Bay 12 Games Forum

...one's busy essentially preaching a modified version of the rapture to those who will listen, while the other one is actually taking steps in the realm of technology towards end-goals.

We already have a perfectly good term for the latter type of person: scientist. Being a self-identified "transhumanist" is not mutually exclusive with being an actual researcher with a workable research program, but unfortunately the most influential "transhumanists" – such as Kurzweil, Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and the aforementioned David Pearce, to name but a few – are exclusively of the former type.

I will pray for your soul, friend. Lord Jesus have mercy on you on Judgement Day. Amen.

We now return to your regularly-scheduled excavator digging and ranting rednecks.
EDIT: Apparently 4chan picked up wind of this and has been trolling the live chat hard. I've been laughing my ass off.

These imbecils cannot keep a stream going for more than a few minutes at a time. The last one cut off just when I cracked open a cold one.

Pretty sure that was sarcasm.

Reminds me of Uzumaki.

If you look closely at the satellite images, you can see that the whole country is being rearranged into a giant spiral.

It's actually kinda poignant, seeing the realization slowly creeping in that none of the other militias are coming to save them. Already heard them grumbling about how "Idaho should have already been here".

So they've been chatting with a bunch of alt-right twitter trolls with animu avatars, and now they're earnestly waiting for the cavalry to arrive?

...'tis poignant indeed. :<

EDIT:
I BROUGHT MY TAXES FORM WITH ME THAT... WHATEVER TAXES THING

I thought we were talking about gender quotas?

I thought that this thread needed a good derail since there was nothing more to say about the original subject.

The truthfulness of statement s3 is questionable/dubious, and is where the false equivalency lies.

(Your reasoning is correct, but bear with me for a moment because I'm playing the Devil's advocate here. ;P )

It is indeed the case that "intelligence" can be conceived of as real property that exists regardless of what we think – but, is it possible to objectively measure such a property? To start with the easier end of things, measuring "non-human intelligence for humans" is, as you pointed out, often a trivial matter: we can instantly tell that crows are more "intelligent" than nematodes, and humans are more "intelligent" than crows (whatever that means) – these answers can be easily extrapolated by comparing the animals' behavioural and neuronal complexity with each other, simple as that. However, we start getting into trouble when we try to compare the behavioural patterns of species that closely resemble each other in terms of behavioral/neuronal complexity: Are horses smarter than donkeys? Are goats smarter than antelopes? Are flatworms smarter than nematodes? The official scientific answer at this point is "who the fuck knows?"

Things get even more desperately difficult when we try to measure differences in intelligence between members of a single species. The fact of the matter is that we currently have absolutely no way of objectively measuring "intelligence as such" in humans, since human intelligence tests like WAIS are obviously designed to quantify a very specific subset of possible human behavioural patterns – a very specific kind of "human intelligence for humans." If you want to know how accurate our intelligence tests are, well, the Flynn effect is quite illustrative of the present state of the art, as is the membership of Mensa (including such luminaries as Scott Adams, Jimmy Savile, Julie Peterson, and Katariina Souri).

Because we have no objective measure of being "intelligent," the colloquial measure of "smartness" is – in a capitalist society – quite simply the abilty to make money, period. If John makes a buck, then John has to be "smart" in some unspecified way (M ––> S). If John is "smart" in whatever way, then John sure as fuck does make a buck (S ––> M). Therefore, to be "smart" is to "make money" and vice versa (S <==> M), as I argued above.