People confuse change with progress, until it gets explicitly adverse. So, more cars in 1955 equaled progress. It wasn't progress, but it certainly was change. In many ways (I'm sure you know the drill) automobiles have been an ecological and actuarial BAD thing. Yes, they gave millions great mobility with privacy to boot, but it was mostly a change in mobility -- not something new. After decades of smog, few people in LA, Beijing, or New Delhi think that unbreathable air is a sign of progress.

Air travel = progress, too. Gee, you can travel from London to New York to LA in a matter of hours. Amazing! Progress? Mostly an increase in speed--just change. One could go from London to New York in a very nice boat and then New York to LA in a very nice train.

Did you catch my bit about "punctuated progress"? Most of the time, we are not experiencing progress. We're just experiencing the sloshing back and forth of change. Once in a while something is invented or discovered that revolutionizes our understanding of the world and gives us new powers.

These periods of punctuated progress are usually not long. The innovations I mentioned--photography (1840), telegraph (1850), electrical generation and application (1880), telephone (1880), and radio (1900), appeared within a short period of time. Punctuated progress is one-time-only, not repeatable. Electrical generation can only be invented once. The late 19th century was a period of intense innovation -- and then that period was over. What followed was "digestion" -- integrating inventions like radio into life, and finding the possible applications for it.

A tremendous amount of new business activity is generated by the inventions of this punctuated progress, but eventually the benefits of increased economic activity level off then decline (because you can't reinvent the wheel, so to speak. You invent the wheel once, it finds it's best applications, it becomes part of life, and then your done with the innovation of wheels. Same thing with electricity. It's a once off discovery.

So progress isn't continuous; it happens every now and then (just a few times in the last 1000 years) and then what is new becomes routine, and it's back to the sloshing back and forth of restless change.

You're basically asking mankind not to invent things or to find and exploit more resources. — VagabondSpectre

"WISDOMfromPO-MO" is doing that. He also seems to hold the idea that progress should eliminate human problems. Lots of people expect that. "Well, with all these inventions and progress life should be damned near perfect!"

But it never is. Being animals, as we are, we are always treading the trail from the cradle to the grave, and invention, innovation, and progress do not change that fundamental fact. Progress has made life more pleasant in-between the cradle and grave (much to most of the time for many, at least) but in the end we get sick, injured, or aged and we die. Our deaths can be just as unpleasant as death has ever been.

The trail between the cradle and the grave can not be made a friction free, problem free, paradise either. Life can be quite wretched for individuals DESPITE material progress, and it always has been. We human beings are able to overcome our potential for happiness, peace and harmony and visit misery, violence, and harsh abrasion on each other for years on end, and we are quite able to do this on a one-to-one basis too -- and we do!

That strikes me as extreme ethnocentrism. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Well, progress is ethnocentric, because some group is responsible for each piece. Humans in all environments innovated appropriately to their settings. Amerindians have a list of innovations which is quite impressive. For instance, the glue they extracted from birch bark ( a slow heating process) is very strong. You probably have eaten some of their innovations within the last 24 hours -- tomatoes, potatoes, and corn (maize) for instance. These food crops had to be developed from very primitive, unimpressive progenitors over a long period of time.

That Europe benefitted from the innovations of western Asia isn't the fault of Europeans. It was luck that western Asian innovations could be readily transferred to Europe (as well as south and east Asia). Innovations in agriculture, animal traction, metallurgy and so forth travelled east and west along a narrow geographical parallel.

The innovations of Western Asia couldn't go south and north because the climate kept changing ever few hundred miles, and what worked at one parallel didn't work at the next parallel closer to the poles. The Amerindians had the same problem. Innovations that worked in what is now Washington couldn't work in what is now Arizona. Innovations in Central America could only go so far north and south.

As a consequence of geography, Amerindians weren't able to accumulate and transfer technology as easily as Europeans and Asians (from the Island of Britain to Japan) could. They didn't have draft animals, true, and there were no candidates for draft domestication in the western hemisphere. Llamas aren't quite big enough and they aren't 'built' for traction. Buffalo do not tolerate the sorts of things that domestication would ask of them.

Could the Amerindians have used wheels? Sure they could have. It would have been much easier for humans to pull a load on wheels than drag it along behind them. But again, their north/south distribution (rather than east/west distribution) made accumulating innovation less likely. If they had brought cattle with them (a highly impractical idea), the cattle would have had a lot of difficulty adapting to everything from the tundra to the desert. That's why Africa didn't have the same animals as Europe and Asia -- Cattle don't do well in the tropics. Neither does wheat. Neither do wheels.

If you don't like that, blame the planet.

True enough, killer diseases did arise from domestication. Close proximity to domesticated animals enabled bacteria and viruses to adapt to humans, and so they did. Of course, there were diseases that didn't come from domestication which remain just as problematic today as ever. Amerindians had diseases which are troublesome which didn't come from domestication of cattle, horses, donkeys, chickens, camels, goats, sheep, and dogs.

What the graph shows is the frequency of appearance in the corpus of words extracted from all the books Google has scanned. It does not, by and large, reflect spoken language, or privately communicated language -- letters, journals, diaries, etc.

So, no - this graph (and google n-gram) do not show the number of individual people who used the words or in what context. One would have to go to the OED for some of that. What it shows is the corpus of authors who got books published. There isn't any way of capturing past language usage by all the people, except by sampling. There are, for instance, transcripts of court proceedings (including what witnesses said); later on, there were sound recordings of people speaking, and a few transcripts have been made of that. Then television, now youtube, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. But none of that is represented in Google N-gram.

btw, this kind of research was begun by linguists in the 1960s and on -- and maybe earlier. The University of Goteborg in Sweden published a book of the English language corpus, back in the 1980s. It's just a very long list of words a frequency figure after it, arranged in order - most frequent to least frequent. It could have been done earlier, of course, but one really needs a computer and a big database.

Skeptics might say that such progress as eliminating slavery or equal rights for women were correcting errors that should not have been made in the first place. In any case, any improvements are welcome, even if the specifics are arguable. Though it somehow feels all too precarious... like everything could be lost in a flash, or like the entire culture is in a game of high-stakes poker. — 0 thru 9

All true.

Some people think progress is punctuated, others think it is continual. The punctuated theory makes more sense to me than continual progress.

Change is what is continual. In a society where no new innovations have been introduced in 500 years, there is still change: people die and people are born; houses fall apart and houses are repaired or built. Some years the weather is better than other years. There is happiness and tragedy, but life goes on pretty much the same as it has for centuries. A lot of human history is like that.

Sometimes there are major discoveries. Metal extraction and metal working were very big innovations thousands of years ago. Writing, of course. Stirrups were a major innovation. Likewise the wheel in the form of carts and chariots; horseshoes; improved plows; improved yokes for horses. The capture of power in waterwheels and improved gearing (late Roman); improved sails on boats to capture wind power. Much more recently, (late 18th century) the capture of power from combustion by steam engines, and so on.

Some people think that the major 'punctuated changes' of our contemporary period were pretty much finished up by the early 20th century. The changes between steam and radio occurred in a very short period during which major innovations cropped up all over the place. During the past century (1917-2017) we have been digesting all these innovations. Transistors were not equivalent to the wheel, they were a miniaturized vacuum tubes which were invented for radio. Telephony, telegraphy, photography, and radio made possible motion pictures, then television. Computing began with the punch card well over a century ago. (It was an innovation of manufacturing and data processing.) The cards enabled fast, mass counting and sorting operations.

Don't get me wrong -- I love my very fast miniaturized powerful computer, in the same way I loved typing on the IBM Selectric typewriter introduced in the 1960s -- the little ball replacing the levers of the typewriter. But the Selectric typewriter was only an improvement on the manual and electric typewriters of the latter 19th century. And before computers there was the Comptometer, a multifunction machine which could mechanically carry out computations in a series. (These were replaced by electric calculators in the early 1970s.)

The punctuated progress theory holds that we are at the end of major technological invention. What we will see for a long time is continual change and only slight improvement. Electronic gadgets may end up being implanted in our heads at birth, but that will be possible only because of much earlier innovations. Atomic powered flying cars will still be cars, and the morons driving them will still be morons.

Very small point: pictures are hung; people are hanged. — tim wood

But why? When was this differentiation made? Here's a Google Ngram showing the difference of use between 1800 and the present. Why the decline in people hanging things--the wash, the blame, cloaks in cloakrooms...

You can never land in the same pile of shit twice.

Surely it's Groucho. And fruit flies would like a banana.

Outside of alcohol, I can't claim much experience with mood altering substances. The last time I had a couple of hits of cannabis ... 27 years ago, it was a bit too mind altering and I didn't like it. A bit too much and a bit too long. So that was the end of that. I had 1 and 1/2 bottles of beer last evening, and that was about as much as I can handle at this point. That second large cup of coffee in the morning isn't doing much for me either. The first cup is essential; the second is close to optional.

Our expectations of alcohol and drugs is somewhat constructed. Advertising prepares us to believe that drinking is very enjoyable, an essential ingredient for good times. Peer testimony performs the function of advertising for the whole range of street drugs. Word of Mouth works. We are led to believe that using drugs will give us intense measure and deep insight. Intense pleasure--sure--deep insight not too deep, not too often. As you said, its pseudo-profound.

Depending on which people one hangs around with, one might feel like a Mormon if one doesn't use any of the whizzy drugs available. (Mormons generally avoid alcohol, street drugs, coffee, tea, coca cola, etc.)

Consider how smoking and drinking have been portrayed in movies. The classic B&W movies of the 40s and 50s featured people smoking in a manner that was very seductive. The characters in Mad Men drank in a manner which the distilling industry must have loved--liquor in decanters on office credenzas, nice glasses, sometimes ice, sometimes straight up. The alcohol was consumed during work hours as if it were the most delicious thing on earth. It was the all-purpose-cure. If one was up, down, just bagged a new client, one's wife had just walked out, one had a bright idea -- about any thing was a cause to pour a drink.

Because it's not real. We're relying on artificially altering your experience, because we can't face it straight up. Surely Our Lady Sophia would say that we need to learn to value ordinary experience, to see what is valuable in it, without artificial stimuli.

Between my last post and this one, I went out and did a 5 km run (after coming home from work). Now, after three weeks of not drinking, I am doing that run about 80% better than I was able to before. I have been lamenting the fact that I'm getting too old to run - I'm in my sixties now- but suddenly, I can again! Plus I have a feeling of inner clarity and verve. So I'm thinking when my sponsorship drive is over, I'm going to stay dry for a while. — Wayfarer

Artificial stimuli? What would artificial stimuli be -- alien-operated brain probes?

Is an alcoholic fast or a worthy cause natural or artificial? And what about old men running down the street after a long day at the office? Natural or artificial--the running and the office both? Someone might ask, "What are you running from and what are you running toward?"

I'm all in favor of exercising and worthy causes, maybe even spending all day in an office. (Though, office work can be fairly perverse. You should probably consider whether it's natural and authentic to be doing whatever it is that goes on in your office.)

Everyone says this kind of thing, including me. Whisky makes me depressed for days, wine is fine, and so on. But they say (and they would know) that the kind of alcohol you drink doesn't make any difference, that the difference is how much you drink, which is what varies when drinking different kinds of alcohol. — jamalrob

Everyone says this kind of thing because their experience bears it out.

Alcohol is alcohol is alcohol, but there is other stuff in the bottle that varies enormously. Aging whisky for years in charred wood extracts various chemicals that you won't find in wine, gin, or beer. Fermenting grapes will contain a host of chemicals not found in whisky or beer, and so on.

Granted, how much alcohol one drinks (in whatever medium) will have effects quite apart from the medium.

But what occurs to me is that if you want to have a drink, don't try and rationalise it as some life-altering event, because I'm sure that will only have one outcome, and it won't be a good one. — Wayfarer

Most people self-regulate drinking and they don't go on to become alcoholics. Some people, however, don't/can't self-regulate well at all, and for these folks moderation in the use of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, heroin--whatever intense pleasure-producing chemicals they try--just doesn't happen. Escalation is a given. Smokers tend to maintain the same level of tobacco usage over many years. It all has to do with the way various chemicals are metabolized and the way neurotransmitters work in a given brain.

Contender for the first clause of the first line of your autobiography? — jamalrob

Could be.

Religion, sex, drinking, pleasure, guilt... A fine mix.

I've only gotten sick (really horrible hang overs) from wine. Some of it was good, some of it was rotgut. Didn't seem to make much difference. Never gotten sick from beer, gin, whiskey, rye...

Do we act in bad faith when we get drunk? Is it inauthentic to escape our anxiety and live for a time as if nothing else matters and that we will never die? If so, is there anything wrong with that? — jamalrob

It would be bad faith if you drank a quart of gin and believed that you wouldn't get drunk.

God recommends "strong drink".

Deuteronomy 14: 22-26: You shall tithe all the yield of your seed that comes from the field year by year. And before the LORD your God, in the place that he will choose, to make his name dwell there, you shall eat the tithe of your grain, of your wine, and of your oil, and the firstborn of your herd and flock, that you may learn to fear the LORD your God always. And if the way is too long for you, so that you are not able to carry the tithe, when the LORD your God blesses you, because the place is too far from you, ... then you shall turn it into money and bind up the money in your hand and ... spend the money for whatever you desire—oxen or sheep or wine or strong drink, whatever your appetite craves. And you shall eat there before the LORD your God and rejoice, you and your household.

So there you go: If you can't haul your tithe to Jerusalem, get some strong drink and celebrate the blessings you have received. The is not, by the way, a suggestion. It's an order.

There's nothing inauthentic about having a few drinks to quiet one's fears for a while. Carpe diem: Seize the day. Eat, drink, and be merry, or gather ye rosebuds while ye may (take your pick) -- for tomorrow we may die.

If Jean Paul Sartre doesn't like it, tell him to go fuck himself.

In fact, the anxiety-ridden people of Paris are marching through the streets this very minute chanting
"John Paul, baise toi-même! John Paul, baise toi-même!"

Sure, let's all work out the causes of our neurotic fears. Therapy is dandy but liquor is quicker.

Beer: Safe and effective when used as directed.

Cruisy gay bars are no place for sobriety. As a soft ball Methodist faggot I can't generate the requisite joie de vivre without chemical assistance--I prefer beer. After a couple of quick beers I begin to experience and display that certainje ne sais quoi which signals that yours truly is a good time that could definitely be had.

Ethyl alcohol dissolves the tight wrappings of repression. It loosens up the bondage of overly restrictive morals and manners. Ethanol sets the erotic spirits free. Drinking reliably disinhibits one's overly restrictive cautious policies. Of course, one doesn't want to disable one's reality-testing facilities totally. I mean, smart shoppers evaluate the prospective trick. Does he seem like a more or less normal guy -- not more psychopathic than the average Joe? If he's driving, does he appear to be sober enough? How far away does he live -- one doesn't want to get stuck in exurbia with a nutcase. And just how far-out is he? Wild? Kinky? Merely adventurous? Vanilla tastes? Overly phlegmatic? Too dull to bother with? And really, just how good looking is he? (The downside of inebriation is the over estimation of positive features and the under estimation of negative features.)

Enough beer can make downbeat Protestants upbeat and lively. That's what I am there for.

I avoided Oblivion at the bar. Unless one has someone in attendance to watch over one, guys who fall into oblivion in bars tend to loose things -- stuff like wallets and the content thereof. Plus, if it's winter and one is Oblivious, the possibly frigid windy walk home is ice, snow, cold, and misery. I guess if you lived in Tucson, Arizona or L.A. that wouldn't be a problem.

Of course it depends on how you define and measure "progress". If "progress" is material developments that make a major difference in daily life, then I think much of what is considered "progress" today is at least a century old. Some of it two centuries old. Steam power and railroads; photography; telegraphy; civil engineering and sanitation -- water and sewer systems; the germ theory; electrical generation, lighting, and motors; telephone; radio; sound recording, internal combustion engines; and steel frame buildings made a great deal of difference, and continue to influence daily life.

Since 1917, the most important material progress event has been the discovery of sulfa drugs and penicillin (and similar antibiotics).

Though ubiquitous, Computers, television, rockets, satellites, cell phones, jets, CT and MRI machines, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, atomic weapons, plastics, and so on make less difference in the experience of daily life than earlier inventions. YouTube, FaceBook and Twitter capture attention in ways that telegraphs didn't, but that doesn't make them significant samples of progress. (Abraham Lincoln liked to hang around the Army's telegraph office near the White House to read the latest dispatches from the field as soon as they arrived.)

If "progress" is defined as cultural innovation, then there is far less to report on. For cultural innovation we have to look over millennia. The major innovation that Stephen Pinker talks about (centralized governmental authority) was implemented maybe 5,000 years ago. Writing is about 5,000 years old. Language is... don't know -- scores of centuries old. Philosophy is what... 3,000 years old. The major religions are at least 2,000 years old (with the exception of johnny-come-late-islam). Agriculture is around 8,000 years old. What have we done lately (in units of centuries or millennia)? Well, there's the printing press -- fairly big deal -- 500+ years ago. Gunpowder--progress or not? Science and technology developed over the last 700 years--things like better plows and better yokes for horses made a big difference.

So in the times that everyone here has been alive, really very little "progress" has occurred.

In the Tavern from Carmina Burana (a 13th century text set to music by Carl Orff in the 20th century)

It seems intuitively obvious that depression is a lack of belief in some expectations about the future, whether these expectations are real or illusory. This is called a loss of hope, which seems intrinsically tied to the placebo effect and expectation fulfillment. With this predicament of losing hope, an individual gives up the beneficial effects of the placebo effect. — Question

It seems intuitively obvious, but perhaps that is not the case.

The problem (as I see it) is that untangling mood (which is biological) and belief (which is intellectual) may be practically impossible. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Is it mood altering belief or is it belief altering mood, or both?

Another problem in this conundrum of whether one is actually depressed (which is a mood disorder) or whether one is afflicted with other kinds of problems (which can rattle one's mind to the point of dysfunction). If it's being afflicted by too many problems, then belief and altered responses to problem solving will probably work really well.

Then there are placebos. Yes, the placebo effect is real; it occurs sometimes but it isn't effective all the time in all cases and one can get carried away with miraculous placebo effects.

One of the core problems here is that depressed, rattled, messed up minds are the only minds available to examine their internal dialogues (this is personal testimony). People who have bright, up-beat, positive minds are just as limited. We can't escape our own heads.

My own experience points towards depression being a mood disorder which is NOT caused by ideas, beliefs, or a lack thereof. It's more that mood tips the balance of ideas and beliefs toward the upbeat or the downbeat. Mood is biological (it's a property of the limbic system) and it is a difficult target to hit with blunt antidepressants. Therapy can help the individual by stimulating their cognitive resources, but there are limits here too.

Depressed people either do, or do not, get better, and whatever happens, it's difficult to state what the cause was. Was it a successful or unsuccessful placebo effect, did the medication work or not, did the limbic system change on its own, and did the intellectual forces of the mind overcome the biological system of mood? It is never possible to say with certainty (at least with the analytical tools we have now).

Is the song "White Boys / White Boys" from the 1960s musical HAIR racist? Or progress?

Racism is thankfully a thing of the past. Pockets of racial supremacists exist but it's been stamped out in the political domain, if not in practice at least in spirit. — TheMadFool

No, it just isn't true that racism is a thing of the past. It hasn't been purged from the body politic or individual behaviors. Race consciousness is too deep (at this point anyway) for racism to disappear. Maybe "race consciousness" doesn't even need to disappear. "Consciousness of race" isn't the problem. It's systematic discrimination that is the problem.

What keeps blacks in physical and cultural ghettoes are the legacies of policies going back before 1865. Some of the policies which have resulted in ongoing impoverishment of blacks were instituted in the 1930s and later. Two prime examples:

Federally insured home loans were begun in the 1930s. This program was explicitly for white borrowers and was explicitly not for black borrowers. Even though the court ruled the explicit policy unconstitutional, the policy continued as if the court had said nothing. By this policy, blacks were barred from the one means that working and "middle class" people had of accumulating wealth: home ownership in good neighborhoods.

After WWII, the Veterans Administration adopted the federal policy and would not issue federally-insured mortgages to black veterans.

Another federal program that robbed blacks of wealth was the federal highway program. When freeways were planned in the 1950s and 1960s, they frequently were routed through the most stable and viable black communities. Generally these communities were wrecked in the process.

The so-called War on Drugs also had a very negative effect on the black population. A large percent of black men ended up with felony convictions and served time in prison. A felony criminal record practically guarantees that a man will have great difficulty finding work--regardless of skills or education.

Do some blacks identify with white folks? Do some blacks wish they were white? Do some whites identify with blacks? Do some whites wish they were black? Sure, some do. If I were on the bottom of the social heap, I would wish I were like the people on top. Cross cultural identity is not all that unusual. People have various reasons for doing so. Some of the reasons are ideological; some are guilt based; some are opportunistic; some are sexual; all sorts of reasons.

Maybe your lucky shirt backed the other team. See, it does work! If it can affect game outcomes, it can also have a mind of its own.

Like... life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? Freedom of religion? Freedom of speech? Freedom of assembly?

You could do a better job of stating what it is you are thinking of.

he or she consents to it — JohnTravolski

What kind of consent?

Assumed consent? Explicit consent? Informed consent? Forced consent? Consent on behalf only one's self, or consent which affects the freedom of other people?

We should always be suspicious of anyone wanting to override rights, and we should be very careful in understanding what consent does and does not mean.

Succinct summary. I hope it keeps working.

I just wanted to link my materialism to the spiritual in the most reasonable way I could think of. — TheMadFool

That's a reasonable desire, me thinks. I won't suggest any books about it, but I've wanted to do the same thing, in a way. Let's avoid spooky stuff.

The thing is, the purely material world of early earth was lifeless. In time life came about -- how is a whole nuther discussion. But it did. And it appears to have come about out of the purely material. Early life was not, presumably "spiritual". One doesn't usually think of the spirituality of blue-green algae. Eventually (billions of years) life evolved into animals that had an interest in the "spiritual". This spiritual being is the offspring of the purely material--though the distance between parentage and offspring is very long.

You can suppose that life has striven to reach for the spiritual from the very beginning--the teleological approach. It's a nice spiritual approach. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, SJ is the man you want to go to for this approach. He was a Jesuit priest, French idealist philosopher trained as a paleontologist and geologist and took part in the discovery of Peking Man (not to be confused with the discovery of Peking Duck).

"Nothing is mere" Feynman said.

Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere." I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more ? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why ? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it ? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?”
― Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics

The thing is, second-by-second events happen that push future events in any one of many different outcomes. Tracking all of these potentially significant events in the life of the whole world is not possible. Whether it's Hitler, Jesus, you, me, a thunderstorm, an airliner crashing, the collapse of a building, a crop failure, catching a nice batch of fish or catching nothing--whatever you choose as a topic, tracing it's ultimate cause in the cosmos is impossible.

People from the "everything is determined by physics since the Big Bang" lobby have the same problem. Successfully tracing all the chains of causation requires an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent god whose will moved all the events of the cosmos since it's very beginning.

We can track gross causes: Cheaper, inferior material caused an apartment fire to get out of control and kill many people in London. Sloppy sanitation in a food plant can be identified as the cause of a large food poisoning event. Compulsive gambling can be identified as the cause of a personal bankruptcy. These are discreet, short-run, events.

But even here, there are limitations. On Sunday I left my bike on a bus. I didn't think about the bike as I got off and went about my errands in the shopping center until two hours later when I headed back to the bus stop. Suddenly I remembered--way way way too late. I can not account for this lapse of attention. Some chain of events left me in a distracted fuzzy-minded state--but what? Don't know, can't tell, too many possible factors. (I picked up the bike yesterday at bus system's Lost and Found office.)

I am sometimes wondering whether stock price indexes such as Dow Jones Industrial Average, NASDAQ Composite, etc, are existing objects or not. If they are existing things, are they concrete or abstract??? — A Son of Rosenthal

This is an Excellent Question. Let's not go into too much depth with it, lest we stumble upon some highly inconvenient truth. The price of a stock is supposed to have something to do with concrete reality, right? But we know that the up and down movement of stock prices is often driven by fairly whimsical, non-production events. (Like, "After Angela Merkel slapped Donald Trump's face and said he was "Zu dumm fur Worte" the DJIA dropped 259 points.")

It seems like some stock take on lives of their own as speculative instruments. Real money changes hands, the stated value goes up and down, but to what is that activity tied? It's hard to tell. At least the stock of some companies is tied to real activity. Electrolux actually produces things (lots of appliances). BNSF is a real railroad that hauls around real stuff like waste paper for recycling, coal, new cars from Japan, and tea from China.

Money itself (fiat currency) is pretty much an abstraction; it's based on faith. Insubstantial. We hope to God that the faith in our money lasts. If not, we will be maximally screwed, and the screwing won't be at all abstract.

Isn't it reckless and irresponsible to act without understanding the best that you can? — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Of course it is. But there are several reasons why understanding isn't wider and deeper.

1. It isn't "necessary" to have "understanding". If you want a decent job it's necessary to have skills, like knowing how to do lab work or write a business plan; it's necessary to have knowledge about information and how to get it when you need it (for some specific job-related purpose).

2. There are certain habits which make understanding more or less likely. Reading widely contributes to understanding. Playing video games does not lead to understanding (of much beyond playing video games). Spending lots of time following Facebook traffic, watching hours of YouTube, twittering away about trivia, doesn't lead to understanding. Engaging in more substantive YouTube titles could help deepen understanding.

3. The primary task of most of the people in industrialized countries (not just western ones) is to consume. Advertising and social media will teach you everything you need to know about being an avid consumer. Consumption does not generally lead to understanding.

4. Work generally does not lead to understanding. It squeezes the life out of people and leaves us with little appetite for intellectual activity.

5. Knowledge production is difficult. Discovering or producing new information is hard work and problematic. For instance, tons of experiments that researchers do in the lab do not yield consistent results. Still the experiments have to be done, tweaking this factor and that. It's tough. It's just as difficult to produce new knowledge in the humanities.

It's like the thought of a person trying to listen, better understand, better appreciate, and gain more wisdom about things is foreign to the overwhelming majority of people. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

Yes, it is. But let's not dump on all 7.2 billion.

A lot of people have their hands full taking care of their families--and not just 3rd world peasants. A lot of people don't have the intellectual or material resources to pursue knowledge. If you didn't go to school, no matter how bright you are, you are missing an important intellectual resource. If you can't afford books, films, plays, various tools of amateur science, etc. you won't get too far.

The people who should be dumped on are the ones have have no excuse -- maybe 2 billion people. They have the intellectual and material resources to pursue knowledge and understanding, but they don't.

So, somewhere between 2 (you and me) and 2 billion people --- what number would you propose --- is the number of people who actually are getting knowledge, wisdom, understanding, the big picture, the whole kielbasa?

Humans by nature do not plan for long term. — noAxioms

And that is the crux of the matter. We just don't know how to deal with very long-term problems that are inconvenient in the short run, no matter how destructive they will be in the long run.

Despite that, we have a chance: If we can't embark on 200 year solutions, we certainly can manage 10 year projects. (I first said "20 year projects" then decided that was probably beyond our imaginative range). And, in fact, we are doing that. There are a lot of multi-year projects that do not extend far into the future. Things like increasing the output of wind power in the midwest from 3% of energy consumed to 20%. That's doable. Will that save the planet? No, but it's manageable. Increasing efficiency of motors (all kinds) is a 10 year type project. Maybe it will reduce the consumption of energy 12%-19%. Planet saving? Not by itself, no.

There isn't one single fix that we can carry out and then we'll be all done with the global warming problem.

There will be new and fresh good reasons to undertake more ambitious plans that we can actually manage in the decades ahead: resource shortages, problems of too much very hot weather, food supply instability, water shortages, severe storms, physical discomfort, etc. are going to be an on-going goad in our hindquarters. We won't forget about climate warming, because climate warming will regularly remind us of its facticity.

Your screen saver will destroy the universe.

The trouble with the butterfly flapping its flimsy wing theory, is that trillions of insects and birds are flapping their wings at the same time. Not only that, billions of animals that move on the face of the earth have an effect on air movements. Now, if they all flapped their puny little wings in concert,  perfectly coordinated, one would have a concept one could
I highly doubt that chaos theorists have the means to model the effect of flapping wings.

It is meant literally. — noAxioms

It's literally bullshit, because there is no means of showing that such a thing actually happens in the real world. There are far, far too many events happening at the same time that can not be adequately assessed in the context of all the other events.

There are real, actual small events which have a massive outcome. One pair of emerald ash borers secreted away in a shipment from Asia could be ultimately responsible for the loss of all of the ash trees in North America. One pair of zebra mussels flushed out of a ships hold could eventually reek havoc on all fresh water bodies in the Western Hemisphere. These kinds of "butterfly" events have an explanation that can be understood (reproduction).

Small events may cascade and cause larger events. However, the strength of effects also dissipate. The winds from a hurricane (and the hurricane itself whether started by a butterfly or not) eventually slow down as energy is expended. A terrific storm in the Gulf of Mexico will eventually end up as light breezes and a showers in the northern Great Plains.

The butterfly-causing-a-hurricane is a figure of speech -- not to be taken literally.

Many small, and not so small, events cause -- and maintain -- hurricanes, everything from dust stirred up over the Sahara Desert to slight changes in the ocean currents.

Sure, but the question we were talking about had to do with what the Buddha actually said, so in that case it's problematic to put stuff in his mouth that there's no evidence he said. — Agustino

Sure, it's problematic to put stuff in his mouth -- or take stuff out. How much confidence can we have in any evidence that he did or didn't say something?

Of course, believers want to know what the Master said, but to some extent, they/we are out of luck. The Master usually didn't leave us written, unequivocal, verifiable, signed, sealed, and delivered Truth. This guy lived here or there around such and such a time, and he preached, counseled, taught, etc. and some disciples gathered around him, and then one fine day he died. The disciples did not, apparently say, "Well, that's that. Let's go have a cup of tea, brush up our resumes, and pick up where we left off, before we got tangled up in his BS."

No, they kept the community of the Master together. They repeated what they had heard the Master say; what they thought they had heard; reconstructed what they thought they should have heard; made up some new material to illustrate what the Master clearly meant but hadn't expressed very clearly. On another fine day the last of the Master's disciples died too. Now it was the followers of the disciples of the Master who kept the community together. Eventually it was the followers of the followers of the followers of the followers... and we have a religion. FF 2000 years or so and we have all these followers of the followers (many times over) splitting hairs about what the Master did or didn't say, what he did or didn't mean.

Point being?

For believers (actual or would-be) take the texts you have and interpret them in the light of the world you live in. Leave it to the the scholars to sort out what fits, doesn't fit, or isn't even in the ballpark. There's enough truth to go around among the believers and enough unanswered questions to keep the scholars busy, at least until they get tenure.

If the Buddha floats your boat, be glad. If not, try something else. Take up macrame; try fly fishing; learn Swedish, Latin, or Sanskrit; raise fancy chickens; Memorize the Iliad. Become a Zoroastrian. Or just go without The Truth altogether.

Like usual, you're taking the Buddha out of his context and bringing him in a modern context — Agustino

To some extent, at least, isn't that both necessary and desirable? We don't live in the temporal/spatial context of Buddha, Abraham, Jesus, Mo... and most other religious founders. And what we know about Buddha, Abraham, Jesus, Mo, et al was not written down by secretaries while they were talking. By the time it was written down, new contexts had arisen. And since they were written down, several different contexts have come and gone.

When scholars engage in the search for "the historical Jesus", they discard bits and pieces that can be ascribed to later accretion. What they end up with after a few rounds of deletion is a shredded record with nothing but some bits and pieces left. My guess is that the same thing happens when scholars attempt the search for the historical Buddha, the historical Mohammed, etc.

One can't be entirely certain that one possesses an entirely true account of one's own life. What you yourself and others remember isn't a multimedia record. For the most part, we have only changeable memories of events which at that moment were colored by various influences.

I feel that as biological beings our views will constantly be skewed by biological and evolutionary impulses (emotion and intuition).It may even be the cause for most of the harm currently occurring in our world. — Zoonlogikon

Our ability to think and feel together account for both the good and bad things we do. It's important to remember this: emotions drive our best and highest actions, our worst and lowest actions, and everything in between. Yes, they skew our view of the world, but they also keep us looking at that view and trying to improve our take on it.

Without emotions, we would be much more like an AI--a power without a conscience.

One of the implications of science-in-general, biological science in particular, molecular biology even more so, is that we have moved into a position of directing evolution. That we are ready to assume such responsibility is a joke, but here we are taking over the lab, nonetheless.

That molecularly biologists should perhaps have several critical agencies looking over their shoulder was revealed in a bit of science news--that a group had succeeded in building the polio virus from scratch. They would, of course, try to build the variola virus (small pox) from scratch too.

Why would they select two of the most dangerous human viruses to try out construction techniques? There are numerous viruses far more benign than polio and small pox. Why, for that matter, are two or three governments and some science groups reluctant to burn up the samples of small pox or polio (which hasn't yet been eradicated -- almost, but not quite).

What these issues reveal is that our cultural capacity to proceed into the future ethically and safely has not evolved sufficiently.

There have been many discoveries in science which were advantageous or disadvantageous to one group or another, but most of them have not caused huge and prolonged controversy. Maybe there are reasons for this.

Origin of the Species by Darwin and Wallace's On the Tendency of Varieties to depart indefinitely from the Original Type were concurrent. They arrived at a time of intellectual ferment in many scholarly area. But then, what period doesn't ferment intellectually?).

Had Darwin and Wallace been Renaissance personalities, or even better, ancient Greeks or Romans, "evolution" would probably have not triggered such a strong reaction. First, the theory was not about the physical world of physics & chemistry; it was about all life and thus human beings. It laid bare a process of nature which had previously not been recognized (not very clearly, at least) and which had been assigned to the divine.

Darwin and Wallace severed the divine from the human in a particularly effective way.

Evolution placed mankind in an embarrassing relation to primates. The effect was worse than discovering that the exalted royal family's roots were actually very low class trash--nothing exalted whatsoever. We were (gasp) descended from chattering, grinning, idiot monkeys -- an outrage! (We aren't descended from contemporary monkeys, of course. We diverged a few million years back.)

Evolution was tied to the notion of survival of the fittest -- without asking "fittest for what?" Social darwinism is more the idiot bastard son of evolution, rather than a core principle.

It can survive in deep space — Wayfarer

According to the all-knowing wikipedia tardigrades can survive vacuum, radiation, high pressure, high temperatures, etc. for a while -- not indefinitely. Eventually radiation, heat, pressure, vacuum, and so forth causes serious damage. Still, they are very remarkable little creatures.

what was earth before our sun captured it? — TimeLine

The sun didn't "capture" earth, earth and the sun, plus all the other planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and various leftovers, all arose out of a disk of dust that happened to accumulate in this area of the Milky Whey and eventually went thermonuclear.

I ask this because it is well-known that some dinosaurs were huge by today's standards, so if the force of gravity were slightly less, that might go some way to explaining the difference — Wayfarer

What about creatures from the Jurassic and Cretaceous that were not spectacularly large?

Maybe this falls outside of your 'economical' theme, but what about stealing for a good cause? For example, stealing plans from the nazis to stop their next attack — Samuel Lacrampe

Too easy. How about stealing US hacking tools for spying and giving them to the rest of the world?