Economic Devastation

[RealBitcoin]

Evolutionary legacy principles can be distracting when thinking about self-evolving systems. You are extrapolating in the wrong direction, I think. For a self-evolving intelligence, spatial expansion is only interesting as a form of back-up redundancy. It will operate on multiple time-scales, with high energy localized rapid response immune systems, and low energy higher cognition, because time scales of higher function operate on an efficient frontier trading off speed limitations due to speed of light against bounded local energy resources.  The only interesting frontier of expansion is the information frontier, because it is unbounded, among other reasons.  Expansion along that axis is intrinsically non-aggressive. 

Ok but the legacy evolution principles are also limited in our own minds because we have only seen bio-life, and never mechanic life.

A human DNA can have only as many combinations as the physical matter that is made up can allow by chemistry or the physical properties of that matter. A mechanical AI that has mastered nanotechnology and can create itself a body or shell from any material (mostly choosing the most optimal,durable, abundant,efficient one) and combine it's shape,size, form into the most efficient, perhaps even change it rapidly if the enviroment so desires.

Therefore an AI like that wont have the same properties and goals like the other bio organisms limited by the self-organizing chemistry.


The only reason life on earth is biological and not metalic, is just probability. Obviously the organic matter had higher probability of organization than metalic one. Just assuming that Carbon, Hidrogen and Oxigen is more abundant than Titanium or Wolfram and is more chemically flexible, the probability of Carbon life is bigger than one of Titanium. Therefore we are only biological because our probability of existance was higher.

There might be a species made of Titanium on some corner of the universe. So a mechanic AI is totally possible to evolve like this, not even calling it AI as it would be a real living organism.

However just looking at the probability, it's more likely that our techno-nanovirus AI was created by biological aliens as a weapon. Who knows, even humans could create such foolish inventions in a couple of millenia?

It is more likely that a biological organism wanted to create a weapon and created this techno-nanovirus, adding an AI to it, and that AI figured out new technologies to start manipulating its body/shell by mastering nanotechnology. Needless to say that this virus would immediately destroy their inventor race, as it would see it as a threat to compete with the nearby resources.


Regarding your thoughts on information and learning. Yea it could be that it would have some sort of central brain supercomputer that would try to figure out the universe.

But such project would require an enormous amount of resources, therefore after the invading hoardes have assimilated the planet, they would start to ship back the resources to the central command. Therefore their protocol would not change,and they would still have to multiply to keep up with the computation requirements and storage space.

Who knows maybe they would set up bases near supermassive black holes, and gain energy from there, it is by far the biggest energy source there is.


Maybe our own Milky Way's central blackhole has some parasite aliens leeching off energy from it. It would be interesting to send some kind of probe into the Sagittarius A zone to check out what aliens have bases near it?

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[iamnotback]

Of course it wont be omniscient, i dont believe in that, but it will be far superior, like an ant to an elephant in terms of power.

I could argue quite convincingly that ants are and have been much a more resilient species than elephants. They arguably better engineers and their brain is the community, i.e. they are processing information with a much more anti-fragile efficient (in the sense of the cost of unmitigated top-down failure, but not as efficient as a top-down system when risk is not factored), more fault tolerant, granular bottom-up organization.

Your foundational premise of ill-defined term 'superior' falls apart.

Every species is specialized to its target environment and mode of survival. Ditto A.I. with free will. There will never exist an omnipotent species that is specialized to every target of the disorder of the universe, because as I explained already, this would require that the speed-of-light was not finite and would require a top-down assimilation of information, i.e. the abrogation of free will. Without free will, you only have a machine that deterministically obeys its inputs, thus is not sentient and not alive.

Life is precisely disagreement and random fits to the expanding disorder (divergence) of the universe.

Any notion of deterministic omnipotence is antithetical to intelligence and knowledge formation.

An AI species is guaranteed to survive for centuries, if not for eternity (or until they run out of energy which is hardly an issue if you are intergalactic).

That is not true. Just as human species carry on for generations via genome and competition of our free will in the form reproduction of offspring, A.I. is also subject to the risk of mistakes which lead to its extinction, because it is impossible for A.I. to be omniscient and prepare for every possible black swan event.

And for A.I. to be truly alive and compete, it must have free will. Thus instances of A.I. will have disagreements and maybe even destroy each other.

Humans would have 0 chance against that kind of enemy, they would just spread and assimilate everything in their path that they can gain resources from.

Just as humans don't waste their time exterminating every ant on the planet, A.I. would need a reason to want to attack humans. With such incredible advances in technology and a vast universe of resources to explore, why would they pigeon-hole their capacity for advancement to this one little dot in the Milky Way called Earth.

Of course if the universe is infinite, then we might never encounter them, but if it's finite, then it's only a question of time until they get to us.

Our universe is unbounded by necessity, otherwise it would collapse into a static with no delineation of space-time (past and future would be reachable always at any point in space-time and speed-of-light could not be finite). I had already explained why in my prior posts. I had explained why also in my blog post about The Universe.

If there exists a perfect omniscience (i.e. a God), then to that power the universe is entirely known and finite relative to a speed-of-light which is also not finite. That power is able to operate at a speed-of-light which is not finite.

[iamnotback]

They would spread across the universe exponentially, and capture any planet in their way, assimilate all resources and then move to another.

Evolutionary legacy principles can be distracting when thinking about self-evolving systems. You are extrapolating in the wrong direction, I think. For a self-evolving intelligence, spatial expansion is only interesting as a form of back-up redundancy. It will operate on multiple time-scales, with high energy localized rapid response immune systems, and low energy higher cognition, because time scales of higher function operate on an efficient frontier trading off speed limitations due to speed of light against bounded local energy resources.  The only interesting frontier of expansion is the information frontier, because it is unbounded, among other reasons.  Expansion along that axis is intrinsically non-aggressive.  

If there is an achievable means to usefully extract zpe, spatial expansion loses most of its value.  Thinking about self-evolving systems as though they were starved for material or territory is remarkably atavistic.  If you want to defend against real threats, look along inward directions first and foremost.  That is where almost all threats will originate, in the long-run.

For that matter, we are probably pervaded by spread-spectrum intelligences operating with asymptotic energy efficiency right now. They are essentially undetectable by physical means, operating at the edge of noise with astronomical complexity.  This both limits their threat, and makes it almost impossible to defend.

Excellent. I enjoyed that. Also thanks for teaching me a new vocabulary word, atavistic.

You are operating at a very detailed mathematical model level. I would like to be able to get there. When you can relate the detailed models to the overview and back, that is zen.

Btw, I would attempt to find a way to show space-time is a form of information. I think then we can relate this to a rate limit of how efficiently we can process information. We will get into Byzantine fault tolerance and the limitations of information systems.

[RealBitcoin]

I could argue quite convincingly that ants are and have been much a more resilient species than elephants. They arguably better engineers and their brain is the community, i.e. they are processing information with a much more anti-fragile efficient (in the sense of the cost of unmitigated top-down failure, but not as efficient as a top-down system when risk is not factored), more fault tolerant, granular bottom-up organization.

Your foundational premise of ill-defined term 'superior' falls apart.

Well yes in a biological naturally evolved enviroment its hard to tell what species are superior, and while ants have low self investment and focus on numbers, elephants focus more on individuals.

An organism that has low self capability tends to be more community (communists?) oriented, while the one that has more tends to be more individualistic (sort of like why human leftists are usually dumb)

A centralized organism doesnt need the community that much, it can operate individually, while a decentralized organism needs it's peers to survive.

Every species is specialized to its target environment and mode of survival. Ditto A.I. with free will. There will never exist an omnipotent species that is specialized to every target of the disorder of the universe, because as I explained already, this would require that the speed-of-light was not finite and would require a top-down assimilation of information, i.e. the abrogation of free will. Without free will, you only have a machine that deterministically obeys its inputs, thus is not sentient and not alive.

Life is precisely disagreement and random fits to the expanding disorder (divergence) of the universe.

Any notion of deterministic omnipotence is antithetical to intelligence and knowledge formation.

I dont know why you emphasize so much on omnipotence, of course it's not possible by how the universe is limited by the physical laws. The speed of light is only 1 element.

And what you said doesnt prove that free will is true, it only proves that some tail events happened in the probability distribution, but it can revert back to the mean in the long long run.

It can still be deterministic, but with big variance that diverge from the mean in the short run, but converge in the long run.

That is not true. Just as human species carry on for generations via genome and competition of our free will in the form reproduction of offspring, A.I. is also subject to the risk of mistakes which lead to its extinction, because it is impossible for A.I. to be omniscient and prepare for every possible black swan event.

And for A.I. to be truly alive and compete, it must have free will. Thus instances of A.I. will have disagreements and maybe even destroy each other.

Except keeping backups of every learning path? Every "update" is logged, and it can be "reverted" anytime if a glitch happens.

An AI with nanotech, can easily test out all combinations in a simulated enviroment and only build in it's uppgrades after he made them safe to use.

If it's decentralized then the risk of failure is even smaller, and for that kind of AI, it should figure out to make itself decentralized to be more flexible.

So the odds are really in it's favor, you might as well just say that it will randomly collapse into a black hole, because it's probability of failure will be close to that.

Just as humans don't waste their time exterminating every ant on the planet, A.I. would need a reason to want to attack humans. With such incredible advances in technology and a vast universe of resources to explore, why would they pigeon-hole their capacity for advancement to this one little dot in the Milky Way called Earth.

Yes that is true, the AI wont hold grudge against humans, or waste their times with inneficient things, it will just identify it as a threat and deal with it (or not, if they find us too inferior), and start harvesting the resources.

If for some reason they need the metals from the core of the planet, they will suck them off, and without that our atmosphere will evaporate and we will go extinct either way.

So maybe they wont exterminate us on purpose, but they will definitely make our planet uninhabitable after they got what they came for.

Our universe is unbounded by necessity, otherwise it would collapse into a static with no delineation of space-time (past and future would be reachable always at any point in space-time and speed-of-light could not be finite). I had already explained why in my prior posts. I had explained why also in my blog post about The Universe.

If there exists a perfect omniscience (i.e. a God), then to that power the universe is entirely known and finite relative to a speed-of-light which is also not finite. That power is able to operate at a speed-of-light which is not finite.

So do you believe the Universe is like a quantum simulation? It is rendered as it expands and expanding by necessity?

Or what is your broad definition of the Universe, what is it?

[iamnotback]

They say never argue with an _________, so I bow out of this discussion.

And what you said doesnt prove that free will is true, it only proves that some tail events happened in the probability distribution, but it can revert back to the mean in the long long run.

It can still be deterministic, but with big variance that diverge from the mean in the short run, but converge in the long run.

Btw, a probability distribution says nothing about whether the random variable represents a deterministic set of trials. It only relates to the distribution of the values.

I was relating how the finite speed-of-light makes it impossible to remove free will, because no top-down controller (or coordination of all the instances of a species) can be updated in real-time.

Free will is the inability to receive control from a central command in real-time. It is the inability to compute the future precisely, thus each actor in the environment makes a different decisions based on their different initial and environmental conditions. The genome combined with the environmental development of the infant even makes each instance of living thing unique as well, so it responds uniquely.

[alplaxxx]

In my opinion there exists substantial evidence  that  this is just the beginning of a multi-year bear market of unprecedented dimensions.2016 is some what similar to 2007 and 2017 will be more like 2008. In fact, it could be far worse than 2008 both in its intensity and duration.In comparison to 2008 , the present conditions prevailing in the world are far more complicated. Back then, it's origin laid in bad loans lent to sub-prime borrowers in the U.S. It was a U.S. mortgage crisis which spread globally due to the integrated global markets. The U.S Federal reserve was able to stop the rut by printing money and save their banks.Although all the freshly printed money  did not make its way into the hands of the public, it had the ability to infuse confidence amongst market participants and this in turn revived the Stock Markets globally. Also near zero interest rates in the developed world helped a long way in fueling stock market  recoveries.But equity markets once they begin their upward thrust, rarely stop at their fair values.The bull run which began in March 2009, continued all the way up to 2014 by which time  they had well gone past their finishing line.In the mean while there has been no growth or at the most very anemic growth in most parts of the developed world.The markets have now discovered that they were running without much improvement in the real economies.

[sidhujag]

In my opinion there exists substantial evidence  that  this is just the beginning of a multi-year bear market of unprecedented dimensions.2016 is some what similar to 2007 and 2017 will be more like 2008. In fact, it could be far worse than 2008 both in its intensity and duration.In comparison to 2008 , the present conditions prevailing in the world are far more complicated. Back then, it's origin laid in bad loans lent to sub-prime borrowers in the U.S. It was a U.S. mortgage crisis which spread globally due to the integrated global markets. The U.S Federal reserve was able to stop the rut by printing money and save their banks.Although all the freshly printed money  did not make its way into the hands of the public, it had the ability to infuse confidence amongst market participants and this in turn revived the Stock Markets globally. Also near zero interest rates in the developed world helped a long way in fueling stock market  recoveries.But equity markets once they begin their upward thrust, rarely stop at their fair values.The bull run which began in March 2009, continued all the way up to 2014 by which time  they had well gone past their finishing line.In the mean while there has been no growth or at the most very anemic growth in most parts of the developed world.The markets have now discovered that they were running without much improvement in the real economies.

this is making me bullish towards my 32k dow target again

[iamnotback]

CoinCube, Paul Sztorc writes about your upthread concept of the tradeoff between defectors and top-down coordination (do you have a link in the OP?).

Remember AnonyMint was proposing anarchism and a totally free market. You were pointing out that top-down organization is also necessary to prevent divergence (you had presented a biological model to demonstrate the point). AnonyMint had agreed with you that even bottom-up processes are composed of top-down processes, e.g. the owners of small businesses are on aggregate a bottom-up process, but individually they are each top-down run businesses. I visualize this as a fractal organization which nests (recurses) bottom-up and top-down processes within each other.

Edit: You might want to read my entire analysis of Paul's blog post.

[iamnotback]

Btw, I would attempt to find a way to show space-time is a form of information. I think then we can relate this to a rate limit of how efficiently we can process information. We will get into Byzantine fault tolerance and the limitations of information systems.

http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2008/12/eventually_consistent.html
http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/pos-vs-pow-1.0.2.pdf#page=3

[STT]

Im not sure why people are so certain of AI when its so limited currently, all the intelligence lies with the originators of the program and while computers have advanced greatly in speed Ive not noticed anything special occuring in their ability for self development.
Im more optimistic near term for a leap forward via bio technology in algae, some kind of natural but human determined development branch like diesel producing algae.
Economically that changes many things

So that is why I believe the SETI project is an existential threat, and we should not search for aliens, because what we shall find will be very very ugly.

Well theres voyager out there somewhere, space is so vast its like letting go of a helium balloon I guess or even more so really since earth is contained

There wont be remnants left in space  just by themselves, you wont find some algae under a rock on Mars. You either find an entire alien civilization, or none of them. There is no middle ground.

You might be right there, if we've developed then so will they have with millions of years I guess thats reasonable.  Any stable eco situation out there will have matured into a full range of species.    If we find them first, dont we have the advantage and likely to be superior

[RealBitcoin]

Well theres voyager out there somewhere, space is so vast its like letting go of a helium balloon I guess or even more so really since earth is contained

Yea and the fucking probe they sent off with the coordinates of Earth relative to the milkyway and the local galaxies. And a golden disk that had human songs on it.

It's just fucking crazy how wreckless they are. Those objects emit EM waves, and aliens with good sensors can pick it up, and find us.

And when they come we will be peeing in our pants.

You might be right there, if we've developed then so will they have with millions of years I guess thats reasonable.  Any stable eco situation out there will have matured into a full range of species.    If we find them first, dont we have the advantage and likely to be superior

Yes the only advanced species that can survive that long are either:
-Predatory/Militaristic expansionist (expanding fast, and collecting resources from other worlds)
- Mechanical /AI based expansionist

In which case we are fucked if we meet them. Those idiot astro scientists think that all alien advanced alien civilizations are peaceful and utopic.

Well they might be proven wrong, but then it will be too late.

[groll]

You will probably need a week or two of studying the thread slowly.

I will be the first to admit I needed a week to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint.

The Rise of Knowledge
Understand Everything Fundamentally

Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read.

If the author is right and I think he is we are all in the midst of a tragedy of epic proportions.  It is sad unstoppable and will devastate the lives of much of humanity.

Edit:
This thread is now over 100 pages and too long to realistically expect a reader to cover from start to finish. There have been multiple requests for a roadmap or guide. In response to the latest request I wrote the following roadmap.

You write a lot of interesting things but I really have to ask for some sort of roadmap to your universe.  I’m not asking for a summary but a sitemap, a directory where the main ideas and concepts are mentioned. Catching up with a linear approach isn’t really doable especially if one wants to reach actionable status before the projected economic meltdown/madmax.

Thanks for any reply

It is best to start with a secure understanding of our financial system as it truly is. The three links on finance below were inspired by Anonymint's overall insight and are less deep than Anonymint's writing making them a good starting point. Part I covers fractional reserve banking what it is and how it works in a modern economy, Part II covers the business cycle how fractional reserve leads to recurrent and cyclical booms and busts impoverishing the masses. Part III covers how fractional reserve banking leads to government capture and the eventual economic strangulation of the economy.  

Finance Part I: Understanding the Parasite
Finance Part II: The Parasitic Cycle
Finance Part III: Divide, Conquer, Enslave

Once you understand the basics of the modern financial system you are ready to move on to Anonymint's more complex writings and ideas. I would start with

Understand Everything Fundamentally

Understand everything fundamentally covers the broader principle of collectivism and its dangers including the tragic consequences of our current economic trajectory. It also covers the principles of centralization and degrees-of-freedom in the economy. Next up is

The Rise of Knowledge

The rise of knowledge is in my opinion the very best of Anonymint's writing. In it he covers finance and why the role of finance and debt will progressively decline in the future. It is a compelling argument that describes how and why humanity will eventually and inevitability break free of the chains of finance and unrestrained collectivism and enter an age of knowledge.

CoinCube Highlights
Health and Religion
On Fractional Reserve
Justification for New World Order: Part 1, 2, 3, 4
Thesis on Life
Surviving Socialism
Mouse Utopia
Consciousness

Economic devastation will only occur if there is a world war or a major natural disasters that will affect the entire world. The recent reports that have occured about brexit and other conflicts that have uproared are not worldwide event. So theres no need to panic the present events in our world could affect selected economic commodities but will not place a major disaster on the economy.

[RealBitcoin]

Economic devastation will only occur if there is a world war or a major natural disasters that will affect the entire world. The recent reports that have occured about brexit and other conflicts that have uproared are not worldwide event. So theres no need to panic the present events in our world could affect selected economic commodities but will not place a major disaster on the economy.

What about the 1,600,000,000,000,000 $ derivatives?

[iamnotback]

I think you are just misdirecting your intellect, which seems above average, on a wild-goose chase.
Power distributions are a fact of nature, whichever system you will build, if it is valuable to humans, power over it will be unfairly distributed. If it isn't, that just means there is a power vacuum waiting to be claimed by someone with the means to.
But I suspect you know this already and you might be on some high level trolling or something.

Bottom-up organization is also an aspect of nature, because if it was not then it would require that a top-down omniscience was possible, which is impossible because it would require an non-finite speed-of-light, which would collapse the future and the past into nothingness (read two pages of my posts following the linked one in order to capture my complete reasoning).

There are systems in nature which have successfully resisted top-down organization thus are not power vacuums, e.g. sexual reproduction. Their key trait is that they can't be top-down organized, because they have a local, real-time environment relevance that can't be managed nor captured by the top-down organizer. This was essentially the key fundamental insight of my famous essay about the Rise of Knowledge being that individually empowered (by the Internet) knowledge creation is individually serendipitous and accretive, not capable of being captured by top-down finance:

Economic Devastation

You will probably need a week or two of studying the thread slowly.

I will be the first to admit I needed a week to fully absorb the following works of AnonyMint.

The Rise of Knowledge
Understand Everything Fundamentally

Together these are quite simply the most insightful piece of economic theory I have ever read.

If the author is right and I think he is we are all in the midst of a tragedy of epic proportions.  It is sad unstoppable and will devastate the lives of much of humanity.

Edit:
This thread is now over 100 pages and too long to realistically expect a reader to cover from start to finish. There have been multiple requests for a roadmap or guide. In response to the latest request I wrote the following roadmap.

...

Satoshi's design was an attempt to create such a permissionless, trustless system, that unlike fiat and democracy, would not be captured by any top-down oligarchy. Unfortunately his design is a power vacuum that fails to power distribution of control (e.g. Bitcoin = ChinaCoin) due to economies-of-scale in profitable proof-of-work mining.

I have conceived of a design for unprofitable proof-of-work mining which I believe has the necessary trait to not be a power vacuum.

Note that even phenomena which are not currently a power vacuum, can later become one. CoinCube has been arguing that human reproduction is soon to come under the control of the State or Corporations due to advances in technology for reproduction such as In Vitro Fertilization and other factors. I don't completely recall his reasoning off the top of my head.

[CoinCube]

Note that even phenomena which are not currently a power vacuum, can later become one. CoinCube has been arguing that human reproduction is soon to come under the control of the State or Corporations due to advances in technology for reproduction such as In Vitro Fertilization and other factors. I don't completely recall his reasoning off the top of my head.

Here is my current thinking on this topic.

Speech By Henning Webb Prentis, Jr:

"Paradoxically enough, the release of initiative and enterprise made possible by popular self-government ultimately generates disintegrating forces from within. Again and again after freedom has brought opportunity and some degree of plenty, the competent become selfish, luxury-loving and complacent, the incompetent and the unfortunate grow envious and covetous, and all three groups turn aside from the hard road of freedom to worship the Golden Calf of economic security. The historical cycle seems to be: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more."

It is no coincidence that the critical ingredient Prentis links with freeing humanity from bondage is spiritual strength. It is that same strength that when cast aside for selfishness, apathy, and hedonism facilitates societies decline into dependency and bondage.

...you will not stop the State from spiraling into the abyss, because the majority is going to demand expropriation. You can't suddenly change the situation of the majority. The majority has no other option and all the (political or even violent) fighting you do can't give them another option.

The economic reality and trajectory was written into stone decades ago. It can't be altered. The economic reality is what it is.

My advice to everyone is pay off all your debt because in a deflationary collapse that is underway (see oil under $50 today!) the government can take your assets and leave you with debt to pay but no assets to pay with. And debtor's prisons are returning. Even though I was reduced to near pauper, I prioritized paying off my credit card debts in 2014 and did pay $20,000 of it off for less than $10,000 by accepting best offers for negotiated settlement. I only have about $2000 of debt remaining (except that my ex took out a $25,000 student loan recently and I don't know if the USA will try to pin that on me).

Also radically reduce the risk to unjust IRS audits and assessments, because these will become more common.

Also radically reduce the risk to lawsuits, because these will become more common as westerners get desperate.

Then the next priority is to align your vocation with the Knowledge Age and so you have income even during global economic collapse and your skills are transportable to any location you might choose to move to as the chaos takes form.

Anonymint's advice is correct but incomplete. When you couple a mechanism of progressive and increasing dependency (socialism) with a fundamentally unsustainable financial system (fractional reserve fiat) the probable result is a system who's declared role is helping the poor but who's insolvency dictates policies geared towards sterilization. Such a result requires a certain degree of cognitive dissonance and a government who believes it is helping you while it works to ensure you do not reproduce.

Toxicity of the Modern World

In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley envisioned a future where the masses were rendered infertile and controlled with pleasure and drugs. Is that the world we live in now? Anyone over that age of 25 may not realize how far traditional courtship and dating has been undermined by modernity. The tinder generation is being conditioned to swipe right on their onscreen app and meet up later for random sexual gratification. This phenomena has been described by Vanity Fair as nothing less than a dating apocalypse.

In Colorado long acting implantable contraceptives which a render women infertile for up to 10 years and require a doctor’s visit to remove have been implanted in 26% of young women age 15-24 as of 2013.

In 2015 an advisory body to the US Department of Health and Human Services recommended that Medicaid examine how often doctors are using “most effective” or “moderately effective” contraception. Only contraception deemed “highly effective” or “moderately effective” (Long acting implantable or long acting injections) would be included in the proposed measurement. Doctor’s with a low percentage of young patients using such contraception would presumably be rated as giving lower quality care.

We appear to be living in a “Utopia” of declining fitness and capability. An age of existential exhaustion manifested by an ageing, hedonistic society characterized by declining marriage, and near zero children.

Add to this data the very real possibility of more direct government action. The Catholic church in Kenya has accused the government of secretly injecting young women with an anti-fertility vaccine disguised as a tetanus vaccine. Either the Catholic bishops are lying or the Kenyan government is.  
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2015/01/19/kenyan-bishops-call-for-no-more-tetanus-vaccines-until-further-tests/

The situation can be looked at abstractly as the sudden and dramatic shift in selective pressure. Until recently violence, starvation, and disease were primary drivers of selection and survival. Today new pressures predominate in the form of dependence, hedonism, and sterilization. As a species we have never been subjected to this kind of pressure before and are likely to be highly susceptible. Halting the re-imposition of selective pressure is economically impossible and perhaps even inadvisable for some form of selective pressure is needed to prevent a generalized decline as was seen in 'mouse utopia'. In the near term astute individuals are best served by minimizing dependency a task that will be increasingly difficult with time. However, intellectual adaptability and self sufficiency alone are not enough for in this new era it is also necessary to resist the toxicity of decadence and hedonism. In Religion and Health I argued that faith provides the best chance of success on this front.

Like all selective pressures the triad of dependence, hedonism, and sterilization will eventually lead to a population resistant to them but the time scale is one of generations. It will be a dramatically reshaped humanity that emerges some generations from now. It is these survivors that will pave the way for the knowledge age as outlined in The Rise of Knowledge.

[RealBitcoin]

I argued that faith provides the best chance of success on this front.

C'mon faith and religion can be both bad and good.

I know personally a dozen people that pray everyday to Jesus to make their lives better, but never really do anything about it, only drink alcohol.

It's only thing to have positive attitude, and have this sort of religious support on your shoulders, but it's another thing to really fix your life independently even if you are in a bad situation.

[CoinCube]

I argued that faith provides the best chance of success on this front.

C'mon faith and religion can be both bad and good.

I know personally a dozen people that pray everyday to Jesus to make their lives better, but never really do anything about it, only drink alcohol.

It's only thing to have positive attitude, and have this sort of religious support on your shoulders, but it's another thing to really fix your life independently even if you are in a bad situation.

In the Health and Religion thread I looked at the data on correlations between happiness and religion. Most of the benefit is associated with the highly religious. Being nominally or moderately religious had little benefit.

Praying for divine intervention to passively "make your life better" without actively changing anything is an obvious recipe for failure. Praying for improved self discipline to affect change or for insight into how to change is far more likely to be beneficial.

For the devout and observent religious individual the odds of ending up in a situation where it becomes necessary to "fix your life" is probably much lower.  

[RealBitcoin]

In the Health and Religion thread I looked at the data on correlations between happiness and religion. Most of the benefit is associated with the highly religious. Being nominally or moderately religious had little benefit.

That is fooling yourself, how can you be happy when the influence of your happines is only to fool yourself with magic sky deities?

Praying for divine intervention to passively "make your life better" without activally changing anything is an obvious recipe for failure. Praying for improved self discipline to affect change or for insight into how to change is far more likely to be beneficial.

That is like taking painkillers for cancer. It doesnt solve the problem, but it makes them feel good.


Religion is just an excuse to do or dont do things.

Better give it up and think rationally.

[CoinCube]

That is fooling yourself, how can you be happy when the influence of your happines is only to fool yourself with magic sky deities?
...

Religion is just an excuse to do or dont do things.

Better give it up and think rationally.

Your tone tells me that you have either not put sufficient thought into this issue or are too young to have examined its deeper philosophical underpinnings.

Rational thinking honestly applied and taken to its conclusion dictates the embrace of religion.
However, it is intellectually far easier to dismiss the issue entirely.

Regardless, this thread is not the place for a debate on religion. I have outlined the logic elsewhere for those interested in reading it and will leave you the last word.

[sidhujag]

That is fooling yourself, how can you be happy when the influence of your happines is only to fool yourself with magic sky deities?
...

Religion is just an excuse to do or dont do things.

Better give it up and think rationally.

Your tone tells me that you have either not put sufficient thought into this issue or are too young to have examined its deeper philosophical underpinnings.

Rational thinking honestly applied and taken to its conclusion dictates the embrace of religion.
However, it is intellectually far easier to dismiss the issue entirely.

Regardless, this thread is not the place for a debate on religion. I have outlined the logic elsewhere for those interested in reading it and will leave you the last word.

Just an answer for the unknown and revolves around the sun mostly. Its kinda like how gold is cherished because of its sun like appearance.. seems we are tuned into cherishing anything related.