With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2001-10-17 - 10:52 a.m.
I didn't update yesterday. Not that I had anything earth shattering to write but I really would like to update every day. Let's see, what happened yesterday? I went to school, I worked at Chez's, I went home. That's about it. I bet some people could write a book about that, a good book even. Not me, I didn't find any inspiration in it.
The things that affected me yesterday were three communications from friends. I had a fight via IM with one friend. We're OK now, I knew we would be, but I still hated it.
An ex-friend who I try not to talk to anymore called me last night. She got some really bad news and needed to talk. I couldn't really say no. It put me in an awkward situation; I didn't want to talk to her. There is no good way to get out of something like that though. I still care about her but I know it is really bad for my emotional well-being to get too involved with her.
The last was a Frümessage from Gella. She responded to my entry about intelligence. She made some interesting points, which of course I expect, as she is intelligent. It got me thinking more about it so I'm going to talk about it again.
One thing I learned of general use in math was the concept of the partially ordered set. In a partially ordered set you can compare some elements but not every pair of elements. Intelligence is like that. Yes I can say without fear of contradiction that Einstein was smarter than George W. Bush. Or that a rose bush is smarter than George W. In most cases though it isn't cut and dried. One person can be better at one thing and the second person is better at something else. That is what is wrong with IQ tests; the notion that you can reduce intelligence to a number is ridiculous.
IQ tests basically measure two things, problem solving and memory. It combines these two things with a basically arbitrary weighting system. There is so much more to intelligence and to combine them to one number would require making value judgments on their relative importance. The one thing that tests never measure is creativity. That is really odd because when we call someone a genius that is what we are usually concerned with. Beethoven was miserable with simple arithmetic but if he wasn't a genius who is. For myself I'm great at problem solving and math and spatial relationships but I can't learn languages or song lyrics at all. Even memory is too complex to quantify with one number. I have memorized enough to be a Jeopardy Champ but I can't remember people's names. I usually need context to learn something. I can remember that Babe Ruth had a lifetime batting average of .342 because I also know that Lou Gehrig's was .340 and Ted Williams' was .344. I'm sure to most of you that makes no sense but it is how my mind works.
My basic point is that one number can't describe intelligence. I used to think perhaps a vector could. A vector is an ordered set of numbers, something like (5,3,7,8) where each number would describe a different facet of intelligence. I think that is too simple too. For now I'll just use my keeping me amused standard.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2001-10-17
