Marat

If you look at statistics on the labor sector before the introduction of the minimum wage, the service sector was actually much larger than it is today, since a large percentage of the work force was employed as domestic servants. Even middle-class people could expect to have at least one household servant circa 1900. Work-sharing is the best way to provide everyone with a sense of a purposeful existence and an income. Although it would mean everyone earning less money, this would be good in that the greater income equality in society would promote social justice and decrease social tensions, and everyone would have more leisure. It is often said that our present era is the only one in which technological advances allowing a shorter work week have not led to fewer working hours being expected in the week, largely because capital is now insisting on higher profits. Circa 1880 people used to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, and while this was gradually reduced with increasing productive technology to the 40-hour-week by 1950, we remain stuck there 60 years later. In Europe, however, the shorter work week has already been introduced, with many people working just 34 hours a week. Even in Ancient Rome the work week was less than it now is, since the week was 10 days long with 3 days set aside as holiday time, and the whole morning was expected to be spent visiting one's patrons rather than actually working.

If a woman requires a man to perform certain meaningless rituals of courtship for a few weeks, to give her some expensive gifts, to elevate her social status in front of others by his actions, and to take her out to someplace expensive for dinner, and only after these conditions have been fulfilled does she consent to sex, how is that different from prostitution? The man has been required to perform a list of material favors which have in themselves no emotional significance, and which he may find utterly meaningless, and in return for these material favors the woman offers her cooperation with sex. Why does it matter so much whether the list of material favors includes all those rituals and gifts or consists just in a cash transaction?

Observance of the rule of law and the basic principles of humanity is only characteristic of the surface of states; on the hidden side all states are ultimately just a fist.

Perhaps the whole question of the OP and the responses to it can be approached through analyzing this question: Is oceanography the opposite of soil science? Since water is in a sense the opposite of land, you could say these two disciplines are opposites, but few scientists would know much about either discipline if they did not also hold considerable knowledge in common with its 'opposite' discipline. Is the opposite of soil science something as far away from it as possible, like 14th century French literature, or is it something at the opposing end of the same track with it, like oceanography? You could come up with good reasons for either answer.

It is important not to assume that all beliefs are the same sort. Empirical beliefs are really just the confidence that something is probably true, but believers are prepared to change their views if evidence is presented to them which contradicts their initial commitment. Empirical beliefs are constructed as implications of empirical data, and although they may contain elements which are, in isolation, theoretical or not individually empirically supportable, the belief as a whole is accepted as a plausible, economical, rational way of explaining the observed data. Atheists who support the existence of alien beings would do so from the examination of empirical data, offering the posit of alien beings as the best and most economical way to account for what has been observed. But religious belief typically refuses correction by any amount of empirical data to the contrary. It is also not economically and rationally derived from empirical data, but always posits way more theory structure than the data can sensibly require. 'Rational' theory constructions out of empirical data are those consistent with the analogy of nature -- with things ordinarily accepted as real -- and resort to strange or supernatural hypotheses is resisted as much as possible, even if the data seem to require them. Thus when Newton found he had to posit gravitational action at a distance to account for the observed motions of the planets in his new system of mechanics, that posit was rejected by contemporaries as supernatural, since they were committed to explaining everything by particles in motion, thanks to the dominance of Cartesian theorizing. But the important point is that Newton accepted action at a distance only as a last resort, and even tried to back away from it in the Opticks. In contrast, religious theorizing seems to leap too readily to supernatural posits.

I just tend to be sceptical about the general expectation that ancient peoples were much more advanced than we have assumed. At one time people were amazed to find that many lengths of buildings made by the Ancient Eqyptians were multiples of pi, thus indicating that they had discovered this mathematically sophisticated value before the Ancient Greeks. It was later discovered that the Egyptians measured large distances over land by using a cycle on a pole and counting the number of cycles, thus making distances a mulitiple of pi, even without the Egypticans knowing the number.

Science has been quite international for some time, and it is only during major world wars that communication in science is really cut off, as it was with respect to the development of the dialysis machine in occupied Holland during World War II, or penicillin during the same period. Still, medicine seems to be peculiarly culture-bound, even though human physiology is pretty much the same everywhere. Thus in Germany it is taken for granted now that benfotiamine is an essential supplement for prventing the development of the vascular and neurological complications of diabetes, while in anglo-saxon medicine most endocrinologists and diabetologists have still never heard of this.

Many governments do have general purchasing agreements for drugs with pharmaceutical companies in order to keep the prices of drugs low for their citizens. Canada is one such example. Essentially governments should use their block buying power -- together with their legal regulations, if necessary -- to act as a citizens' union forcing drug prices down. Better still, why not just nationalize the entire medical industry and have the government develop, price, and sell all medical products in service of genuine human need with no loss of efficiency in this quest for serving the demands of wealthy capitalists to make a profit? The problem is far worse than just drugs and medical devices being overpriced. There is also the problem that drugs are developed in the first place to make profits rather than primarily to ameliorate human suffering, and this further induces pharmaceutical firms to lie about research data and to manipulate the market by inducing doctors to prescribe drugs so as to serve profit-making interests rather than human interests.

The answer seems simple. Given that life has come into existence on earth, and given the large number of potential earth-like environments among the huge number of planets elsewhere in the universe, it seems statistically likely that there is life somewhere else in the universe. So belief in the possibility of aliens who might actually come to or come into contact with earth is at least rational. But since 'God' is defined as an infinitely wise, infinitely good, and infinitely powerful being, yet there obviously exists suffering in his creation which appears unnecessary, his existence is palpably self-contradictory, since his infinite goodness and power exclude the existence of facts we know exist. So believing in God is simply self-contradictory.

What about cases of South Pacific aboriginals who, after seeing certain signs which they interpret as implying their imminent demise, become catatonic, suffer depression of respiration, heart rate, and blood pressure, and then quickly die? Melville's novel 'Moby Dick' reports such a case, but anthropologists have confirmed the reality of this phenomenon. Interestingly, guinea pigs that have been badly shocked can also become completely immobile and die under similar circumstances. I'm not sure what is the exact mechanism of death in either case, however.

There's a story that Wolfgang Pauli was always rude to anyone who gave a presentation in front of him at a conference, calling him and idiot and a fool for what he was saying. One researcher, knowing Pauli would object to his results about to be presented, went to speak with Pauli privately about them prior to the talk. Pauli told him then emphatically that he was a fool and an idiot, so when the conference came, Pauli just muttered under his breath, feeling that there was no point in telling the fool once again how dumb he was.

When you express concern that people's lives may decline in quality if they are 'overwhelmed' by indulgence in sex, it also has to be considered that there can be enormous loss of life quality, even to the point of neurosis, from insufficient indulgence in sex. Similarly, overindulgence in chess (Fisher), mathematics (Nash; Erdos), philosophical psychology (Fechner), or sociological research (Max Weber) can make people somewhat damaged, but few seem ready to call these activities 'dangerous addictions' or fret about the need to regulate and control mathematics, sociology, chess to prevent such pathologies. The reason, again, is that we have an irrational fear of sex but not of these other activities. Some argue that marriage is itself just a more elaborate form of prostitution, at least in society prior to recent times, when the woman exchanged sex for a share of her husband's income and his labor as the father figure for her children. It is interesting also that it is a commonplace of anthropology that prostitution comes into existence only in societies where there is marriage, so it is dialectically generated by the artificial restriction of partner availability. In some societies, there is a complete blurring between marriage and prostitution. Thus in Iran, for example, a man can have four permanent wives and any number of temporary wives, with whom he can legally contract to have sexual relations for a month at a time. Iran is an extremely pious society, furious about violations of marriage by adultery, about pornography, about women scantily clad in public, or about frank prostitution, but it seems in effect just to redescribe much prostitution as temporary marriage.

Why not visit a professional hypnotist and ask him to give you hallucinatory suggestions while you are under? One over-the-counter drug with enormous potential to induce hallucinations is insulin, but it seems almost never to be abused, probably since it can potentially cause permanent brain damage or even kill the user. Pushing hypoglycemia to the point where hallucinations supervene would also bring you well into the range of not being able to come out of it on your own, so unless you are fooling around with a group of medical friends, it's best not to try it.

I agree with an earlier poster that many apparent mathematical relations can be superimposed by imagination on any random set of objects, which then look as if they were designed in some sophisticated way. Something like that was done with the people trying to merchandize the mystery caves of New Hampshire as a North American Stonehenge. I always wonder why Stonehenge would have such special mathematical sophistication when so many of the other similar stone structures built around the same time by similar cultures around Europe show little or no sophistication at all. Some are not even alligned with any astronomical orientations.

Another odd thing about the research 'breakthroughs' and news reports in medicine, and perhaps in other fields as well, is that often things that have been known to clinicians for the last 20 years as working hypotheses or basic assumptions are suddenly 'discovered' in some published study that backs up these assumptions with statistics or lab work, so it now becomes 'true' and can be reported as 'major progress' in both medical circles and the public media. The fact that it only confirms what everyone already knew in practice is not mentioned.

To an extent, the money and the science issues merge, since if the science were more advanced then trips to Mars would cost less and we might actually be going there. In the 1960s there was a cartoon called '1999' which showed people travelling around the universe, each in his own spaceship, and this must have seemed reasonable at least to some people at the time. The OP seems to be asking why scientific advance hasn't kept pace with public expectations, which didn't seem unreasonable when they were first formed. I know at least that the stagnation of medical science has been widely recognized and discussed for at least the last five years. The lead editorial in the journal, 'Diabetes Care,' in 1990 expressed its astonishment that diabetes care hadn't been significantly improved or the disease even cured by then, and here we are now nearly a generation later and still no cure is in sight, with next to no clinical improvement achieved either since 1990. Ironically, I wonder whether we have paid a very high price, yet without noticing it, for all the advances made in information technology over the last 40 years. True, we have become much better at filing, sifting, searching, and arranging information, but has this cost us a huge diversion of scientific effort into organizing information rather than generating new discoveries? Historical eras in science seldom perceive their stagnation until after they have gotten past it, so I wonder if we are deeper into a phase of substantive stagnation in science than we recognize? The last major disease to be conquered in medicine was polio nearly 60 years ago; the great expansion of physics was over by the end of the 1930s; the foundational mathematics leading to the development of the computer was finished by the mid-1950s, etc. A person born in 1870 and living until 1950 would have seen the invention of the typewriter, telephone, television, radio, car, airplane, jet, x-rays, refrigeration, atomic power; the development of dialysis for renal disease, insulin for diabetes, the successful treatment for diptheria, tuberculosis, adrenal insufficiency, thyroid insufficiency. But a person born in 1930 and living until 2010, the same lifespan, would hardly have seen comparably dramatic changes. What's happening to us? Shouldn't we have been able to build on the progress up to 1930 and continue to develop at an even faster rate? Instead the curve of scientific progress seems to be flattening out dramatically.

Conventional nutrition theory posits that the only purpose of nutrients is to avoid the characteristic diseases of nutrient deficiency states. But in making this assumption, it simply defines away, a priori, the possibility that getting more of various nutrients than you could possibly get from eating food has no ability to prevent or cure diseases which have nothing to do with nutrient deficiency states. Take for example all the medical benefits now recognized for taking very large doses of vitamin D3, folic acid, the vitamin B1 provitamin benfotiamine, etc., such as you could never get from a normal diet.

Be prepared for flak from the scientific establishment with its academic reputations heavily invested in whatever it is that you are challenging. I was at a presentation of a very clever computer-based proof the four-color problem years ago, of which the presenters were quite confident, since it was logically unimpeachable. They weren't prepared, however, for some outraged old combinatorics professors in the audience who hadn't been able to develop a solution to the problem themselves, however, and who furiously attacked them for offering 'a proof which is no proof at all,' since they defined 'proof' to mean some process which humans could perform in a finite amount of time on a finite number of pages. As Henry Kissinger once said, 'Academic disputes are so vicious because so little depends on them.'

Conventions of what means can legitimately be used in war depend often on the arbitrary list of things which have been used and accepted as legitimate means historically. Thus fire to burn the enemy is legal, since it was used in Antiquity, but a gas attack which disables enemy soldiers by inducing severe nausea, allowing them then to be captured while they are disabled with retching but with no permanent injury to them is illegal. It has a lot to do with conventions of chivalrous combat, in which killing is permitted but poisoning is not. McCain said recently in a Senate speech that he doesn't believe torture should ever be used since it provides only unreliable information. People often say that since those tortured say anything they think their captors want to hear, their statements are seldom objectively informative. Also, if you can wait a while you can get as much information from someone by keeping him awake for three days and then interrogating him as you can from torture, and perhaps the information will be more reliable. If there is less time available, why not use scopolamine, the Nazi's 'truth serum,' which at least doesn't hurt?

Lemur makes a good point about society's obsessive fear and concern about sex perhaps arising from women's historical feeling that sex has to be very important, since it can mean pregnancy, the birth of a child, and all the emotional entanglements of child rearing, having a husband to share the parenting roles, etc. But the fact that these sacredness assumptions regarding sex have now persisted a good forty years after the invention of easy methods of birth control suggests that our morality is anachronistically lagging behind our technology. Since sex now no longer necessarily risks bringing with it all these truly special, emotionally significant implications, there is no longer any objective empirical basis for society to assume that either pornography or prostitution are immoral by carrying cheapening implications for genuinely sacred things like new lives coming into being. So since it is so expensive in terms of all the costs of social regulation and sexual frustration to preserve this now ungrounded sacredness of sexuality, let's stop it -- even if we are 40 years late drawing the necessary conclusions leading to this insight. If your wife normally makes your dinner for you (this usage persists even in the modern world, often at the woman's insistence!), there is clearly some added emotional dimension to the experience of sharing a meal with her than if you eat a meal prepared by a stranger in a fast food restaurant. But just as it would be ridiculous if your wife divorced you if she discovered you had been eating at McDonald's, so too it should be absurd if your wife were to divorce you if she found that you had visited a prostitute, or lusted over photos of a Big Mac while away on a business trip.

I see priests, religions, and churches on a continuum. Why does the first person in some primitive society step forward and say that he has a special revelation about some transcendent mystery? He hopes the rest of the tribe believes that assertion so that he can become a shaman, have special authority, special privileges, and not have to do real work, but just sit around and recite incantations over sick people. For him the key to his power is his ability to induce people to believe in his special access to this transcendent insight, and while sceptics posing a rational challenge to his assertions might weaken his authority among the few thoughtful people in the tribe, public ridicule can destroy his authority among the mass of the people quite quickly. Thus from the shaman at the bottom of the system up to the established church at the top, the whole of religion has always had to fear blasphemy the most.

I think the issue is not one of semantics, but of fundamental phenomenology. Since love and hate are profoundly intertwined, they can be seen either as opposites or as essentially related, depending on which analytical perspective you see as most informative for the particular question you are considering. It often happens, for example, that people eventually fall madly in love with those they initially find repulsive and hateful, but people they find uninteresting from the outset usually never arouse any strong emotions in them. This suggests that love and hate may be intensified emotions which first arise from the repression of their opposites, so in this sense they might be essentially related and thus not true opposites. In the midst of many love relationships there is often a core of hatred over some particular aspect of the beloved which is not quite right, and which becomes all the more intolerable because the rest of the person's features are so intimately embraced, since that brings the disliked feature into a repulsive proximity. Even though Freud's overall perspective is now generally rejected, many of his isolated observations of human behavior remain instructive, and his theory that romantic love arises out of the overcoming of hatred for the parent of the beloved's gender again suggests a close nexus between love and hate. People most hate what deprives them of what they most need, and since the beloved becomes the focus of enormous emotional needs, the failings of the beloved to meet those emotional needs are naturally closely tied to great hatred.

The ultimate point of life is to be doing what gives you the greatest sense of interest and purpose at each moment. Do that and either the rest will take care of itself, or it won't matter. Too many people use their lives instrumentally, foolishly expecting that they will be happy by spending their whole lives doing what they hate in order to become rich or famous, when in fact the value of life depends on how enjoyable each moment is. If you want to think, explore, and indulge your curiosity, then you have to take the academic route, even if the price is being banished to Siberia.

The reason why there is so much reporting of old medical news as new is to disguise the general stagnation into which medicine has fallen. The public expects medical breakthroughs to occur all the time, the medical profession needs them to sustain its authority and inflated income, and the news media require them to sell advertising, so the temptation is irresistable to exaggerate medical progress. Every medical story you see in the media always mentions only the positive aspects of the intervention and never the downsides as part of a general propaganda effort to keep the public happy with the medical establishment, no matter how stagnant it has become. Thus in the present case, there is no mention of the enormously high risk of graft versus host disease this patient will now have to endure as the price for escaping the AIDS threat, or whether he has had a T-cell-depleted bone marrow transplant to avoid GVHD, which then brings with it a massively increased risk of cancer or infection, just as would the immunosuppressive drugs he would have to take to suppress the GVHD risk. Overall, the patient has taken on more medical burdens than he has escaped, but a story like that lacks the necessary uplift required to sell advertising.

If people were playing high-stakes poker, making the kind of bets that could cause a whole family's home, college education savings, cars, etc., to be lost on a single hand, most of us would refuse to participate because we would prefer to avoid that sort of stress. Even if there was an even chance of winning that much money, we simply would not want to have to endure the tension and dread of something that bad going wrong. But then what about life itself? Even if you believe that there is a good chance that your fortune in life will bring as many entertaining and rewarding experiences as negative ones, having human physical existence means that you constantly have to live with the awareness that, at any moment, some terrible fate may befall you that would make life infinitely worse than death itself. After reading this message you might take a bathroom break and find yourself urinating blood, leading to a diagnosis of cancer, resulting in your having to make an existential choice between gaining a few years of low-quality life at the price of enduring the monstrous torture of chemotherapy while sacrificing your children's education fund to pay for your treatment, or just giving up and dying a horrible death instead. The terrifying process of dying that way could go on for years. Having to go around all your life knowing that things like this are always possible creates a dreadful uneasiness, and when evil actually materializes, people often wish they had never had consciousness in the first place so that they would not have had to endure what now occurs. But your chance of escaping the ultimate terrors of life is small, given the certainty of death and the fact that as a being who depends on organization for your health and happiness, living in a world governed by entropy means that the odds are stacked against you. A stab wound in the stomach happens in an instant but can produce an injury lasting a lifetime. If you were just an animal, the fact that half your experiences would probably be good and half bad might give you an acceptable existence, but as a human, your awareness of the possibility of evil will always overshadow your hope for the possibility of things being good, thus giving a negative tone to every experience. The Ancient Greeks understood all of this, which is why their Myth of Silenus had the wise old centaur say, "The best thing for mankind is never to have been born, or failing that, to die as soon as possible." Once you come into existence you are trapped, even if you find life and its negative possibilities too terrifying, since your irrational instinct to keep living no matter how awful life is also closes the escape of suicide. So rather than papering over the insight of the Ancient Greeks with various mythologies about benevolent father-figures in the sky making things all right, wouldn't it be better just to devote the energy historically wasted in religious indoctrination to teaching people how to commit suicide without Angst if that's what they felt they needed to do?