Phi for All

! Moderator Note OK, so not appropriate for mainstream, and lacking enough evidential support to be a speculation. We can open this again if you come up with more than just feelings.

We like long stories. Short ones leave us with too little information.

You're welcome! We all want to improve ourselves, to learn more and gain in wisdom and experience. We all have to build on what's already there, adding to ourselves, so stop thinking about it as if you're "fixing" yourself. Work on adding to your positive experiences in life. There are processes you need to figure out that let you be yourself, and hopefully realize "you" aren't the problem. The problem is your perspective on "you" is overly harsh and judgemental, and sometimes that's like wearing a sign that says, "I'm not worthy". It can push people away who wanted to get to know you.

Do those things if you think they'll help, but my point was that a focus on fixing yourself may not be needed. If you focus on your relationship with others, and do what you can to help friends and family, you may find out that you're more than capable of handling life just fine. Helping others and finding out how awesome you really are will help you be more optimistic about everything.

What if the first sentence is responsible for the second sentence? Can you learn to stop being so hypercritical of yourself? Surely it must affect the way others see you. It sets you apart, which is automatically lonely. Focusing on others will give you a better self-image, and if you stop criticizing yourself for a while, it will be easier to see your strong traits. Respect for you has to grow from respect for yourself.

Please don't take this the wrong way. We can give you advice about dealing with adversity, but as soon as it becomes all about a mental health issue, the site's policies demand we recommend you see a professional, since nobody should be offering diagnoses over the internet. That said, I'll make an observation. You're very fixated on yourself, and like many highly intelligent people, if you do that too long you can become hypercritical. You mention that you'd like to help people, so why not try turning that focus on interactions with others, and helping them with their problems? Most people are better at solving other people's dilemmas than their own, and you may find it gives you more confidence and less anxiety about your own competence. As for the choice in front of you, it sounds to me like you've set up a false dilemma. Studying zoology now doesn't mean you can't study medicine later, does it? It seems like a similar path and knowledge gained about non-human anatomy often helps us understand our own better. Both fields of study will probably help you develop a more outward focus and give you confidence in your choices and abilities.

Or YOU don't know. Your knowledge has been updated a few times now. The evidence is starting to show us that you've misunderstood quite a bit. If I were you, I'd go back and study mainstream science. It's more trustworthy than what you've been reading, obviously. The last thing you should ever do in science is start guessing without knowing the basics.

Study mainstream physics FIRST. Then you'll be able to tell when a new theory is needed.

! Moderator Note Please start another thread about this more political issue, so we can save this thread to talk about the news story. And don't get me wrong. We need to talk about our behavior in space as more nations and private companies leave the planet, just not in this Science News thread.

You should study the Big Bang Theory, which is based on a painstakingly thorough mathematical model called Lambda Cold Dark Matter. Then make the claim that "science hasn't got a clue what is going on". The fact that you could make this statement tells us all you don't know what you're criticizing. What the model and the theory tell us, working backwards, is that the universe was much smaller, hotter, and denser but suddenly expanded and cooled. The model spends all its power detailing what happened just after that rapid expansion, but our skills can only take us back to a fraction of a second AFTER expansion began. So the truth is we can't know if the moment before expansion was the beginning of space and time, The energies and geometries at the exact moment of expansion are beyond our present ability to fathom. So the point is, anyone who talks about "before the big bang" is guessing. But we know TONS about what happened after. And you've been told. The best supported explanation to the evolution of the universe is the BBT/LCDM model. You should study it before criticizing it. That's a bit like reviewing a book without reading it, based on the fact that you can't make out what the cover is all about.

! Moderator Note We gave you a LOT of opportunities to explain yourself, but when asked rational questions and faced with reasoned refutations, you resort to the childish behavior displayed above. I warned you before that this may not be the site for you. We are a science discussion forum that has rules against posting video-only explanations, and it's clear you want to soapbox about your misconceptions without any rigor at all. We don't support that type of guesswork, and you should find a place that does. We aren't going to lower our standards, so please make everyone, including yourself, happy by either behaving according to the site's rules, or just leave and go preach your mistakes elsewhere. Thread closed, don't bother to bring this subject up again without some supportive evidence.

I'd also vote for writing. A definite leap from oral traditions that led to an increase in overall intelligence, which made all our other traits that much better. I think you mean "heels". And congratulations, I don't see how you do it! Especially the stilettos!

Happy New Year! Enjoy, work hard, and don't worry too much about past mistakes. Save the hindsight for 2020.

! Moderator Note An off-topic pet theory hijack has been split to Trash here.

! Moderator Note Careful here. You know you can't introduce pet theories in mainstream discussions. It's off-topic here.

! Moderator Note Let's make this official. No more videos for you. We don't like them here. They're VERY difficult to deal with in a discussion forum, as the quality of audio and visual varies too greatly for consistency, and quoting is tedious at best. So write out your work while you're here, and save your videos for other, less rigorous sites. There are plenty out there, and we don't want to be one of them.

I read Vogel's Why the Wheel is Round. Very informative, not too technical, and extremely insightful. I look forward to reading this one as well. Happy New Year, studiot!

Any broad leanings toward math/physics, biology/chemistry, or perhaps engineering/computers?

Probably because your "theory" was made up to fill gaps in your own knowledge. That's why it seems so perfect to you, and only you. No offense, many people do this. It's untrustworthy, but many do it. You should study mainstream science if you're curious why people refute your claims. Be warned though, there is no truth, especially Truth, in science. Theory is the highest achievement there is.

You're generalizing. All people aren't idiots. The world is a mixture of the absurd and the sublime, and everything in between. If you choose to focus on idiocy, that's what you'll see. If you focus on compassion, you'll see thousands of groups all over the world striving to embrace compassionate responses to many problems. If you focus on freedom, you'll see people everywhere continuing the efforts of those who came before them to create fairness and liberty, and to stamp out oppression wherever they see it. You think the world is in a horrible state, but I'm not sure what you're comparing it too. We're in the most peaceful period the world has ever known. There are fewer wars around the world than ever before. More people have an education than ever before. Many areas have far less pollution than they've had in the past. It may seem bad but it's been far worse. Personally, I think it's a bit idiotic to only look at the bad side of high intelligence. We're the only species capable of leaving the planet on our own, and eventually that might lead to a bigger respect for what we've got here.

Too many people don't have a proper education, and so they rely overly on emotions. Emotions get things done, but perhaps we should focus more on using our intellects to decide our course, then strengthen those decisions with our passions, instead of the other way around. I think it's too easy to label us idiots. We have a unique form of intelligence (as far as we know), and it has many consequences in our search for explanations and solutions.

At some point in the far future this may be more practical and cost-effective than making some form of adaptive clothing, but for now it's MUCH easier to make a tool to solve specific problems than to physically change our bodies. Maybe a few centuries of using drones and robots will give us time to work on our own body editing.

Magically?

Trying what, exactly?

If you're talking about the effect, by definition it focuses on stuff that's not needed, so your OP is asked and answered. If you're talking about the desire for new tools, I don't think we'll ever tire of it. We can, however, debate what makes a good tool, and what is merely marketing manipulation. Is that new smartphone an organizing time-saver, or is it a time-sucking diversion? Is a "fully-loaded" automobile a better value than one without all the bells and whistles? Or should we all take buses? If you're talking about the stuff we actually consume/use up, we have our own affluence to blame. The better off people are, the more new stuff they want to try, the more they want to taste, the more they want to have. We tend to abuse this, which has the add-on effect of making more people affluent, so the cycle continues. Can you solve this problem without destroying many economies? If you stop making so much stuff, who benefits first? Who feels the impact first?