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Coming from Europe, everything in the US seems more complicated, and set up with the purpose of making it hard for less intelligent people. Filing taxes is always the responsibility of the private citizen instead of the employee, the price of goods is displayed without sales tax and it's up to the citizen to calculate…
Americans enjoy lower qualities of life on every single indicator that you can possibly think of. Life expectancy in France and Spain is 83 years, but in America it’s only 78 years — that’s half a decade of life, folks. The same is true for things like maternal mortality, stress, work and leisure, press freedom…
Our model predicts that the second wave of computerisation will mainly depend on overcoming the engineering bottlenecks related to creative and social intelligence. As reported in Table III, the “fine arts”, “originality”, “negotiation”, “persuasion”, “social perceptiveness”, and “assisting and caring for others”…
You and I ought to reach this moral understanding not just so we can have a logically consistent conversation but because mutual unselfishness is the only way we can simultaneously pursue our interests. You and I are both better off if we share our surpluses, rescue each other’s children when they get into trouble…
The day will come, says Spencer, when altruistic inclination will be so well embodied in our organism itself that people will compete for opportunities of self-sacrifice and immolation. When altruistic inclinations are implanted in everyone, how will opportunities arise to apply them? Either such a state presupposes…
Memetic Infection One of the most worrying weaknesses is the spread of virulent information patterns such as memes. Memes thrive in environments with intense communication (Bjarneskans et al. 1997), and would likely spread extremely quickly inside a borganism, infecting both collective and unit schemata. Having a…
Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see; But microscopes are prudent In an emergency.
In proportion as physical characteristics become of less importance, mental and moral qualities will have an increasing importance to the well-being of the race. Capacity for acting in concert, for protection of food and shelter; sympathy, which leads all in turn to assist each other; the sense of right, which checks…
...older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge…
The Human Cognome Project was an academic research venture to reverse engineer the human brain, paralleling in many ways the Human Genome Project and its success in deciphering the human genome. The HCP was a multidisciplinary undertaking, relevant to biology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, artificial…
Because the real planet Earth is revolving around its north-south polar axis, so, too, is mini-Earth. They are both thus revolving without effecting any change of the observed position of Polaris—the North Star—in respect to mini-Earth's north pole. Therefore, the observer at the center of the Geoscope feels…
When I pause and reflect on our expanding universe, with its galaxies hurtling away from one another, embedded within the ever-stretching, four-dimensional fabric of space and time, sometimes I forget that uncounted people walk this Earth without food or shelter, and that children are disproportionately represented…
The autopsy of a person who had died from phosphorus poisoning would reveal inflammation a haemorrhage in the stomach and bowel, the liver would show fatty changes and both it, and the kidneys would be enlarged, greasy and of a yellow colour. But the most convincing proof of death due to phosphorus exposure would be…
"Faith" is a fine invention When Gentlemen can see— But Microscopes are prudent In an Emergency.
We cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individual. Toward this end, each of us must work for his own highest development, accepting at the same time his share of responsibility in the general life of humanity—our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful.
Humanity certainly needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to…
EMBALM, v. t. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic…
It's easy to see that predators (animals that kill and then eat other animals) are working for the downfall of their prey. But it's also true that prey are working for the downfall of their .fedators. They work hard to escape bei and it they all succeeded the predators would starve to death. The same thing holds…
For a dying man it is not a difficult decision [to agree to become the world's first heart transplant] ... because he knows he is at the end. If a lion chases you to the bank of a river filled with crocodiles, you will leap into the water convinced you have a chance to swim to the other side. But you would not accept…
But there is another alchemy, operative and practical, which teaches how to make the noble metals and colours and many other things better and more abundantly by art than they are made in nature. And science of this kind is greater than all those preceding because it produces greater utilities. For not only can it…