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Nobel Disease

en.wikipedia.org

121–130 of 139 posts

Re: Nobel Disease

#121
post #60

This has always felt like such a weird quirk in human behavior. Imagine a 5 year old who is good at basketball. His parents notice it and enroll him in a class. Coaches recognize his talent and dedicate special time to him. He trains every morning, every night and entire weekends through primary, middle and high school. Gets barely any time for classes, but he anyways just needs a passing grade (which teachers are ha…

It is called the halo effect.

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

More generally, if someone is good at something (here, basketball), or even just because he is tall, attractive,... we instinctively assume that he is good at everything (like here, geopolitics).

Re: Nobel Disease

#122
post #82
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Ethics" is subjective, there is no such thing as an objective ethics (unless you are religious). This is why thought experiments like the Trolley problems don't have a simple answer.. and they get even more complex with variations of the thought experiment.

I agree ethics can be subjective, so much so that there is more than one model of ethics. However, please tell me which model of ethics supports eugenics. Is it Utilitarian, Rights, Fairness, Common Good, or Virtue?

If we eliminate a gene that causes bad thing to happen, this kind of eugenics would fall into the Utilitarian model, among others.

Re: Nobel Disease

#123
post #122
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree ethics can be subjective, so much so that there is more than one model of ethics. However, please tell me which model of ethics supports eugenics. Is it Utilitarian, Rights, Fairness, Common Good, or Virtue?

If we eliminate a gene that causes bad thing to happen, this kind of eugenics would fall into the Utilitarian model, among others.

Would you propose selective breeding, selective sterilization, selective euthanasia, war, genetic engineering, or what to eradicate such a gene?

What single gene that only causes bad things to happen do you have in mind? Are you sure it doesn’t also control unrelated activity that’s helpful to the population?

Re: Nobel Disease

#124
post #68

> In his autobiography, Mullis professed a belief in astrology and wrote about an encounter with a fluorescent, talking raccoon that he suggested might have been an extraterrestrial alien. Absolutely wild shit whoa

You don’t need a Nobel prize to see talking raccoon aliens. Just take a heroic dose of hallucinogens.

Mine was a penguin dropping down from the spinning fractaled infinite hexagonal beehive grid that took over the ceiling but... yeah

Re: Nobel Disease

#125
post #88
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the logic here is backwards. Nobel Prize winners won the prize because they had unorthodox ways of thinking that led them to an actual discovery. I'd think that it's quite normal that 1 out of 10000 unorthodox beliefs ends up being a scientific reality of high impact. i.e. ~1 out of 10000 unorthodox thinkers will win the Nobel Prize, 9999/10000 of those thinkers you will never hear about. For the one who won,…

The article lists an order some 10 of Nobel prize-winners later seen as "unsound" mostly in a field other than their main area of expertise. Making them 1 in 100. I won't be surprised that 1 in 100 senior scientist expresses unorthodox or even unsound ideas when foraging far away from their field, particularly on the kind of topics listed. I agree that the share of unorthodox thinkers should all in all be higher amon…

I have to assume that this list is pared down considerably. When I opened the list, I fully expected to see Roger Penrose, who believes that the human brain is a quantum computer. This is not a view that is espoused by people who study human brains or quantum computers. The list seems to be limited to scientists holding opinions that have conclusively been ruled out, and not just kooky ideas outside their field of expertise.

Re: Nobel Disease

#126

> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now…

Angela Collier has a terrific video about this : billionaires want you to know they could have done physics.

If anybody else wants to sip on this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA>

Thanks for some coffeetime thoughts.

----

Something I have in common with Ms. Collier is that we both interpreted Atlas Shrugged as satirical, when in fact Author Rand was dead serious on her "objectivist" theories within her book.

----

My Twin and I approach life almost entirely different, akin to his opposite enjoyment of Shrugged as "aspirational utopia."

Even with identical DNA, our brains differ on such fundamental outlook of the elites' motivations (vs *almost everybody elses').

Re: Nobel Disease

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression doctors do this exact categorization all the time? Given an individual's race (looking at them and asking) and the medical literature they change their treatments if need be. Skin color and place of origin is a pretty rough but decent way to do this? If need be they could just sequence your genes, afterall isn't that exactly how they connect and learn about hereditary diseases or know that…

Far from it, I’m saying genetics is the only true science in all of this. What I’m saying is the way we do races is subjective, arbitrary and not scientific.

Ohhhh well that explains my confusion I thought you were saying we had nothing to tell.

Re: Nobel Disease

#128
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was under the impression doctors do this exact categorization all the time? Given an individual's race (looking at them and asking) and the medical literature they change their treatments if need be. Skin color and place of origin is a pretty rough but decent way to do this? If need be they could just sequence your genes, afterall isn't that exactly how they connect and learn about hereditary diseases or know that…

> a pretty rough but decent way How, exactly, would we know it's a decent way? I suspect it's not really about "race" which is full of wrong meanings; it's just that "race" in the US mostly also means genetically close populations, like black people originally coming through slave trade from one of a few places in Africa and therefore sharing some similar traits. But if you scaled research to a representative sample…

I mean a black looking person complains about a problem and you instantly can guess that because he's black and something is more common you can come to a conculsion faster.

It's not "science" but don't doctors do this stuff like every single day?

Re: Nobel Disease

#129
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a pretty rough but decent way How, exactly, would we know it's a decent way? I suspect it's not really about "race" which is full of wrong meanings; it's just that "race" in the US mostly also means genetically close populations, like black people originally coming through slave trade from one of a few places in Africa and therefore sharing some similar traits. But if you scaled research to a representative sample…

I mean a black looking person complains about a problem and you instantly can guess that because he's black and something is more common you can come to a conculsion faster. It's not "science" but don't doctors do this stuff like every single day?

> he's black and something is more common you can come to a conculsion faster

Certainly very fast, but is that conclusion correct? Is it really more common for "black" people, and even if so does that apply in this case? I have my doubts, having a bit of an experience with how doctors operate.

Re: Nobel Disease

#130

> an informal term for the embrace of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise Sounds pretty much like every founder out there who strike gold once in the past now believing their genius now…

Angela Collier has a terrific video about this : billionaires want you to know they could have done physics.

I never thought about how they all talk about physics! Yow!
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