is there any 'truth' to be found in feeling depressed about oneself in relation to the world? — Posty McPostface

There might be.

First, most people are properly functional. They feel OK, at least. Maybe they feel really great. Their mental skills are operating at par: memory, concentration, alertness, energy level, etc. They got to work, get along with their fellow workers almost all of the time. They commute, shop, clean, cook, go to the movies, play with their kids, visit the neighbors -- all sorts of perfectly normal activities. Life runs more or less smoothly for them. OF course, things happen every now and then that are very disruptive. But the difficulties are overcome.

Some people [the depressive group] are NOT properly functional. They don't feel great. They experience the world as much more abrasive and irritating than most people do. They quite often aim high and miss, which is bothersome to people who also tend to be perfectionists in small ways. The atmosphere they move in is thicker and resists them more. They are less patient than many people are.

The depressive group is more likely to see and feel the flaws in the world because their 'skin' is thinner and already more irritated than most people. Healthy happy people probably won't identify the overbearing nature of the hierarchy, because they are go-along, get-along personalities. The depressive will feel it much, much more acutely. Depressive people are more likely to see and feel lots of minor injustices that happier people gloss over.

If the world is an unsatisfactory place, the depressive will recognize that truth quicker than a happy person will. The depressive person is primed to feel the dead weight of futility, and if an activity is futile, they will zero in on that fact quicker than a happy person will.

The trouble with the truth-sensing ability of the depressive group is that the healthy, happy group doesn't sense the same thing, and thinks the depressive group are mis-perceiving the world. (Of course, sometimes the depressive group does mis-perceive the world, and so do the happy people.)

I thought that might be the case. I only know it by its title. You can judge a book by its cover if that's all you know about it. It's a great title, assuming that there were 7 particular habits of highly successful people.

This is my secound objective in asking the original qestion im sure you can see; "to look for patterns that seem to lead to success." — XanderTheGrey

There are people who have conducted research into the nature of success, what makes some people more successful than other people, and so on. People like Stephen R. Covey, Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, have delved into this. (DO NOT rush out and buy the book, please). Research has been done into how belief systems figure into successful behavior. Sure, there's a connection -- but it isn't an obvious straight forward connection.

People who have well organized belief systems seem to be happier, have better social relationships, and live longer than people who do not have well organized belief systems. But be careful: it may not be the content of the beliefs that make people happier. We don't really know, for sure.

If you are a young person (like, high school? In your twenties? You didn't say.) and anxious to get on with life, this all seems very urgent. I recommend a slow and steady approach. As you get older (not like in 50 years, more like 5 years) this will become clearer. It takes time.

IF you had been raised to believe in karma, or the compassionate Buddha, or Jesus -- or any other religious system or figure, THEN your belief might be a helpful organizing principle which would lead to "success" -- whatever you mean by that. Belief in karma, the kingdom of God, or any number of religious / magical (superstitious) beliefs isn't something that one can simply take on board as a strategy for success.

There are two reasons for this:

1. What leads to "success" is thinking organized around the goal of achieving "success" (whatever that is for you). The kind of thinking that leads to success establishes clear goals, sets priorities, lays out strategies, tests the results, revises, and moves on to an improved plan.

2. Belief in karma, the compassionate Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed (or any number of religious ideas) isn't like shopping for a new and better pair of running shoes, or a new suit, or some other object. Belief requires a conversion experience, and conversion experiences can't be forced, demanded, scheduled, or planned on.

Karma is part of a larger belief system -- it isn't like yoga or meditation that can be adopted by all sorts of people as a practice to stay limber or calm their minds. It's a piece of one of the world's major religions. It's not really a "removable component" -- at least I don't think it is.

Are you saying that realism free of superstitions is a superior formula component for personal success, and that adopting a superstitous belife would be a downgrade? Or are you saying that it has to do with me? That i may be a natural realist, and that a natural realist cannot hold sufficient stable faith in a superstition. — XanderTheGrey

I don't know enough about you. I have only what you have said here to go on. If you are "a natural realist", then realism is the way to go. Like I said, "adopting a superstition" or "a belief in karma" or a belief in something else, is not a workable strategy.

My opinion, for what it's worth (probably not a lot) is that adopting a superstition is a definite downgrade. It's a downgrade from first class to the baggage compartment of the airplane.

Good, and welcome to The Philosophy Forum.

Im a nihilist, if i could get away with anything, their is literally nothing i would not do. — XanderTheGrey

All to see if karma is a good thing to adopt into my beliefs and or superstitions. I will do whatever it takes to succeed in my own eyes, if adopting certin superstitions that i know are not true will even give me a psychological edge; then i will adopt them. — XanderTheGrey

Assimilation worked well for the Borg of Star Trek fame; I doubt if it would work for you. [You will be assimilated; resistance is futile. You will comply.] You seem a bit too ruthlessly realistic to benefit from adopted superstitions. Do you carry a rabbit's foot with you for good luck? Do you pray for success? Do you avoid inauspicious numbers? I bet not.

I love my sadism, i want to just embrace it, it feels like true freedom to be myself. I just know that it is not socially acceptable, that its a very merkey lake to swim in.
3 hours ago
XanderTheGrey
12
This is probably a topic for another thread. I think this question ive proposed about karma and success is an interesting one. — XanderTheGrey

It probably is a different thread topic. Why don't you start it? We haven't discussed the aesthetics, ethics, or erotics of S & M or B & D recently. If you do, bear in mind that your thread needs to pass the moderators smell test. Take the high road in your opening post. (Don't go into a lot of nitty gritty detail). You don't want to frighten the horses.

Now, there's sadism and then there's sadism. Are you referencing a sexual practice where the sadist whips the consenting and eager masochist (real whip, real pain, real blood) or beats him up as part of a sexual scene, or are you talking about torturing people for your satisfaction alone, whether they consented or not?

The karmic consequences would probably be unfavorable for your case if you just liked to beat people up for the literal hell of it.

There 's a couple of cultural pieces you might like to take in: A film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Italian: Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma), titled Pasolini's 120 Days of Sodom on English-language prints[2] and commonly referred to as simply Salò (Italian: [saˈlɔ]), is a 1975 Italian-French horror art film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. It is based on the book The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. I saw it in 1976 at the University Film Society in Minneapolis. Some conservative legislators threatened to defund the Film Society, punish the University of Minnesota, or burn the projectionist at the stake. The police threatened to seize the film as obscene. It could not have had better publicity for any price. The film quite effectively evoked disgust, actually, but nobody walked out. It had good production values. Quality trash.

Another item you might like is “Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward: Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade” by Justin Spring recounts the life of Sam Steward, an English professor at a Chicago University (can't remember, sorry). He was fired when the university found out that Steward was running a tattoo parlor. They would have fired him a lot sooner had they known the whole story.

Steward was a classic masochist who needed a good beating every now and then, plus some humiliating (fulfilling) sex. And beaten up he was, sometimes ending up in the hospital. He appreciated that there were sadists who would oblige him (they were a rare commodity). “He paid the price for being himself,” Mr. Spring said, “but at least he got to be himself.”

Steward was a high flyer, including in his circle Thornton Wilder, Paul Cadmus, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Christopher Isherwood, Alfred Kinsey, the photographer George Platt Lynes, and various Chicago toughs. Great book!

I like it when things makes sense. — ddarko

It will probably help you to abandon the plank in your platform that "I don't believe in anything fully". It will help you if you at least believe in yourself, fully.

Science is the best bet we have for making sense of the world. "Science" is a big field, and you don't have to be a master of any of it. It helps a great deal if you can make use of scientific findings. You don't have to be a climatologist to understand that the climate is warming up, for instance.

I am concerned about defining myself — ddarko

As well you should be. It is one of the primary tasks of people.

I don't know anything about "self-hypnosis". Visualization--the repeated imagined performance of a specific skill--is thought to improve actual performance. Mental rehearsal isn't a replacement for actual rehearsal and practice, of course -- it's a supplement.

Time has said something about this; it will say more. In fact, time will tell.

On the other hand, I don't understand why you'd think that a transition from non-life to life is "outside of possibility." — T Clark

I do not think it is outside of possibility. I believe it is not only possible, I think it happened. What I was trying to say clearly is that "I don't know how it could happen". Maybe somebody else knows how, but I don't.

TED — Rich

One can definitely watch too many TED Talks.

all post 1950 philosophers are extremely narrow specialists and world and humanity interpreting theories have, as far as I know, gone extinct. — PiggyBoi228

What you are observing is not limited to philosophy. There are many particular fields of study that have been worked over so thoroughly that there are no nice, broad general topics left. Shakespearean studies, for example, have become terribly tedious and detailed.

The great increase in the size of universities and the number of people engaged in advanced study has had an effect, too. What field in philosophy has not already been plowed up, harrowed, planted, and harvested several times over? Most post-1950 philosophers are going to be a product of 'the system' and won't be publishing broad, general ideas.

But all this is a problem for advanced scholars. Compare Philosophy to Shakespearean Studies. There is nothing left about Shakespeare where a scholar can write a broad, general dissertation. There's nothing left except minutiae. BUT... Most people have not read many (or any) of Shakespeare's plays, let alone seen them performed; for these billions of people, Shakespeare is totally new. Same with philosophy. Most people have not read much of the field of philosophy, and for them the field is new.

I don't read philosophy, for the most part. As a field of study, it just doesn't interest me. 30, 40, 50 years ago I read Sartre and Camus with much more interest than I can summon now.

If you feel so bold, take your views to the public square instead of your courageous position behind your keyboard. — Hanover

Of course, we're all here behind our courage-granting keyboards. But yes, PHILOSOPHY FORUM is akin to the Mall of America or Lenox Square in one respect: it's private property and they do not allow demonstrations or organized airings of opinion not consistent with the rules of the property owners.

By the way, what the hell is this thing at the Mall of Georgia? Some sort of weird chiropractic appliance?

How about the grammatical "infinite comparison": "This is better."

The qualifying infinite may be used in various ways.

Give me something to drink.
Give me a chair to sit.
It was a sight to see.
This is a thing to admire.
2) to qualify a verb like an adverb

I came to see you.
We are going to play the match.
It is going to rain.
3) to qualify an adjective like an adverb

The book is nice to read.
This picture is beautiful to look at.
4) to qualify a sentence

To tell the truth, you are a fool.
To be frank, I don’t like him.

I think schopenhauer1 has the better argument. The things we do today that aren't aimed at survival or procreation, are simply to alleviate the discomfort of doing nothing — CasKev

There are two sides to schopenhauer1's coin of stasis: the side he likes to polish is the "doomed to the horror of boredom and generally unsatisfactory experiences`"; the other side is "seeking engagement with the environment" (whatever that happens to be).

I would agree, however, that much of what we do has nothing to do with survival or procreation. For one thing, most of the time the options available involve neither. Indeed, I don't think our genes are worried about survival either. We are organized to seek positive experiences (sex, eating, warmth, the better BBC Masterpiece Theater production, etc.). Survival happens by accident--at least most of the time. Once in a rare while (we hope) survival is at stake -- you find yourself tiring as you try to overcome the riptide that seems intent on drowning you, some thug is pointing a gun at you -- but most of the time it is just a question of whether or not we are going to be very bored.

Suppose we as a society think that black people are inferior to white to the extent that we treat them as property. — unenlightened

Is it possible that enslavement came first, and the stereotype followed? It seems like one would be required to think of one's slaves as inferior, especially if one consigned them to only physical labor. What else would cover the cognitive dissonance of enslaving one's fellow man? Did the Romans have a more complicated view of their slaves because they served as tutors and teachers as well as ditch diggers?

I just finished reading John LeCarré's novel, The Constant Gardiner which is about GiantPharma and corruption. There a new drug that cures TB, crudely conducted field trials in 3rd world countries (like Kenya, where much of the story takes place), dead victims of the new drug, and the efforts of some people to bring the matter to light.

It's fiction, of course; there is no new drug to cure TB and the company is non-existent. But the way things work in the story have an immensely probably and believable feel. You might like the book.

Barnes and Noble has the digital copy for $1.99, very good deal. You can download the Nook App.

I haven't read the articles you linked, but I am still not inclined to grant plants sentience. Plant to plant and plant to predator interaction is most remarkable, and I'm always happy to hear about it. Certain vines in the Amazon interact with certain ants in a complicated mutually beneficial relationship. I don't find either one - vines or ants - very sentient, but they've still managed to develop this relationship.

Maybe your articles explain how plants create and maintain sentience, but I will be surprised.

You won't get an argument from me about the evils of concentrated wealth. But on the subject of scientific research -- the amount of money flowing into basic research is not huge (which is a problem because basic research lays the groundwork for the heavy duty solutions to pressing problems). Into pharmacological research? Sure, if there is the chance of a new drug that millions of people will take for years on end. A life saving drug that they will take for 3 weeks, not so much. There is an extremely pressing need for basic research in antibiotics. So far, huge number of people are not dying from multi-drug-resistant infections (everything from multi-drug-resistant streptococcal and staphylococcal infections, tuberculosis, malaria, gonorrhea, et al, but the numbers of people succumbing and dying is rising, and there are no new antibiotics in the pipeline.

We already know how memories are in the brain — BlueBanana

More or less. But not really very clearly. Yet.

How about plants? — BlueBanana

I wouldn't go anywhere close to vegetarian sentience, but some plants, at least, can signal that they are under attack and near-by plants (same species) can receive those chemical signals and initiate defense (increase of alkaloids in their leaves, maybe).

Plants also have simple tropisms (sunflowers following the arc of the sun for instance.

Most of their time was devoted to developing marketing pitches for fundraising purposes. — Rich

There is a reason why scientists (and everybody else who does research in a university) spends so much time on fundraising: Over the last few decades legislatures have off-loaded the cost of running universities onto tuition. Tuition can't support teaching AND research, so the researchers have to work as much on finding grants to replace expiring grants. Without replacement and continuing grants, their lab work and research is pretty much closed down.

Labs can't stick up their nose at commercial entities that give grants, and they are usually interested in products. So, sometimes the tail wags the dog. But that has been true for a long time, not just recently, and not just in research.

then Minimalism is essentially a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important—so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom. — Brian

Minimalism isn't a new idea: voluntary poverty, simple living, Walden Pond, ascetic religious practices... It is highly likely that the only people who will try it are the prosperous. The poor have had minimalism handed to them on a paper plate.

Don't get me wrong: Trying to provide meaning by surrounding one's self with just more cargo is a failing strategy. "Stuff" and "keeping busy" carries little meaning, and can becomes burdensome. A better strategy is to differentiate perceptively between the useful and the useless (which is idiosyncratic), keeping the latter and ridding one's self of the former.

I've made a lot of mistakes with the "stuff" part of the problem. I thought that acquiring certain things would result in a better life -- more satisfaction. Not always. Sometimes I was right, however. I really enjoyed certain pieces of clothing (nice shirt, attractive comfortable shoes, good looking sweater, etc.), most of the records I bought, the computers, the house, the bicycles, and books.

I replaced the ugly 20 year old plastic mini-venetian-type blinds with wide, real wood blinds. Kind of pricey; was it worth it? Yes, it was. I really like and enjoy them, damn it. Fuck minimalism.

By the way, I've tried minimalism too. There is something to say for it. Reducing one's consumption can yield more free time. One has to work less. But reduced consumption and part time work can become an unpleasant scramble too.

These mavens of minimalism both have too much hair.

Excellent quote job, there.

Megabytes of comments have been made here about political correctness; racial insults, sexual insults, and so on. Asshole--there's a book by that title, not very interesting, I didn't think--has been tossed around here quite a bit.

I've been called queer, fairy, faggot, homo, cocksucker, etc. Before I came out of the closet (50 years ago) these terms would have upset me. I would have taken them as hostile; a knife through a weak spot in my armor. In the same way, it has bothered me for a long time when people refer to my (thick) glasses as "thick as the bottom of coke bottles". Being called blind as a bat or handicapped would have cut to the quick.

From my perspective, the power of name-calling to hurt or anger me is proportionate to the confidence I have in myself. Not exactly self-esteem, but self-acceptance and confidence. These days I am not very sensitive. (I can still be gotten to on a couple of points, which I am not going to reveal here).

Is a white person being called a honky the same thing as a black person being called a nigger? Is being called a "Jew" an insult whether one is or is not? Why is "colored people" an insult and people of color isn't? Why is "illegal alien" an insult even if one is? Negroes call each other "nigger" all the time. Why is it OK in one mouth and not in another? Is "niggardly" an OK spoken term?

It seems to me that racial slurs, and name-calling in general, is only effective when the person being called a name has a negative view of themselves, or their race. Those with a higher self esteem are barely affected, if at all, by name-calling. — Harry Hindu

This sounds true, but some people who seem primed to go off at the first use of even prejudicial terms, let alone slurs quite often seem pretty proud of themselves and their group--race, sex, country of origin, belief system, bank account size, etc.

I'm so glad we have another thread from the Pessimists United School (PUS) of Oozing, Mississippi.

1. Trump is president in 2017.

In relation to this truth I can think of 3 lies:

2. Jane is the president in 2017
3. Sarah is the president in 2017
4. Vick is the president in 2017

So, assuming life is random, there's a 1/4 chance of truth and 3/4 chance of falsehood. — TheMadFool

This is just arbitrary nonsense.

In a nutshell, the number of ways one can be good are fewer than the number of ways one can be bad. To add, our moral compasses are incomplete and flawed. — TheMadFool

Evidence, please. Let's see the figures on possible ways to be good or bad.

People usually act in their own self interest (which they define as good), and only a few attempt to shoot themselves in the foot (which is bad). Therefore good occurs more often than bad. You don't like that? IT's no worse than your argument.

We don't know what you think is good and bad, which is an additional problem with your claim. Please list everything that is good, and bad in your opinion. What about the magnitude of acts? How many acts are largely consequential and how many are minutely consequential? Whose perspective are we using--the early bird feeding it's young or the worm?

There was an experiment back in the 60s where some clearly crazy people were divided up into 3 groups. One group received what was at the time standard group-therapy. A second group received behavioral therapy (sorry, don't remember the details--this was a long time ago). But the interesting part of the study was the third group who were turned over to some lay people for whatever therapy they thought they could provide for their patients.

None of the groups were worse off at the end of the experiment, but the group "treated" by the lay people felt better than the other two groups.

My guess is that the laypeople just talked to the patients, maybe went for walks with them on the hospital grounds, spent time with them. Maybe ate with them in the hospital cafeteria. They were 'nice' to the patients. If psychiatric hospital staff are not cruel to their patients, they are often not "nice" to them. They keep their clean crisp distance.

People who become psychotic by way of mania (bi-polar) or schizophrenia are likely to recover their sanity through medication and good psychiatric care (talk therapy)--and/or maybe by the passage of time.

I don't have any reason to doubt that the Finnish patients liked the interaction they had, and benefitted from it. But the kind of fast fix that an American insurance company would love, I'm not so sure.

natural selection does not select for 'the fittest', but for the 'fit enough'. That is, evolutionary pressure is always somewhat 'baggy' - within the constraints it imposes, it leaves a great deal of space for variation. — StreetlightX

Good points.

Are people confusing Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Charles Darwin (Origin of the Species, 1859)? I wonder if people are thinking, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" when the hear the phrase, "survival of the fittest".

"Survival of the fit enough" is carried out in very, very slow motion over long periods of time. It isn't carried out with the speed and violence of a no-man zone. "Nature is red in tooth and claw" was written by Tennyson in a verse memorial to a close poet-friend (In Memoriam, 1851). He was addressing the conflict between science and religion. Ideas about "evolution" had been percolating for a couple of decades, and he references the conflict in the poem.

"Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all"

is another famous phrase from the poem.

Nature is red in tooth and claw because some animals are meat eaters, and it tends to be what we think of as peace-loving benign vegetarians who are preyed upon.

There are a lot of small inventions we use all the time; they may not be live saving or life changing, exactly. Safety pins; staplers; photocopiers; vacuum cleaners; plastics; pressure cookers; automatic water heaters; Velcro; Zippers; rivets; etc. Some inventions are very over rated. Teflon pans, for instance. Not a great invention. A properly seasoned cast iron pan is better than Teflon. Conduction stove tops -- not great. The self-cleaning oven -- dubious. (Better, maybe, was the continuous cleaning oven coating that was popular in the 80s. I used one for 15 years; somehow the rough gray coating shed carbonized spatters (the bottom wasn't similarly coated, unfortunately.) The pneumatic milking machine was a life saver for farmers. Conveyor belts are quite important. Look how many difficult and unpleasant problems have been quickly eliminated by a 'plumber's devil'. Mechanical barn cleaners and manure spreaders are a good thing.

If not computers, then certainly the internet. — Agustino

The internet IS computers. The computer is a tremendous facilitator. Without content it has nothing to facilitate.

Back in the 1970s, people working in educational technology were groping towards something like the Internet. We pictured remotely accessible libraries, for instance. Or computer assisted instruction. Mainframe computers were available to us through VERY SLOW telephone connections. Computing students were also using teletype terminals and punch tape. Data flowed like an IV drip.

At the time I imagined a system which was a behemoth electro-mechanical monstrosity to do something of the miniaturized sort we now take as a birthright. (It was sort of modeled after the 1909 novella by E. M. Forester, The Machine Stops.) Forester was actually very prescient. The residents of his future society lived underground in 6-sided cells surrounded by mechanical servants. The Machine featured a world-wide communication system through which one could listen to music and lectures, or as he put it, "share ideas". The Machine was voice-operated. An automated subway system connected each cell. It's really a very good story.

The means were not yet available. The connecting infrastructure hadn't been built. I first signed on to AOL in 1990. I down-loaded some HyperCard stacks (a Macintosh application) and it took all night, just about. In the morning there they were -- text and some B&W illustrations. Not great, but a first step.

Ten years later content and speed was much better, but still not great, unless one spent some money on higher speed transmission. Animated full color banner ads slowed transmission of the desired content.

Transmission cables, faster desk and lap tops, and server farms made the Internet's library/audio-visual phantasmagoria into reality.

... bury our heads in the sand and consider it a done deal philosophically?

:)

OK, bitter. I get the desire to prohibit discussion on this. I'll for now obligingly bugger off. — javra

Very odd.

Even though I have long thought that life came about in some sort of sloppy environment -- hot smoky vent, warm mud hole, clay mush -- whatever -- there are some practical problems with this idea that I can't get around.

The simplest form of life would need several components which alone might happen by chance, but would have to link up in just the right way, also by chance, more or less all at once. A life form needs a template. Life on earth uses DNA and/or RNA. The life form needs machinery of some kind to build itself and carry out making a copy of the template, and cutting the copy off. In order to have all this machinery, it needs yet another piece of machinery -- it's exterior package.

I can sort of imagine chemistry getting more complicated, but for more complicated life-chemistry to form stuff that could snap together, stay together, and make something more or less alive, seems to be on the outside of possibility. It seems like the ur-life form would have to pop into existence, rather than crawl into existence.

On the other hand, I don't want to invoke an exterior agent -- God, for instance, or some sort of cosmic will.

Solutions?

the public will become numb to all of it — WISDOMfromPO-MO

I'm sick of hearing about race, gender, sexism, immigrants, fascists, feminists, the KKK, BLM, Donald Trump, Hillary's damn e-mails, etc. I'm just about ready to throw the baby, the bathwater, and the tub all out the window.

EDIT: part of my (and other people's) experience is that I get news from public radio and two newspapers -- the New York Times and the Guardian. These three present more information about issues connected to race, gender, immigration, etc. than more middle-of-the-road news sources do. If I switched NYT for the Wall Street Journal, I would see fewer stories about these topics.

I thought John Maynard Keynes did not care about the long term because, his words, "in the long run we are all dead". Makes sense to me. But in any case, is it true that JMK didn't care about the long run ahead? My guess is that some gay and or childless people care little about the long run than some others, just as it is certain that some heterosexual people with many children do not give a rat's ass about the future. If I was speaking at a large education conference and said "some parents have too many children because they don't care about the future" I would expect to get tarred and feathered (and maybe lynched) even though the statement is (to the best of my knowledge) true.

People, being people, have been saying embarrassing, tasteless, inappropriate, insulting, slanderous, provocative, inconveniently true, and wickedly amusing things for a long, long time. What is different now is that far more people than ever before can read/hear about what other people said quicker than ever before and can register their real or fake outrage far faster than ever before.

Because people can hear and respond to a stimulus instantly, they do -- and fake outrage seems to be the fastest response.

Even though everyone alive today has grown up with the reality of electronic media, and even though everyone in the public sphere knows what a microphone is, and further, knows that microphones are fairly sensitive, people will still sit in front of a mic and make highly regrettable comments to other people, which everyone can hear. You would think they would know better.

I for one do not want to live in a wood shack reading by candlelight and dying at 30. — fishfry

Is it the wood shack, reading by candlelight (you could read in the daytime, ya know), or dying at 30 that you find unsatisfactory? By the way, 30 was the average age of longevity in bad times. Child and maternal mortality kept the average so low. If you made it through childhood diseases and graduated to your own shack in good health and plenty of candles, you might well live to be 50.

For the system to work — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Capitalism also has a process called "creative destruction". Audio tape (reel to reel or cassette) augmented the vinyl record, and did nothing to the turntable. the compact disk, on the other hand, was introduced to destroy the installed base of 33 rpm records and turntables both. Why do that? Because the market in vinyl recordings and turntables was matured and was saturated. New recordings could be turned out, but huge sales figures and high profits would not be forthcoming.

In one fell swoop, the recording industry switched from one kind of gear to another, and opened up the whole market to new sales of old product, as well as new product. (Everybody except a few aficionados that stuck with vinyl.) Sales bounded forward, along with profitability.

Windows replaced DOS. The MP3 player replaced cassettes and CD players. New iPhones no longer have a convenient plug for headphones. Newer phones use pads instead of plugs to recharge the batteries. There are many instances of a new product line rendering the old product line dead.

Creative destruction accounts for a major chunk of both change and more junk. Then there is style obsolescence, which auto manufacturers have used for a long time. New cars are as styled as fashion runways, and people want to be 'in style'.

There will be some aspects of creative destruction which will be beneficial. Book technology was perfected a long time ago, and I love books. Maybe the digital reader is creative destruction of the printed book, but I find the digital readers much easier to read (bigger print size, more contrast). I wish it had come along 60 years ago.

This must be the first time that stone tools and circumcision has been used in the same sentence, and referencing the history of technology. If I were to get circumcized, I would definitely prefer stainless steel and anesthesia.

But you are right. Stone age tool making was a well-developed technology. I read the other day in the New York Times that Neanderthals had learned how to extract a pitch-glue from birch bark. They used it to fasten points to shafts.

man is part of nature

Man is not supernatural or outside of nature

Man is a natural being — szardosszemagad

Absolutely. But it is hard to remember that stuffed into a small chair at 30,000 feet, eating the 10 lousy peanut pieces wrapped in plastic generously provided by Delta.

humans are quite certain that technology will save them against 15 foot storm surges. — Rich

Like it did in Houston.

But man has toyed with hi-tech for only about 70 years. — szardosszemagad

Good point, but a little longer than 70 years. 1839 for photography (with developmental events preceding); 1840s for the telegraph, (with developmental events preceding); Franklin investigating electricity 1752; the Leyden jar, 1740s; Bell's telephone, 1876; transatlantic cable, 1850s; electrical generation plant, 1880s; Germ Theory 1876 (with developmental events preceding); viruses identified, 1890s; transatlantic radio transmission 1901; Darwin's big book, 1859...

So many bits and pieces had to fall into place before any of this could happen, and they started to fall into place with increasing frequency after [pick a date: 1600? 1700? 1800?]. As you say, over the last 70 years there has certainly been remarkable acceleration of understanding about matter and energy.

The crow comes to mind. — MikeL

The crow is, indeed, remarkable. Parrots too show remarkable capability. For that matter, so do squirrels when they want something. In order for animals in general to survive and evolve, they had to have some skills and adaptability. And, contrary wise, humans can be remarkably dull and blunt.