No, I was making an empirical argument: most great scientists have been religious. It would not be too hard to quantify this if you scraped a few Wikipedia links.
I take the Bible and related texts to be the key document(s) upon which the religious beliefs in question are ultimately based. For believers, the Bible/Torah/Koran are of more importance than the institutions, the priesthood, etc... If you want to talk about religious beliefs you would do well to focus on the scripture.
We are talking about religion, not religious institutions. According to bible, these are not the same. Another key theme of religion that atheists seem oblivious to. The important point here is to understand that all powerful institutional hierarchies can and will become corrupt. Religion is meant to bypass corrupt religious institutions by design; there’s a higher authority.
To say that religion “knows” is to be fundamentally unaware of religion. The core tenant of judeo-Christian belief systems is one of piety - being humble and accepting the fallibility of humans and thirsting to overcome those imperfections by studying the universe to better understand the divine principals which we call “truth.”
The point is valid but I am not so sure the line between recreation and use is so clear cut. Take pain patients for example. If they are not getting enough pills from their doctor they’ll get them on the street. Is that person a patient or an addict? At what specific dosage does one crossover? Obviously everyone in the medical profession has a huge stake in dividing the world into two groups, patients and druggies, and so most will set the cutpoint low. The incentives all reinforce such behaviour; you could go to jail for being too liberal in handing out pain meds. So, despite the appearance of there being two groups, heavy use addicts and low use patients, I don’t think reality is so simply bifurcated. I think the appearance of two groups is largely an artifact of the system. Doctors restrict dosages artificially and if someone claims to need more pain pills and maybe seeks another doctors to proscribe them, that person will be reclassified by his doctor from being a legitimate patient to being a drug addict. Scott implies there are no edge cases but that’s because the system starts with that assumption. Definitions are everything.
Some people are never content and need to increase their wealth and social status constantly. Others will be content and happy regardless of their social status. Those who need to keep amassing ever more wealth “to keep up with the Jones’” are the future we’re choosing. Hope it’s the right choice.
Immigrant parents, being more likely to be overachiever on average, are very different than normal parents in this regard. I didn’t know anybody growing up who had to drill on school work. Some dads were into sports and would pressure their kids to be the next babe Ruth or oj Simpson, but school work not so much. The education arms race is very much a function of globalization and international competition, which has added a lot of stress to childhood for today’s middle class American adolescent.
Work requires compromising ourselves. We do this for survival. There is no way to make most tech ethical. It’s an economic reality that is quite evident in the historical data. When was the last time we had an ethical tech company? We have apple, facebook and google, all evil in slightly different ways, all taking more from humanity than they give back.
“ the mere expression "work/life" embodies a mistake: it assumes work and life are distinct”
Going to have to meditate on that one for awhile. It seems “privileged.” For many work amounts to a set of indignities required for survival. A 2 hour daily commute to pay Bay Area rent prices doesn’t feel like “life” at all. Sort of Marie Antoinette vibes to the featured essay. I’m actually ok with that. Not everyone needs to be a slave, and the more people who can forego work and just tinker the better. But acknowledge it. Paul’s not talking to the proles here, but to other gentlemen of leisure who had mathematician dads, or those who had Paul graham type rich celebrity dads. Most people are in essence slaves to debt. Retirement is when work stops and life starts, for most of us in the second class.
They need to be penalized. For every high profile incident like this, there are many more that never reach public scrutiny. The leadership needs to be made accountable.
I think dog owners are generally good people who have done really great things but I also sometimes feel like there might be a few entitled jerks in their ranks, especially pit bull owners.
Great response. At the same time, absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. It seems improbable that nation states aren’t keenly interested in social media influence. It seems much more likely such efforts are undetectable.
Or the person searching it ctrl+f’d a typo. Or a Chinese intern who helped compile the spreadsheet deleted that row on “accident”.
People are too quick to notice conflicts of interest. Everyone of us lives a life filled with such conflicts, yet we manage somehow to rise above, for the most part. Fauci seems like a nice guy to me.
So many of today’s problems result from a lack of morality. If the solution doesn’t involve Bitcoin then it involves religion. Security is impossible and digital security doubly so.
Couldn’t disagree more. If that would happen, why hasn’t it happened yet? There are pirates and terrorists too, and they don’t make the world better or safer, quite the opposite.
The problem is peoples’ notions of justice are capricious and savage. The draconian laws over psychedelics represents yesteryear’s popular conception of “true justice.”
Truly curious, is there no concept of sexual harassment in Europe? Maybe Europeans are less pervy than Americans, like how they don’t have alcoholism or fat people?