Phi for All

I hate that we spend so much money and still get abominable roads to drive on. I hate that I can't always tell the difference between market demand and corporate marketing. The first is based on what the consumer wants to buy and the latter is based on what business wants to sell. I hate that, intellectually, we claim to prefer the unedited truth, but our brains seem hard-wired to respond better to sound byte lies.

In most cases, you want people working for you to have experience. In the case of legislative political representatives, experience can also be a bad thing by continuing an ineffective status quo. It can even lead to ugly things like corruption, scamming the system, cronyism and misrepresentation. We often see newcomers throw their hat into the political ring saying that they'll use their "new eyes" to more easily see what's wrong with the system and work to correct it. We know that bringing in fresh viewpoints can often invigorate business. Does that really work in politics though? Term limits are favored by the vast majority. Why? So people don't make a career out of politics, and to sever ties with special interests. But term limits means even those who aren't corrupt abusers have to go also. What does that do for meritocracy? I've always thought the best way to have fair representation was to draw our representatives by lottery, almost like a draft. Four years service and you're out. Plenty of ways to make it attractive to the vast majority (Medicare for life, great wages, a nice bonus on completion of term, probably still save a lot of money over the way it is now, and no campaign financing!). You'd avoid career politicians who don't really care about representation, but would you get the kind of ability to compromise that seems necessary at the legislative level? When the subject came up in another thread, it occurred to me that it might be a good thing to have some representation from some of the young college grads in the Occupy Wall Street movement on Capitol Hill. They have the conviction of mind that could keep them from being seduced by the power and greed, they have the fresh ideas that might clean out the current corruption and they better represent what I would like to see our federal government do for its people. But they have no practical experience in politics. Is that good, bad, ugly or "other"?

It could only be called illegal if there is a direct line between the work and the compensation. A lot depends on the work done, of course. If the work is something that could be observed and documented, then the payment of the "gift" might alert the revenue service and they could argue a case. I would imagine there are plenty of things I could do for an employer (such as writing proposals) that no one would ever know I had a hand in (assuming others could simply put their names to the work). Something like that wouldn't be necessarily prosecutable, but it would still be against my morals. However, I might do this if the employer was also a very good friend. I think I could justify having one of my closest friends give me a gift of $10K, and me saying thanks by doing some pro bono work for him. As long as I knew there was no observable line between his gift and mine so there would be nothing to misconstrue as illegal, my friend would be safe. If I didn't know the employer very well, then it would very obviously be both illegal and immoral. Regardless of whether it's illegal or immoral or both (note the emphasis), the "arrangement" seems rather generous and selfless, actually. It doesn't really benefit your wealthy friend at all. He can't write off the payment if it's a gift, so he's losing a lot more taxwise than he would by paying the wage tax on $10k in compensation. Your unemployed friend is the double winner here. So the word "arrange" seems like it's merely in terms of the paperwork involved.

I think you may have just found jobs for some of those young people in Liberty Park....

I firmly believe this is true.

There's the rub. As long as the expectation exists that work will be performed and paid for by the gift of money, your friends are scamming unemployment AND the IRS. Gifts up to US$13,000 (as of 2011) aren't taxed, but would be considered income if there is an exchange of work, and therefore subject to wage taxes. Similarly, if you're paid for any work you must claim it with unemployment so your rate can be adjusted. If your friends could truly work it out where the money and the work were freely given without any expectations, they might be legally in the right. I still don't see how that would work around their personal morals, but some people are more comfortable with grey areas.

Well, I just call it logical progression, from telepathic robot to saving people from household disaster. Nothing supernatural about that. Yeah, see that's where it becomes suspect. You could do it but instead you set up some impossible scenario we could never fulfill. And how is it cheating? You get a hunch and pick the numbers just like everyone else. You say you could win the lottery but choose not to for ethical reasons. Most people would consider it the epitome of good ethics to win all that money and then use it, not for mansions and fast cars, but to found a charitable organization that helps the world somehow. What's wrong with that? Nobody is going to believe you could really do it unless you do it. Not "dumb". I was basing the joke on "doom", an impending tragic fate. The Roomba goes around vacuuming your house while the Doomba goes around saying, "Warning, warning! Do not run down the stairs! Your shoelace is untied! Warning!"

I think if OWS started out with a clear message and an organized agenda, they wouldn't have created the groundswell of support they have now. I know I probably wouldn't trust its purpose as much. It's probably hindsight, I'll admit, but an immediate sense of clarity would've suggested that they had some puppet-master pulling their strings, a group with a hidden agenda. It's what I think of the Tea Party, so it would have been logical to suspect OWS too, even though they tend to affirm my political stances on various subjects.

I love the fact that, although the economy is hurting, it means that manufacturers need to get rid of inventory and there's a lot of 50-70% off sales, even at the grocery store. I love that people are too busy judging celebrity dancing to judge me. I love people who can't help the funny laugh they have.

I hate that we're losing a more supportive village mentality while sitting in our home fortresses trying to recreate the village with Facebook, smart phones and reality TV. I hate that all the good curse words are tied to our anatomy and bodily functions, so that we end up constantly affirming a negative aspect of our sexuality. I hate that so many people who barely passed high school are convinced they're right.

People can't stand to have deeply held beliefs challenged. It invalidates them somehow to be wrong. And like the revolving door on a creationist sepulchre, they keep resurrecting dead old myths over and over, and calling it compelling evidence.

It's just not gonna happen. According to David McRaney at You Are Not So Smart, psychologically speaking, the Backfire Effect is at work. Briefly, he says that when your deepest convictions are challenged by contrary evidence, your beliefs get stronger. It usually happens when a poster doesn't know enough science to fully understand a concept, so they end up convinced that special relativity is flawed, or that they've created perpetual motion. And since science deals with the natural world, supposedly supernatural phenomena gain that air of mystery that only helps solidify the belief in it.

If you can train the robot to warn people of a specific impending danger, I think you'll get lots of scientific recognition. If the robot just points out random occurrences or produces slips of paper it may or may not have written down a few days ago or runs around calling people fat, then I think you will have wasted a lot of time and money. People will find it very suspicious that you don't want to win the lottery (presumably because of some ethical dilemma or vague fear of corruption). Having wealth like that would let you fund all kinds of research into the paranormal. And the stuff about getting to know people and being able to figure out what will motivate them, that's called marketing. It's very common and not supernatural at all. Is the robot idea a good one? I think the robotics sector will want either money or proof of your capabilities before they invest any time talking to you. If you can come up with something more concrete, I have some connections. If you could program a robot that would run around the house saving people from slipping in the bathtub, leaving the gas on and falling downstairs (or even warn them when family will drop by unexpectedly), I would be happy to introduce you to the Vice President of Marketing, Home Robot Division at iRobot. I can see it now. We'll call it the Doomba.

All the incidents you mention have natural explanations. Good scientific experiments can remove the probability of those explanations being plausible, leaving us with only the supernatural explanation, that you are a telepath. You need to figure out how you can test your ability to make sure it's not just probability (waiting long enough hours until "something" dramatic happens at a certain locale), or subconscious triggering (hearing someone sobbing while you're asleep, then waking up and feeling sad), or simple statistics (the odds of finding someone in a metropolitan newspaper named Agatha who gives birth to a boy are not as large as you might think; alternatively, you might have subliminally seen an announcement of Agatha's baby shower weeks earlier).

Is "how" a person thinks different from "what" a person is thinking? I define "what a person is thinking" using the experiment mississippichem suggested. One simple sentence in English that I can send to mississippichem for verification. You use your telepathy to say exactly what the sentence is, then I reveal my sentence and mississippichem corroborates. If you could do that a few times in a row, we could move on to another experiment that didn't involve the computers you know best. So people couldn't say you hacked our PM system.

And the Republican response: http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/david/cain-calls-occupy-wall-street-protesters-ant Nice to know Newt is still very much on message about the privatization of American education. Wasn't TARP and the bank bailouts established during the last days of the Bush administration? Did I miss the memo where we're supposed to forget about those eight years? So, since the Tea Party is protesting American taxes, they're basically saying they're anti-American too. I mean, you know, we have to avoid the double standard, right? I think it's sad that these people don't have to work any harder than this to appeal to their base.

Correct. There has never been a successfully reproduced experiment involving telepathy. Even if someone answered 100% correctly, if it can't be reproduced then it must be a random occurrence of a low probability. Feelings are too indeterminate to use for an experiment in telepathy. I don't think many scientists would accept such a subjectively vague criteria. What people are thinking is a different matter. If I picked a sentence from a book I was reading and thought about it very hard, could you tell me what the sentence is, or at least get close to what it's about? If you could do that twenty times in a row, I could almost guarantee some notice from the scientific community. How many times have you personally won the lottery?

Well, maybe he just doesn't want to.

If an architect asks me to see the great new building plans he has for a 40-story office building, I might first ask what materials he plans on using. If he tells me he's using only wood, with no concrete or steel, I don't need to see his plans to know it won't work. You asked if what you did in your pdf was science, so I asked some questions first. I'm not yet at the point where I need to understand your ideas. If you didn't follow the proper methodology, then your ideas won't be considered science. Does that make sense? You say you can predict anything. If I sat you in a room and asked you to predict which card I was going to pull from the top of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, how would you score by the end of the deck? If I did this 100 times, would you still score as well? Keep in mind that, for this experiment to be successful, you are not allowed to say, "I could have guessed correctly, I just didn't want to". Also keep in mind that, if you have to be struck by lightning to prove your point, the costs for the experiment will have to come out of your pocket.

We see a lot of symmetry in nature, and I think it just represents the simplest way for evolutionary efforts to manifest themselves. Beyond that though, there would seem to be a high survival value in dentition that discourages matter from being caught between them. This means more food gets successfully eaten and appropriately digested, with less decay of the enamel, and fewer teeth get broken off due to torque or pressure from the sides.

Liviu, I confess I have not yet read your 35 page journal. Let me ask this first: Were any of the experiments you did repeatable by others? Could they set up the same test you did and achieve the same results? If not, then your conclusions may be false. Can you make a prediction (not in the psychic sense - just something along the line of, "If I do x, then y will happen")? If you can make a prediction, then you can set up an experiment to test it. If you do it many times with the same results, you can form a conclusion. If others can repeat your experiments and draw the same conclusions, then you have something the scientific community can measure. The results don't even have to be successful. Science doesn't have to be right every time, but it always needs to be methodical.

Irrelevant. Think how tedious it would be having to flip back and forth between multiple threads for replies. This eliminates most redundancy and is most efficient in terms of reading and the effort involved in response. Please don't take this the wrong way; other forums may encourage this but we don't. And it's off-topic to respond to Moderator Notes. Please refrain from doing so in the future.

What kind of mechanism could be used for omnipresence or omniscience? The M theory extension of string theory proposes 11 dimensions. Could a dimension higher than the 3rd give a perspective over the first three that could be considered omnipresence? Unfortunately, M theory isn't predictive so you're left with more untestable ideas.

! Moderator Note One thread per topic, please. It's easier for those interested in the discussion.

No. I did not assume that. I stated: If you're going to ask for responses, please read them thoroughly. And so we're clear on this thread, in order to stay in Speculations, we're going to need to provide something beyond a framework for discussion. We need to make some testable predictions about these ideas or it's going to get moved to the Religion section.