response 175 of 239:

Feb 28 04:57 UTC 1996

of course, none of this means that the party program is totally evil. ;)

response 177 of 239:

Feb 28 07:24 UTC 1996

The only thing Einstein had to do with the a-bomb was to write to
Roosevelt, at the urging of other scientists, to say that Germany
was probably working on it, and it would be a disaster if they got
it first. He was right, of course.

You are completely wrong about the merits of thinking and not thinking,
brighn. All the good features of our society and our technology are
the fruits of thinking. There are bad features too, but they are not
the result of thinking, but *of not thinking clearly or thoroughly enough*.

response 179 of 239:

Feb 28 09:52 UTC 1996

gregc's #170 ( i thing hat;'s the ##) is probably closer to the mark
than anyting else. It should also be noted that all communications
skills *tend* to get better with experience, and that usually, but
not always means age/growth.
  
Train of thought retention over a period of days rather then seconds
is a *learned* skill.

response 181 of 239:

Feb 28 15:52 UTC 1996

Brighn, nothing I said was meant in jest or meant to be funny. I was
very serious. I was going to mention something else last time, but figured
I'd said enough. Then you went on to step right into that subject: One of the
things that disturbs me most is people who believe that "I think too much",
or people who believe that there exists such a concept as "Thinking too much".

Rane hit the nail on the head. Most of the problems of this century are
not the result of thinking, but of all the *other* people who run off and
act emotionally *without* thinking through the consequences of their
actions. Or worse, don't really understand how to think things through
in an objective logical way, but allow emotion to color their thinking to
the extent that they arrive at a conclusion that they *believe* to be
the result of rational thought but are actually just bad examples of fuzzy
thinking.

The einsteins/scientists/thinkers of this world *arn't* the problem. It's
the other 95% of the population that grab their ideas/inventions and run
off and do stupid things with them. So you're saying the smart person
should simply have said to him/herself: "This is a very useful idea/invention,
but some idiot will probably take it and do bad things with it so I should
just forget I had the idea"? That's typical of the anti-intelectual/luddite
viewpoint and I think it's one of our biggest problems.

Sure, good ideas can be warped by stupidity:
 Atomic Energy -> A-Bomb
 Pharmasuticals -> drug abuse
 Internal Combustion -> pollution
 Free-market system -> Greed
 Etc, etc, etc.

However, the viewpoint that "all this thinking has produced all this bad stuff
in the world" completely ignores the good. Do you think we'd have modern
medicine, telecommunications, transportation, schools, librarys, impoved/
safe food production, etc, etc, if everyone who had a good idea just threw
it away becuase someone *might* use it in a bad way?

It's easy to forget that before the industrial age, 200 years ago, the average
lifespan was only 35 to 40, 99.9% of the population did menial work 10 hours a
day, 7 days a week, just to survive. Desease was alot more common and a lot
more likely to be fatal. There was no such thing as refrigeration, or
health standards. You took a much greater risk when you ate something than
you do today.

Sure, let's go back to that.

response 183 of 239:

Feb 28 20:07 UTC 1996

Alfred Nobel, then.  That example is undeniable, since the Nobel Prize
is in a way the result of his guilt.

There's nothing wrong with thinking, Greg.  Scientists who put themselves
in ivory towers and generate wonderful ideas that they don't think about
common man corruptions to are an example of the individuals who don't
think these things all the way through.

Part of thinking includes introspecting on the role of emotions.
Part of feeling includes introspecting on the role of thought.

It's odd the rationalism as it exists in this century tends to
rely on the same oppositional dualism sprouting from Zoroastrianism
and made popular by the same Christianity that the rationalists
ridicule.  But, then, that's part of the development of philosophy, ne?

I misspoke my views before.  I think plenty.  I like thinking, it entertains
me.  It also entertains me to not think when it suits me.  I'll admit
I've been not thinking too much lately, and need to return to thinking.
So I came out overly hostile and inimical to the importance of thought.
I was being overly emotional, so I suppose that's an excuse.

Since y'all claim to be Vulcan in your hearts, I guess y'all aren't misspeaking
and do intend to imply that emotions and thought are in polarity and the
latter is what's wrong with humans... in which case you're relying on Christian
thought, which I was fairly certain at least one of you actively 
rejected...
*giggle*

response 185 of 239:

Feb 28 22:03 UTC 1996

   I know that, Jan.  There was a point in my life where I spent too
much time in UTL:PARTY, Plato's 'talk' system and others.  Yes, a 
group *can* have a wonderful conversation in party, but it takes
all of those neat people online at the same time to get that effect.
Half neat people and half dreary souls doesn't generally work.

   ...And that the difference with conferencing: you don't have to
have people online at the same time to make something neat happen.
I'm not trying to say that people who stay away from party are
"smarter".  It is different.  But I do maintain that there are
more undesireable people who gravitate towards real-time conversations
than time insensitive modes like PicoSpan.

response 187 of 239:

Feb 29 03:23 UTC 1996

<mdw is impressed>

response 189 of 239:

Feb 29 06:14 UTC 1996

Great conversations in party seem somewhat rare, and there is a fair amount
of the "I'm bored" type of stuff, but that's not all there is.  I've certainly
been involved in some great discussions in party about some very serious
subjects, as well as some discussions that probably didn't have much
intellectual merit, but were still a lot of fun.  I think party tends to
emulate a lot more having people there in person, without the geographic
restrictions that prevent that.  Maybe it's not as intellectual as some of
the conferences, but I figure that I spend enough time doing things that
require a lot of concentration over a long time that it's ok to take a break
from that from time to time.  Then again, I think party often requires a lot
more concentration than the conferences do, since one has to do the same
amount of thinking in a lot less time.

response 191 of 239:

Feb 29 15:31 UTC 1996

   Quite right, Rane.

response 193 of 239:

Feb 29 18:40 UTC 1996

  In declining an invitation to a Peace Congress in Switzerland, four
years before his death, Nobel said "My factories may end war sooner
than your Congresses.  The day when two army corps will be able to
destroy each other in one second, all civilized nations will recoil
from war in horror and disband their armies."  He was a supporter
of international peace, but had unusual ideas toward achieving it.
 
  He had no wife, children, parents or siblings when he died.  One
of his brothers died in a nitroglycerin explosion, and that was a
major inspiration to develop dynamite and other methods of making
safer explosives.  So he didn't have the usual choices to name as
heirs.
 
  Also, peace was one of five fields for which he set up the prizes;
the others are physics, chemistry, medecine, and literature.  This
contradicts the idea of their establishment as an atonement for his
scientific contributions.  They are not arbitrarily chosen; each
represented areas of particular interest to him during different
parts of his life, like poetry-writing during his youner years.

response 195 of 239:

Feb 29 21:22 UTC 1996

Brighn, again you miss the point. There is nothing contradictory about
what I said and what Rane said. You stated:
  "Greg has condemned thinkers who do not think things out
   all the way as being the real trouble.  Rane has absolved thinkers whose
   work is corrupted by others if that corruption was unintentional on the
   thinker's part."

First off, that is not what I said. I said that most of our problems are
caused by the large portion of the population that just run off and use
an idea/thing with little or no thought directed toward what other
consequences that use may have.

Your arguement against Rane is ridiculous. If you take your argument to
it's logical conclusion, then the inventor of any new thing/idea created
in the last thousand years should have thought out the use of his new
idea/thing and realized that no matter what it was, it could be used in
a bad/harmful way. and therefore he should have abandoned or forgot about
the idea/thing. Where would we be now if *nothing* had been invented in the
last thousand years? No new ideas discovered?

I can build a house with a brick, I can also bash your head in with it.
I could removed an abscessed appendix with a scapel, I could also slit your
throat with it.
Electricity has too many uses to list, including that computer you're
obviously using to enter responses into this item, electricity has also
been used to put people to death.
Computers also have too many positive uses to list, but they also make it
easier for hate mongers to spread their word, and for various agencies to 
pry into what should be a person's private info.

Do the above bad uses mean that the brick, the scapel, electricity or the 
computer should never have been invented? Of course not, that's absurd.

response 197 of 239:

Mar 1 07:01 UTC 1996

Inventions and scientific advancements are inherently morally neutral.
They just are: facts, or arrangements of matter - whether natural
or man made. The moral question only arises when humans consider how
they will use the invention or scientific advancement. This has been
pointed out by so many philsophers, moralists, sociologists - pick
your -ist - that I cannot imagine any thinking person arguing against
it. However, you have shifted your argument, Paul. It is now that
if the invention or arrangement of matter has some *risk* associated
with it, then the inventor or maker should consider the moral
responsibility associated with creating that risk. I think that is
correct if the risk is inherent in the invention or arrangement, but
not if the risk is solely the responsibility of the user. A good example
is nitroglycerin - an explosive that had many practical uses but which
was inherently very risky to use even without any mistakes on the part
of the user. Nobel lost his brother because the risk eventuated. However
Nobel studied the problem very hard and *removed the risk* by soaking
the nitroglycerin to kieselgur, to create dynamite.

However the moral questions arising in creating risk are very mutable.
A risk to *oneself* created by an invention or arrangement may not be
a risk to others (making your own nitroglycerin in an isolated location
is an example - which is what Nobel did: he moved his operations to
an island, after an early accident). The moral question is much mitigated
therby, as risking solely oneself is an absolute right.

response 199 of 239:

Mar 1 16:36 UTC 1996

  Jan, Nobel's wife died when they were both very young, but he did
have two other loves of his life, each of whom married someone else,
so maybe one of their husbands was a mathematician.  One of the
women did receive a peace prize a few years after his death.