allies that probably would prove useful to have, useful to have them a reciprocational debt to you.

     

    Same with friendship:

    People seek only friends that are on their social and cognitive level.

    There are no friendships between people of different social class or different cognitive class, because one side would be envious, the other be disgusted, bored or disgraced.

     

    That's how science works best: you have a bunch different field specialist who play together for a common goal, rather than struggling against each other.

    I doubt this. In reality, all the times, people in social settings "act" all the time, and compete for social status. The forms that this can take, however, are very diverse.

    I would expect that members of a research group try to compete with each other over being clever, resourceful, insightful. As with everything, there is a hierarchy, a struggle for social status.

    You sure would have hated to be seen as the most boring/dumb/unproductive in your group,

    or would have enjoyed to earn prestige, that is, social status in your group, for becoming knows as especially competent etc.

    And, of course, nobody of your group would acknowledge this. The eternal struggle for social status is a taboo to mention. But it's in effect, all the time.

     

    The society is not a struggle or war. It is a common well-being project.

    I do not think so. People compete, the losers get more diseased, get lower quality of life, get less preferable mates, or even no mates at all, or are even directly driven into death or suicide.

    Therefore, this is a war. It is just very well camouflaged, and it less unpleasant to the losers than ever, due to social welfare, electronic entertainment, alcohol etc.

     

    If society was a war, those who end up at the bottom would be just allowed to die off.

    I think differently, again.

    I think killing of the bottom would be wasteful, for they are necessary for the upper class to exploit and subdue the middle class.

    I wrote this elsewhere, here my socio-economic basic model:

    Because, for the upper class, Negroes/underclass function as what I termed “profit pumps”, or “profit guarantees”:

    The only class that really produces surplus is the middle class (MC) – skilled workers, above that doctors, engineers, small businessmen etc.

    I repeat, for this is important: The middle class is the only class producing meaningful amounts of surplus wealth.

    The upper class (UC) wants that money from them, naturally.

    Problem:

    Middle class is too smart to simply being tricked to give their work’s profits to the UC;

    and this cannot be changed, because the MC must be kept rather smart, because the nature

    of their work as a profit source needs to keep them smart.

    How did the UC solve this problem?

    MC has a weakness – they lack capital,they are not really, independently rich – they fear unemployment, illness and falling down the social ladder because from that.

    Therefore, they agree to pay high taxes – for a social welfare system, because of their deep-seated

    fear that they would need it one day themselves.

    Their tax money, therefore, goes to the lower classes (LC) – White Trash and Negroes, in the USA.

    But does their money END there? Not at all – LC people immediately spend it – specifically for stuff the MC would never spend it for (as they are too smart, saving, conscientious for that), like huge-margin/profit goods like branded sports shoes (Negroes actually kill each other for those and crave them – MC parents would scold their kids for buying things like shoes for 500$ that last few months before being worn/ugly and cost 3$ to make, the difference being profits for the UC owners of industry).

    So how can the UC route the money flow from the MC to themselves?

    By growing the immediate-gratification, money-squandering LC, ideally Negroes (as those have lowest IQs and act like easily impressionable – by advertising – kids even as adults and therefore can be perfectly controlled through media and advertising, which is not so easily possible with the MC).

    Thanks to the welfare system, the more LC people live in a society, the more money is forced from the MC to flow to the UC (by proxy of LC).

    This is also the reason the UC enforces “anti-racism” rules – as any questioning of importing more LC people the welfare tax-based system would immediately endanger UC’s vast profits from the work of the MC!

    This is also the reason for the UC pushing “racism” ,“equality” and “social justice” and all those “leftist” concepts – the higher MC is taxed for the welfare system, the more the LC consumes of the MC’s money, and the more profits are forced to flow to the UC!

    Therefore, I think it appropriate to think of the welfare system not longer merely as just that –

    it actually has been modified into a weapon to enslave the MC by the UC.

    And this is what happens in Europe – the native population is too MC, too conscientious, they tend to save too much and squander not enough of their income and savings for consumer trash, therefore limiting UC’s profits. This is especially relevant in connection with the rise of China, as more and more wealth of Western societies flows out towards there because more and more products and services are made and based in China – moving profits and wealth also there; to limit the threat to themselves, Europeans UC’s now mass-import a future LC, their own versions of US Negroes so to speak, to enforce and secure future profit flows from the productive MC to the UC.

    This would allow the European UC to keep their wealth, or even increase it, even in a future where average European wealth would decrease due to Chinese competition and an aging population.

    Demography is a weapon, tool, profit and status foundation for ruling.”

     

     

    But that is not human. It is human to try to help them.

    Human is what humans do.

    History is very bloody, as is the present. Full of war, genocide, rape, torture, murder, war-like competition for resources, status and reproduction.

    Certainly on different levels of conflict intensity dependent on geographical location, the industrial countries with the lowest intensity.

     

  15. This othering has been used for ages. It prepares people to use violence against Them, because they are the enemy, not even human. If They have a name, a personality, a consciousness, same as us, we are reluctant to hurt them. But if they are just them, it is not a problem.

    Othering is used a lot these days. It could be elites, immigrants, Finns, Swedes, Americans, Russians, blacks, whites, jews, nazis, Europian Union, gays, heteros, grandmothers, etc. Your group/echo chamber get to choose who it wants to be Them.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dehumanization

    Works indeed well. Makes killing, directly and indirectly, easier, when killing is necessary.

    Still, even if many do not like this reality, reality is such that the superior killers live and prosper, the inferior killers are extinguished or enslaved.

    Does this make any sense? Howsabout thinking that we, the whole humanity (nobody excluded), are quite similar in our basic needs, and are quite similar in our virtues and vices? And we all are in the same boat (On the same planet) with the climate change. Against that backdrop, othering does not appear to be useful, if one wants to do good moral decisions.

    No, the opposite.

    You see, the more similar organisms, that includes of course people and even social niches, are, the more they need exactly the same things (food, mates, living space), therefore get into conflict and even must kill each other to get these things from each other.

    Example:

    A bird and a lion can ignore each other, they live on different diets, in different places, and need different mates for reproduction.

    But two of the same birds get into war with each other:

    They require the same food resources, the same living spaces, the same mates.

     

    It is the same with humans.

    Your immediate enemies are not Bill Gates or the homeless person in the street. You can ignore both.

    Your immediate problem are people more like yourself: Other scientists, other middle class humans, other rather well-off men, for those compete, that is, are at war with you, for exactly the same things you need:

    The same class of job, the same class of house, the same class of mate.

     

     

  16. Thank you for the article! Unfortunately, I currently do not have access to ACS publications,

     

    but the abstract is sufficient to see that it is still an interesting process. I am well aware that photosynthesis is pretty much the same. BUT: this method "only" produces methanol, which in itself is not plastic

    Don't worry about the science, it is settled already, the only research is about conversion efficiency anymore.

    There are numerous pilot plants, and even companies:

    http://carbonengineering.com/

    It's just economically energy limited, not capability limited.

     

    , but will need a lot of further treatment, before it will be useable as anything else than fuel

    Yes, but all of this we can already do. It just takes energy. Once you have hydrocarbons, we can already convert them into each other. It just takes energy. The know-how is already available.

     

    and it still does not utilize nitrogen, which is much harder to split.

    It also just takes energy. If that is available without limit, we can get all the nitrogen from air for products we ever need.

    Nature is doing, it, too. Quite more efficiently than humans, in the form of bacteria that live on plant roots and make the nitrogen from air chemically accessible to the plants:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_nodule

    This process is where plants usually get their N from to synthesize proteins etc. It's highly efficient, and working under standard conditions (T, pressure) compared with Haber-Bosch. Catalysts/enzymes are chemical "magic"...

     

    Another point is that the main advantage of photosynthesis compared to any process achieved by humas is: it works at room temperature and only needs sunlight to work.

    Thus, while the process described in the article shows great potential, the energy requirement

    Exactly. Again: ENERGY is all that holds humanity back. If fusion works, it will allow terraforming, carry us into the solar system, allow us to colonize other planets.

    Once we unlock free energy from fusion, we UNLOCK EVERYTHING.

     

    and the need for a Ruthenium catalyst, which may be limiting this to small scale lab-sized experiments as Ruthenium is quite rare

    It's a CATALYST. It will not be used up, only abraded. It can be basically 100% recycled. It's therefore irrelevant if it is currently rare.

    Asteroids are literally huge balls full of rare metals of all kinds. With enough energy, we can robot-mine these for all rare elements we could ever need. But even now, we not even need to. We already have all elements.

    We just need free, cheap energy.

     

    A lot of your statements are based on the assumption that we will have limitless and free energy, but I am not convinced that we will see that in the foreseeable future.

    We cannot know, for it's the future. But IF we get the energy, then what we have seen until now in science and technology will be nothing compared with what we will do then.

    Even now, almost all human affairs are only limited by energy, transport, agriculture, travel, space exploration, human living standards development etc. etc.

     

    And to contradict the conspiracy theory a bit more: if there was such a major breakthrough (like cold and controlled fusion, that yield more energy that it uses), I don't believe that it could be kept secret.

    Believing or not is not important, the question is if it is possible. And I think it is. For example, a whole industry and millions of people working directly and indirectly on the B2 bomber or F117 could be managed to keep those secret

    for decades. So it is with other things, too. Exact nuclear weapons design is still secret. After 70 years.

    Documents from WW2 and even WW2 are still classified. Probably for good reason. That's now secret stuff kept secret for over 100 years.

     

    It is like a cure for cancer or AIDS: If you would find such a cure, would you keep it locked up?

    Depends on my interests, but if I had invested in a treatment for AIDS, for example, I would make sure a cure for AIDS will be kept locked up.

    Would you burn a truckload, or rather trainload of your own money?

     

    If not, why would you assume that other people would. I know all the arguments about Big Pharma making more profit from treating symptoms than they would make from treating the cause, but still: the people that work there are humans like you and me and most of them work in the field, beacuse they want to find a cure for various deseases.

    Perhaps. I understand people are different in what they deem best.

    But when those researchers find a definite cure, they are making themselves to a large degree jobless, unemployed and poor.

    Whole research institutes will be closed down, because there is no other cause that needs research institutes of that kind; the directors and lead researchers alone would lose millions in incomes over just a few years.

     

    In our age of being able to spread information with a mouse click, there would be people who would publish their findings, regardless of any repercussions they would face from their employer.

    Perhaps, but this is the old struggle between sword and shield:

    With current government internet control infrastructure, the dissemination of information can be also today filtered or altered automatically in real time on global scale.

    Don't expect you can simply upload and spread information the Western powers, for example, know about and don't want you to send others.

     

    And like him I rather try to work on understanding and bettering the world as best as I can as a scientist.

    And exactly this is not as trivially possible as it may seem, because the bettering of the world for some or even most in many aspects may result in a worsening of the world for others.

    It, again, comes down to conflicts of interests, which are ultimately a power struggle, which is ultimately a struggle in cognitive ability, which is ultimately a struggle in genetic quality.

    But even without conflicts:

    Most of the catastrophic results in history result from some people attempting to "bettering the world".

    The Nazis tried to kill the Jews to that end, from their perspective they were the good guys doing a good thing.

    And they were not stopped by "goodness" - they were stopped by superior application of violence, of power, of superior power to hurt, make suffer, kill and destroy.

     

  17. @Outlooker,

    But who is the elite who conspires against the people? You say :(rulers, scientists, top management, actively governing elements of the upper class etc.)"

    "Conspiring against the people" already assumes a lot which I think may cause confusion.

    "Tricking" may be a more fitting word, because to rule effectively at least some people need to be deceived at least some of the time.

    Imagine young children. They already have a world model in their heads. It's simpler and more wrong than that of adults.

    Therefore, children cannot understand how and why adults "rule" them.

    The same applies to mentally disabled people with low IQ, say, Down's syndrome sufferers.

    From their perspective it is unexplainable how others (normals and better) achieve the successes they see them enjoy, and how they can rule over those low-IQers.

    From their POV, it's a "conspiracy" of the non-Down's.

    The same applies generally to cognitive ability and superior world models ("knowledge", insight capacity):

    ​Imagine two brothers, one seeing normally, the other congenitally blind.

    They like to box each other for sport. The seeing brother, not surprisingly, wins every time. The blind brother now only can perceive the immediate outcome - he wonders why the seeing brother keeps winning, and envies him.

    What he does not know, is that the seeing brother has a vast advantage over him, that is much more significant than the immediate outcome of their boxing matches - for he can see the whole world, colors, things - a whole

    world of perception and experience and learning and insight is open to him, that is completely closed to the blind brother, and the blind brother is unable to fathom this at all.

    The same principle applies to significant differences in cognitive ability, for example in IQ100 people and Downies:

    The low-IQ people sure notice that they somehow end up as losers in social competitions for resources, status, power and high-quality mates; but they cannot quite understand why, just as the blind brother cannot really completely

    understand the magnitude of the comparative advantage his seeing brother enjoys.

    ​So, those cognitively more limited people do, and have done so, tend to come up with rationalizations, explanations why those others succeed: Curses, conspiracy, witchcraft, dark magic, voodoo, religious explanations - so called "magic thinking".

    History of Whites is full of it, esoteric believers still do it, and in more primitive races, for example among Negroes, it is still most widespread.

    Now, everybody with IQ100 can understand how chanceless those with IQ of 60 (widespread in Africa), 70, 80 are - even 90 is enough of a difference to produce great differences in insight capability and competitive outcomes.

    That's the left part of the IQ bell curve.

    The right part of it is even more dramatically making a difference in outcomes - people with IQs of 130+, or 150+, live cognitively "in another world" than those with IQ 100 - from the perspective of the IQ150s, those with IQ100 are just as

    retarded like the IQ 60ers are to the IQ 100s.

    Example:

    Millions of people try their hand at the stock market to get rich. Almost nobody of them ever gets rich, most lose money. Warren Buffett, with a suspected IQ of 160+, made a personal fortune of about 80 billion dollars just by investing intelligently.

    Social class, positions of power, and wealth, are all highly correlated with IQ.

    Sure, IQ is not everything, it only measures certain aspects of reasoning ability; but is indispensable, and just like health or strength, more is always better.

     

    So, there is a "conspiracy" of the few cognitively gifted people in the socio-sexual competition all people fight with everybody.

     

    I belong to the science class/caste and know a lot of people in my class, internationally. Not me nor my colleagues are aware of any conspiracy. We didn't receive any letter from fellow conspirators inviting us aboard their little global scheme.

    And yet you defeated your competitors/enemies in the social war for status, resources and mates: By being smarter than many others, you rose over them socially, in power, in wealth, in access to quality mates.

    You overcame your competitors in school, university etc. - which are battle grounds where those who a smarter defeat the less able, to be selected in positions of privilege.

     

    You may not have been aware of it now - but you murdered, killed off, exterminated other humans! This will greatly surprise you, as you never thought that true.

    Sure, you did not murder in the legal sense.

    But by defeating the inferior competing humans in school, university and in the general struggle for jobs/resources/status/mates you forced all the people who lost against you in those competitions in inferior positions:

    Wherever you are now, whatever you have now, if you were to vanish suddenly, another human, the guy just slightly less competent than you, would have your nice job, nice home, nice car, nice mate, nice children. By being successful

    you took all that away from him, and he now has to make do with an inferior home, inferior car, inferior mate, inferior children or no children at all.

    Life quality and social status are strong predictors for health and life span. Being socially defeated causes stress, and from that illness and death.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_defeat

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winner_and_loser_effects

    By having successfully reproduced, you took that chance from all other men (as every woman only has a limit in time and number in terms of the children she can produce), and at least one man will not have the children you had with your mate; therefore, you exterminated the potential children of that man,and therefore, suppressed the spread of his genes to advantage the spread of your own ones.

    The guy in the social pecking order just beneath you will have a lower-quality mate, and therefore lower-quality offspring, disadvantaging his children and advantaging your children even in the next generation and all the future.

    The negative effect of your success over your socio-sexual competitors goes all the way down the social ladder, until some way down, there are men who will never reproduce at all because you did, because you won over them - and in a certain sense,

    you not only killed those men by your success, you outright exterminated them, because their genetic line ends with them.

     

    Conspiracy is an imprecise word - but you surely have friends, family and generally allies of your own social, that is, cognitive class, and you help each other out - in the search for a good job, or you share tips on where to get a better job,

    or investment or tax tips etc. etc. - and you keep this assistance to your own social circles, your own "allies" - and you do not even care to extend this assistance to people of significantly lower class than yourself,

    because you do not expect they could ever reciprocate, so your investment in them as allies would be wasted/lost.

    From the perspective of those much lower in cognitive/social class this amounts indeed as you and your "pals" conspiring against them.

     

    And now, of course, the same effects apply for those above you in social and cognitive class, because you are not at the top, far from it.

    Those that are much more higher up in cognitive ability, power, wealth have their own social circles, their own issues - but they move billions of dollars and "rule the world", instead merely doing solid work as a scientist.

    On top of that there is also a very significant knowledge difference: From their socially and financially elevated positions they enjoy knowledge and perspectives on economy and society that you lack, for they have to deal with much

    grander issues and wide-ranging problems than you have. Your specialization in education and ability, most of your insights and knowledge, are limited to your field of science. Of almost everything else you know little or nothing.

    You cannot quite concretely comprehend how to rule a country, or how to make billions from investing. It's weird and confusing from your perspective, and you cannot quite understand it. Otherwise you would do the ruling and

    make those billions of dollars yourself, instead of bothering with your job, wouldn't you?

    And, just like you will keep your best tips and insights to your own social-cognitive class, your family and friends, those far above you socially and cognitively and financially will do just the same: You will not advise underclass members

    on how to become a successful scientist instead of, say, a cook, and how to profit most from it socially and financially, just as billionaires will not talk to you about tricks to make a few millions more easily by figuring out some investment

    insight - which you probably feel is unfair, and kind of a "conspiracy" against you.

     

     

    I see you really distrust elites, but please define the elite you distrust more accurately. I am a scientist, but I do not consider myself as elite. I do not know elites personally. The elites are always in the higher echelons of society. I wonder if even elites consider themselves as elites, but rather just ordinary people, working with their higher-than-usual salaries.

    As pointed out above, you may underestimate how superior those few significantly above you are, just like Down's syndrome sufferers cannot understand how it is to be "normal".

    It's organically impossible to perceive, to experience what one lacks the neural machinery or/and the knowledge of.

    At least the science caste seems to be, from my point of view -as an insider-, out from the conspiracy. This is comforting, because the science class is responsible for the analysis of the global warming phenomenon.

    Conspiracy is, as pointed out above, an too inexact word. There are many complex incentives, conscious and unconscious, to selfishly act for one's own benefit.

    Many scientists need money from somewhere, research grants etc. This is delivered from the government, which may be ideologically biased; or companies, which have an interest in certain research results as basis for political arguments to further their economic interests, for example pharmaceutical companies, or pesticide or food companies. Known or unknowingly biased from this, many scientists make sure the outcome of the research is according the interests of the people who pay them - for scientists whose work sabotages the interests of their employers and money suppliers are soon out of their jobs, and fall in social status, must fear to lose their homes, car, mates, or not have enough money for getting children etc.

    I have myself bent experimental outcomes to please the institute I was employed at, otherwise I would have lost my job, or would have get difficulties getting my degree.

    Just as journalists, most scientists are actually prostitutes, that must report so that their superiors/clients are pleased. This is not universally so, but common enough, especially in scientific fields of immediate political or commercial import.

    If the elites are conspiring with climate change, they are conspiring without the science castes support. I do not think the end result would be convincing.. ;)

    As I said above, most scientists can be openly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously bought, at least influenced.

    Scientists are human first. Humans have human needs and weaknesses.

    I do not want to open that can of worms:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming_controversy

    But obviously there is no scientific consensus; some scientists have one opinion on a matter, other scientist the opposite opinion. This may be so due to purely scientific reasons, or due to social, ideological or financial influences.

    And, unlike chemistry, medicine, or climate science, are not "hard" sciences where you can easily run experiments and get clear results. You cannot easily cheat or come to different results in hard science or math or engineering,

    because you get reliable results and can prove/demonstrate everything in experiments. This you cannot do with "soft" sciences, which are actually, because of this reason, no real sciences.

     

    Please reconsider this sentiment. If we distrust science in general, we can just close the shop, abandon all hope in understanding the world, and go back to any religious dogma of our choosing. Game over, man. Game over.

    No, it's not so dire. Science is just another field of socio-economic, political conflict, which is, like all other things, abused to get advantages in the socio-economic war.

    There is nothing of this abuse of science in math or chemistry or physics - because it's not feasible to trick hard sciences. But soft sciences are different; you can either have a synthesized molecule or not,

    or have a working solar cell or not; but there is much more guesswork and interpretation in answering the question if a certain drug is effective, or if a certain social or economic policy works well or not.

     

    Science is the only worthwhile tool for the humanity to know what is "probably" true and real.

    Yes. But science can not be applied to everything easily, for example "law", or "social science", psychology much of medicine etc. is not a true science, because you cannot easily use experimental falsification of hypotheses.

     

    Science is not perfect, but it is the best thing we have to understand stuff. The only thing we have.

    Yes. But again - science is done by humans, which are limited by human nature. Biases and interests are worked into science, in politically critical fields at least.

    To repeat the idea above: You will not find two chemists holding significant different opinions about, say, carbon and it's chemistry; but you find a lot of scientists in soft sciences, like medicine, nutrition, psychology, sociology etc.

    - and climate science - who hold very opposing views.

    Science as a method is great, but humans are incapable so far to apply scientific rigor equally in all fields of study.

     

    Thus, I would never allow a random internet discussion to influence my perceptions, unless there was some sound scientific evidence (from a reliable source and publication) to back the claims up.

    There are quite a lot of climate scientists doubting that global warming is a great, unusual or dangerous phenomenon.

    But scientists have employers, and therefore most scientists are not really free. Try doing science that proves that fossil fuels cause global warming and is dangerous to humanity in Saudi Arabia or Russia; you will quickly lose your job;

    or try to find scientific proof for things the sponsor of your job at a US university does not like, and you will lose your job as well.

    Science is not really free, at least not in certain politically critical fields - because real scientific results tend to be true, and are therefore very dangerous politically.

    Only scientifically proven evidence should be considered.

    No. If I have a company that makes drug X, and scientist find that X is worse than drug Y, I will know this is the truth, but I will fight this truth. I will try to come up finding scientists who get different results, pay them well, if they "find"

    evidence that X is better. Perhaps you are a bit naive, or at least a very honest person? Past evidence plentifully proves that the world, that humans, and human science, does not work so idealistically.

    If X being perceived publicly as best makes me a billionaire, and X being perceived publicly as inferior makes me poor again, because I own X, then I will do everything in my power, legal or not, to make sure that X gets the scientific results I want,

    even if the science is manipulated or even outright wrong.

     

    Conspiracy theories are a waste of time like any speculation without the means to prove it experimentally.

    Yes. Non-falsifiability is per definition unscientific. I call it the "dragon in the cellar problem": Someone says there is a dragon in the basement, so I go looking for it and see nothing. The person says the dragon is invisible. So I throw

    some flour in the air in the cellar, which should settle on the invisible dragon and expose his outlines. Then the person says the dragon is permeable to flour, etc. etc.

    Conspiracy theories, however, are used as a propaganda tool to kill certain facts and ideas in the public sphere. Example:

    Some guy has made, by chance, a photo of a secret military aircraft. The photo is leaked, on all websites. It cannot be censored anymore. Now the government must make it a conspiracy theory, by "information pollution" - the same picture is modified in many ways, and republished by gov. agencies in many forms, in many media, with many a conflicting story. For example that it is aliens, or visitors from inner earth, which is actually hollow, you know, and contains a whole civilization etc. etc. Much nonsense is produced, which now stands equally besides the original information, which now is only one little part of all the information, which makes it seem doubtful and irrelevant. Because the original report is now in public associated with aliens, flat or hollow earth theories, everybody laughs at the stupid "conspiracy theory", and the fact that there has been indeed a critical piece of secret information is removed from public consciousness.

     

     

    You could be wrong. You could be right. You cannot verify it.

    Exactly. With global warming, we cannot know. And therefore we should not be willing to accept huge tax increases - nothing else is the goal of the global warming political propaganda - just like that.

    I am also not willing to accept huge tax increases to defend against evil space invaders or the evil dwarves from inner Earth just like that, even if many would like to take my money to this end and provide many graphs and pictures and

    measurement results to make me accept it.

     

    Has anyone seen any phd thesis (with peer-reviewed published articles) on conspiracies or the psychology of it? That would be an interesting read.

    You seem too naive from my point of view. You could just as well expect a phd thesis on getting away with murder undetected.

    You seem to have a good grasp and respect for science, but seem not to understand that people will lie, cheat, kill to further their interests, and that science is not immune to this.

    For example, if I had the chancee to kill a million people without anybody noticing to get a billion dollars I would kill those people.

    Now imagine what I would do to divert the scientific process.

    You may say I am a "bad" person, but I think I am just a normal, real person, and that you perhaps have very weird moral limitations.

    History and current affairs prove that real people are more like me, not like perhaps some people wish people would be like because it would make everything easier, clearer.

     

     

  18. Could you give me an example which plastic is actually made from air? Air is 78% Nitrogen, which is extremely difficult to utilize (the most common industrial process: Haber-Bosch-Process uses 500 °C and 200bar pressure and consumes roughly 1.5% of global energy production). CO2(0.04% of air) is also very stable and as a consequence difficult to utilise (which is why it takes an extremely complex system like in photosynthesis to do so), in addition to being very rare in air. As far as I know, most plastics are still made from oil and or methane, so we're very far away from "making plastic out of thin air". I would be glad to be proven wrong here, but I doubt you can.

    Than you will be glad soon.

    See, plastics and hydrocarbon fuels are made from fossil oil and gas and coal because it is cheapest currently;

    you can't beat just digging up coal and burn it or putting a pipe in the ground and having oil and gas flowing out freely economically.

    You need to discern the energetic and the elemental (atomic) requirements.

    For decades we have the technology to synthesize hydrocarbons from air - because C and O and H are there as CO2, O2, and water vapor H20.

    There are a great many of ways to do this, you may google

    methanol from air

    fuel from air

    For one concrete paper and method out of many, have this example:

    https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.5b12354

     

    Note that photosynthesis - the energetic and elemental basis for our current fossil fuels and food production - is already an evolved process to make "fuel from air".

     

    But human technology can do it, too.

    We are not doing it for energetic reasons: The processes are currently way less than 100% efficient; therefore, it makes no economic sense to burn the energy equivalent of, say, 100 kg coal or gas, to process air into

    the energetic equivalent (as fuel) of 20 kg of hydrocarbons (80% energy waste).

    There is obviously no reason to make 100 liter of oil from air using up the energy from 400 liters of fossil oil; of course, the fossil oil is used for energy or production of chemicals from directly.

     

    This, however, changes when we have abundant sources of non-fossil energy, so we can afford to "waste" energy to implement a fuel/plastic-from-air-fuel/plastic-back-into-air cycle.

     

    There are at least two major developments that may provide that energy abundance:

    Renewable energies, if they would become both cheaper and widespread, provide "free" energy from solar radiation, and indirectly from solar radiation through capture of wind and wave energy.

    The main hindrance to currently base our energy supply on this is the fact that we lack cheap ways to store that energy - energy supply must be stable, and wind, solar and wave energy is not providing energy as continuously as fossil fuels or nuclear plants.

    But if the energy were cheap enough, we could afford fuel-from-air technology as storage system for the energy from renewables even if the energy conversion efficiency is much lower than 100%.

    So, the electrical grid would connect all over the world wind, wave and solar renewable energy systems, and feed their electrical energy into fuel-from-air plants which produce hydrocarbons from air as a form to store energy.

    If that energy later is needed, we can use this "battery" by burning the fuel for electricity generation as we already do now with fossil fuels.

    Thus, the material cycle would be closed, the matter making up the fuel or air (or plastics or other chemicals made from it) would just cycle into and out of thin air.

     

    But renewables are currently still to expensive to qualify as "free" energy.

    This could change with the advent of nuclear fusion.

    Note that fusion already and for over half a century is technologically established:

    Thermonuclear bombs work well and release quite a lot of energy from hydrogen fusion, but it is a bit much too rapidly, so it's not usable as an energy source to keep civilization going.

    And we have fusors.

    You may want to google:

    fusor

    fusor_plasma_Will.png

    It's a nuclear fusion reactor. It works, it's fusion. It's old technology, and even some more gifted kids build then in their homes. You can today buy them or at least get ready-made kits to build them and order them by mail.

    The issue is that the fusion in them takes more energy input than comes back out from the fusion process.

    That issue is tried to overcome with the larger nuclear fusion research plants.

    If it goes like scientists hope, we get fusion with a net energy surplus, and cheaply.

    This would end all current and foreseeable energy shortages, as hydrogen is practically limitlessly available; in water, and if you want to think bigger, the gas planets are made out of it, so that should last us a while;

    thinking still more utopian, do not forget that stars are fusion reactors, and big balls of hydrogen. Actually, of course, we "eat" and live off fusion reactors since forever, because the matter we are made out of, the fossil fuel we currently use, and the whole ecosystem and organic matter generation is based on the energy received from our local big fusion reactor, the sun, mostly through photosynthesis: fusion-energy capture as sugars/biopolymers(cellulose etc.).

    You may eat a sausage or cookie and think not much of it, but you are actually consuming energy from a big fusion reactor that fuels your life.

    If it works out as hoped, we get practically "limitless and zero-cost" abundant energy.

    And then we can waste that energy, what we cannot do as easily with (limited-supply) fossil fuels. And then we can afford to use the already available fuel-from-air technology.

     

     

    Currently, cheap/free abundant energy from fusion is a huge political challenge: It would disrupt the economy and the geopolitical power order in many ways,

    for example oil-producing countries and companies would stop having something to sell, whole countries like Russia, that live off almost on energy(oil/gas) exports would stop having noteworthy incomes and fall into economic and political disarray, which you would not want with a nuclear-weapons superpower. So, oil/gas producers have an incentive to sabotage fusion research.

    Less commonly known is that the USA also depends for it's economic and geopolitical power on keeping up the need for oil and gas, as it is US policy to enforce all oil and gas worldwide to be traded in Dollars, or deviators get bombed or regime change - thus the USA enforce a steady demand for Dollars in global circulation and trade, which allows the US to create more money/Dollars than equals their real economic growth while spreading the inflationary costs from this to everybody else (who have to use Dollars as a currency for trade and as global reserve currency, and therefore must bear the inflationary devaluation of the Dollar, but not the USA itself).

    De Gaulle called this

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege

    While I do not want to stray into explaining economics and geopolitical power based on it here, just let me give you a simplified idea how it works:

    The US prints up dollars, and forces everybody else to accept them as currency (by killing all people who sell oil/gas/minerals in other currency than Dollars). This creates

    1. a constant demand of Dollars, keeping it's value up

    2. a growing amount of Dollars in saving accounts (in the form of US government debt/bonds held by other countries).

    The advantage for the US is "free money" or "free stuff":

    Imagine the world sells the US "hamburgers" for 1$ per hamburger.

    In year one, the us may buy 1M$ in hamburgers, and pays them with printed-up (money/debt creation) 1M$.

    Now the US has 1M hamburgers, and the maker of the hamburger (say, Japan) have 1M$ in cash or us debt/bonds.

    Now the US creates more money, more dollars, than equals their real economic growth.

    Say, the US creates 2% more money per year (so called "inflation target"), causing the dollar fall in value just as much.

    You now can see that the US still has 1M hamburgers, the Japanese still 1M$(plus interest, but that is irrelevant as the real interest is lower than the inflation) - but because the Dollar has now less value, the Japanese could not any longer buy back all the 1M hamburgers they sold to the US with their 1M$ they got from the US as payment for them - in other words, the US got a lot of hamburgers for free from the Japanese!

    Now, the hamburger example is just for simple demonstration of the problem.

    Real sums are much larger, currently over 2000 billion$ imports p.a. for the US;

    if you assume an inflation of 2% of the dollar, every year the US gets around 50 billion dollar in imports "for free" - and their real debt falls in the same order.

    The net effect is a large advantage for the US - in just ten years they get 500 billion dollars for free in imports (if you take a aircraft battle group - carrier + fighter planes + submarines + destroyers to protect it at around 10 billion dollars in purchase cost, in ten years the rest of the world makes the US a "gift" of 50 aircraft carrier battle groups).

    So, the US has a vast interest at keeping the world dependent on oil+gas and the Dollar, at least for now or until another scheme is established that lets the US keep its "Exorbitant privilege":

    Therefore, there should exist powerful interests sabotaging both renewable as well as fusion energy research.

    But, as I pointed out above, "free and cheap" energy would not only be politically, but economically most disruptive: Ultimately, almost every resource is limited and has costs because of energy costs.

    If energy becomes free, everybody can afford a golden toilet. This, of course, would make a lot of people who are now rich (and powerful) suddenly poor, and therefore they, too, should resist such an energy development;

    world gold reserves became as valuable as iron bars are now, for example. Thus, the real powers in the world can be expected to shift their investments and holdings of value as well as the structures they rely on for political and military power and control, before they allow free abundant energy.

  19. I'm a conspiracy nut, but my conspiracy is on the other side of things...

    Perhaps you should stop being a conspiracy nut and instead become a reality nut - try to figure out how things really are. A part of reality are conspiracies, so you will not have to give those up altogether.

     

    To me, it's quite clear that the following will happen:

     

    1) Mass depopulation measures (instigate strife, start wars, etc)

    2) Remaining population moves into enclosed cities (aka space stations on Earth)

    If that is really what you think, shouldn't you then prepare yourself? I don't know, hoarding canned food, weapons, antibiotics, soap?

     

    Evidence of my theory:

     

    1) Exxon scientists letters leaked

    A leak can be real, or made deliberately towards a cause. Any document can be faked or genuine, but often it is impossible to know with certainty.

    2) Biosphere 2 experiment

    Just science. Such housings will not protect anyone from systemic breakdown you hint at, only delay his end and extend his suffering. Elites should know this.

    3) Swine Flu 2009

    Due to many Asians living practically with their animals under one roof and in one room, it is to be expected that new epidemics again and again develop from there.

    4) Bill Gates TED talks about depopulation

    If elites would want to just kill us off they would hardly announce it publicly.

    The rich have money, but money itself is worthless, it can only be used to trade things from other people and make other people do things for them. The rich need people, they must improve the lives of people,

    because it's other people who invent, produce, built and maintain what rich people want. Depopulation makes no sense.

    5) Bee population collapse

    Happened before, happens now, will happen again. This is a complex ecosystem, and species go through a bottleneck again and again, for example when most members of a species die due to an infection, and only the survivors

    make up the ancestors of the species of the future. For example, human ancestors could produce their own vitamin C once; but for some reason we are all descendants of the animal that lost that ability.

    6) Redbull "xtreme" culture. Youth doing risky things for Youtube glory and killing themselves

    7) Tide Pod eating trend

    Regular human stupidity. We are all very stupid, this is the human condition, just to a somewhat different degree.

    And showing off and signalling mate value, for example, makes humans behave even dumber.

    The world will probably not end because of this.

    8) School Shooter epidemic

    Runs since the early 90s or so, and here in Germany we even had somebody doing a school flamethrowing, killing 11:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cologne_school_massacre

    I have a personal hypothesis:

    Sexual selection is a deadly endeavor. Mating and love is actually about killing other people, because those not being loved, not finding love, are exterminated in sexual selection.

    Some kids may soon get the idea that they will never mate successfully.

    So, an evolutionary program may activate, for example inducing rape.

    But, mating is selecting people of the other sex which are genetically similar and then reproducing with them; this spreads one's own version of genes.

    If that cannot be attained, it could make sense to find carriers of sets of genes that are much more different than the genes in oneself - we usually instinctively dislike these people.

    So, if such a school shooter would selectively kill people he dislikes, that is people that carry on average more different genes than his own, he kind of would benefit versions of his own

    genes in other people who successfully mate in the future, by removing their socio-sexual competition, and therefore effectively helping spreading the school-shooter's genes.

    9) Terrorism Epidemic (stadium attacks, van attacks)

    More or less constantly at low level for centuries.

    10) Western Infertility Epidemic

    Seed oils and obesity demonstratively hurt fertility in mammals. When 75+% of Americans are overweight or obese, this comes as no surprise.

    11) FUD \ conspiracy theories about Vaccines ( less vaccinated folks == more death )

    Vaccines actually cause injury, disease and even death.

    But according to the same logic ambulance cars do: Those, too, cause injury and death (from traffic accidents) that would not exist if we had no ambulance cars.

    But while ambulances clearly kill and maim, their overall net effect is positive for health and life span.

    The same seems true for vaccines.

    12) Prevalence of Autism

    I don't know much about this, but it seems highly irrelevant for a depopulation crisis in the making.

    13) Evangelized waiting to late 30's or older to have kids (see 10)

    It seems economic reasons are the strongest cause for this.

    14) Evangelized Homosexuality in the mainstream media (CIS = Lame, LGBTQ = New Coolness)

    Actually a tiny real-world phenomenon, but greatly exaggerated in the media to sell ads because those things fascinate people, mostly by disgust.

    Media must somehow attract viewers/clicks, even when nothing much happens to be reported.

    Sex sells, weird sexual happenings sell better.

    15) Increased animosity between Genders ( Men's Rights \ MGTOW vs SJW Feminists)

    16) Increased animosity between Religions

    17) Increased animosity between Political extremes

    18) Increased Racial strife

    19) Increased Middle Eastern conflicts (Saudi proxy wars)

    Seems to me all just all the old conflicts and hysteria with fresh colors.

    20) Opioid epidemic

    So, many people take drugs and die from it. Nothing new, no existential threat for most.

     

     

    It's all pretty much in line with what you would expect to see in a coordinated effort to depopulate the world in preparation to live Bio-Domes.

    Should you prepare to live in an apocalyptic wasteland?

    Only if you think you won't be valuable enough to be allowed into the Bio-Dome \ Enclosed City.

     

    Real elites, I am certain, know how the world works, and that they need people for everything.

    They cannot know who will invent the cure for their specific future cancer or that of their family member,

    or the safety device saving them from plane or traffic accident.

    They do not know which human will invent the technology, scientific discovery or art piece they will love to have;

    therefore, real elites must logically seek to work towards that all other humans can develop their potential optimally;

    then, those elites can benefit most themselves.

    This approach is called

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_self-interest

    Special exceptions excluded, this seems to be the logical optimum for elite goals to develop the world.

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