Warren Ockrassa wrote: > >> Which decision? > > That people are stupid. The argument you offered suggests you decided > that people are stupid, and were doing an after-the-fact expansion on > the point of view. I'm not saying you're necessarily wrong, but that > the structure of what you wrote seemed to be justifying a conclusion > rather than building a foundation for it. > No, I _observed_ that people are stupid. This conflicts with the data that people, after all, built the Parthenon, the Soyuz and nukes, so there must be something that forces people to act non-stupidly sometimes.
>> Stupid = not able to think clearly. People who believe that >> a fairy may turn 2 + 2 into fish. > > Oh, that's not stupid; it's surrealism! :D > Of course you don't have pre-teen children, or you would not miss the reference :-) > More seriously, though, even the term "not able to think clearly" > doesn't necessarily indicate much about a given person's mind or > mental faculties. Many people are not able to think clearly when > they're angry, for instance, which renders temporary stupidity; as > Julia pointed out some *choose* not to think clearly, which tends to > lead others into ... anger. Some people don't have the tools to think > clearly but that's only because they lack the training; others are > genuinely organically dysfunctional and blameless about their > inability to think clearly. > Ok, so we are just diverging on the _number_ of stupid people. >>> And with groups in play, stupidity might be relative. Consider, for >>> instance, that a YEC would consider most biologists, paleontologists, >>> anthropologists, physicists and geologists as being incredibly stupid >>> for not seeing the obvious clarity of the point of view that aligns >>> to > >> strict Biblical interpretation. >> >> Ah, the relativity of evaluation... > > Yes, that's correct. Were you rebutting the validity of the above? > The datum can't be refutted: YEC would consider non-YEC as evil, stupid or satan's paws. I don't know how to connect this to the argument, namely, the measure of how many people are stupid. But since it's impossible to define stupidity, it's also impossible to prove that most people are stupid. If we take an average brinller as the measure, it's obvious that most (other) people are stupid... >>> And that is relevant, because Isaac Newton was a young-earth >>> creationist and, when he wasn't inventing calculus in order to define >>> physics and optics, he was trying to find proofs of a literal >>> interpretation of Biblical teachings. So which was he? Stupid or >>> brilliant? >> >> At that time? He was extremely brilliant! Not being a literal >> interpreter >> of the Bible had dangerous consequences those times, like having his >> brain physically separated from his heart by more than 2 meters. > > During the Enlightenment? > IIRC (I could wikipedia for it, but it's not worth it), Kepler's mother had some problems one or two generations before Newton, for being accused of witchery. England, around the time of Newton, had a bloody revolution. Those were dangerous times - freedom of speech was bought with the blood of martyrs [ouch, I sound poetic...] > Not so much so. Inventing physics from > nothing was a heck of an achievement, but the literalism he tried to > justify was much more than simply a hobby or something he was doing to > save face. He was genuinely committed to proving the literal truth of > the Bible. > So? Maybe he thought he had the mathematical tools to do that. >> Maybe everybody is totally incapable of comprehending something - >> after all, human knowledge is much bigger than the size of human >> brains :-) > > Yeah, you're probably right that everyone is probably guaranteed to be > incapable of total comprehension of *something*; I was being a little > narrower in intent, though, as in "Totally incapable of comprehending > X," where X is something presumably simple to grasp, such as number > lines or the dangers of lighting firecrackers and swallowing them. > Ah, now we agree. From what I have seen, most people is totally incapable of comprehending those simple things. I just hope this is due to a lack of education or lack of nutrients during an early phase of the life; otherwise, the future of mankind will be horrible. Alberto Monteiro _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
