I met Nigel, returning from a day spent hard slicing the brains of small reptiles. Or as I like to call them "The spawn of Roger". Our collective mood was both elated and distraught thanks to range of personal events and our remarks on our joys and woes was recorded by a passing NSA agent. Thanks to a FOI request that I have on standing order I can CTRL+C/V the text directly for your enlightenment.
N: I guess one of the main stressors now is my Father's developing Altzihmers. It's just kind of shitty that medical research doesn't get a considerable degree of funding compared to the shitloads that always seem to get spent on self destructive or useless shit, you know? We could be curing so many more things by now it's unreal.
J:I console myself by thinking that in a few hundred years whats left of humanity will mock this era mercilessly for spending so much time, money and effort on say, sports or landmines,meth and beer and never combines them, compared to dealing with, for one thing, diseases. 21C - Advanced enough to know better, still too dumb to bother. It just keeps on showing how far we haven't come as a species.
N:No shit! We are fucking IDIOTS. One of the most infuriating things is that there is some evidence that Alzheimers may have a root that is strongly influenced by human behavior, but we don't know what it is. Because humans are pretty much barely above dog-level intelligence, it is hard to get funding to study anthropogenic roots of disease.
J: Dog level seems generous. A lot of people I encounter wouldn't rate above a fucking goldfish. Hells, we all know a couple of people who would lose a battle of wits against your average carp. And the depressing thing is that we've not even got that far to realise it about ourselves thanks to dunning-kruger.
I've said for a while that if 10% (FFS, even 1%) of football transfer fees or Hollywood film budgets, you know, leaving the sacred military alone, was mandatory to be put to medical research/care, the average life expectancy would probably be past 100 by now. And that's just looking at the past 30 odd years. But let's not do anything too crazy because socialism. Let's develop a system where our left wing politics is practically indistinguishable from our right wing stances. Instead we let this shit continue because big explosions and paying morons millions to kick a ball is apparently a better use of resources.
N:Goldfish do at least have rudimentary problem-solving skills. And you have in fact been outsmarted by one at some point, at least by it's own standard so it fucking wins, doesn't it?
J:Fair enough, if that's the standard you're stetting.
Unfortunately, Dog problem-solving and reasoning can be estimated to range from about 60-85 on an IQ scale, taking into consideration that dogs have almost none of the cortex that predicts future outcomes and so can't plan ahead at all. IQ is based on a normal distribution with a human average of 100, the distribution mean. Below 85 is considered cognitively impaired, above 115 is considered intellectually gifted. These are facts. That's one standard deviation in each direction.
J:I think I need a drink.
That means, that Roughly 78% of people are within one standard deviation from the mean. That's what we're dealing with. Not to sound like an elitist prick, which is an easy hole to fall into when discussing reasoning skills, but the general lack of intellectual reasoning ability in the majority of the population means that we will probably never, ever get even the small fraction of funding for science that could significantly improve the lives and health of everyone, because sportsball and bombs is what's best for fun and profit.
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Nigel, test run, bit rough, considered going into zimbardo for further counterpoint? feel free to add/alter anything you see fit. I've thrown in bits here and there so turnabout fair play etc.
