Delta1212

No one, possibly excepting certain professionals, actually "needs" power tools either. Or backyard propane grills, or recreational aircraft or laser pointers or compound bows or any number of the other near limitless amount of non-essential things that pose a danger to yourself or others if you are an idiot or an asshole who insists on using them irresponsibly.

That presumes that a change in timing and circumstance wouldn't have altered what creature or creatures expanded into the niches left vacant by the extinction. The space rock may very well have killed off a variety of different forms of life that would have taken the place of mammals as the new group of dominant megafauna. some breeds of dinosaur survived to become modern birds as it is. It's possible more would have done so, or that some other tangent that life moved down that was clipped off by having a rock dropped on its head would have flourished during a more gradual decline in dinosaurian dominance. It's really too big of an event to predict what would have happened because by its very nature it erased a lot of "what ifs" that we simply have no way of knowing about. An eventual decline in dinosaurs as we know them either way doesn't mean what comes next is also inevitable, or even likely.

By that logic, there are an awful lot of things that should be banned because they are dangerous in the hands of morons.

Nobody knows what would have happened. An intelligent civilization might have evolved from some other line of animal or it might not have arisen at all. Mammals as we currently know them almost certainly wouldn't exist, though.

Why is that the "probable" cause? Not only did you present no evidence, but the earliest Cro-magnon specimens are from right around the time that Neanderthals were dying out. Neanderthals pre-date Cro-magnons by quite a lot, so they self-evidently can't have gotten any prominent features of their sub-species by interbreeding with a population that did not exist yet. Considering that it rather seems that you pulled that out of your ass, perhaps you should refrain from admonishing others for doing "guesswork."

But not nearly as useful as 1000 measurements.

From this, of course, we can deduce that either time travelers don't exist, or they consider Stephen Hawking to be that kid whose parties nobody wants to go to.

Well, I don't know about you, but I have some Neanderthal in my ancestry. I expect at least most people of European descent have a good few percentage points of Neanderthal in them.

I don't think it's so much a secularization in particular as it is that MLK and the Civil Rights movement in general is very dumbed down and kind of sanitized on a high school level. It basically goes Rosa Parks -> sit ins -> I have a dream -> assassination. And for most people, until maybe your last year or so of schooling, you'd think Rosa Parks was a woman who spontaneously refused to give up her seat and sparked a movement instead of being someone who volunteered for the role and was carefully vetted by an already well organized movement specifically for that purpose. Anything about MLK's personal education and beliefs tends to get glossed over beyond a superficial "inspired by Ghandi's example of non-violent protest." He made allusions to everything from the Bible to Shakespeare in his speeches, but that barely gets touched on, and while I had heard of the Letter from a Birmingham jail, I didn't actually read it until college. Just in general, we have a tendency to cartoonize our historical figures and distill them down to a few achievements and sound bytes and anything that doesn't fit neatly within the confines of that simple narrative just gets dropped from the curriculum. It's essentially parablized history.

If you can travel at faster than light speed from point A to point B, there exists some frame for which your arrival at B precedes your leaving at point A.

The problem is causality, rather than casualties. If you can outrun a photon, you could return to your starting point and arrive before you left. Robots wouldn't fix that.

If that were true, the term "anatomically modern humans" would be completely redundant.

Yeah, they're all identical right down to the little bumps and divots that make up the texture of the skull.

If there are Neanderthal hybrids, and Neanderthals are a separate species, doesn't that, by definition, require some population of modern humans for them to hybridize with? You can't have a half-human half-Neanderthal if humans don't exist.

Then they should be easy to list for the sake of the discussion?

I think there is a bit of a feedback loop going. Let's assume someone with a college degree is more qualified than someone without a college degree. If you have 10 job openings and 5 people apply who have a degree and 15 apply who don't, those 5 people with a degree are pretty much guaranteed a position and the 15 people without one have to compete for the remaining 5 slots amongst themselves. If you have 10 job openings and 15 people with college degrees apply and 5 don't, a college degree no longer guarantees you one of the jobs because you are now competing with far more people who have the same qualification, and now the people without a degree have no shot at getting into a position at all. Once you have gone from scenario 1 to scenario 2, a college degree stops being a sufficient qualification and starts being a necessary one. That means more people trying to get a degree because now it's no longer really a choice whether to get one or not, and failing someone out of college becomes a much bigger deal because the consequences for the student of not graduating are much more severe than they would have been in the first scenario. That leads to an ever increasing number of people with degrees, which means that degrees become ever more necessary and you have to do even more to give yourself that leg up that a degree used to be over all of the other job applicants who now also have a degree. We've made college mandatory without also making sufficient moves to cover it as essential education the way that schooling through high school currently is.

I know what you're talking about generally, but what do you personally mean by "transcend"? There are a lot of different things that could mean that all impact the answers to that question. If the Singularity has any real meaning, we're already on the other side of it. The Singularity is predicated on greater than human intelligence being able to rapidly speed up progress and create every most advanced intelligences that rapidly outpace what humans could have done on their own in any reasonable timeframe or even at all. The moment the first (modern) computer was switched on is a decent approximation of the moment the Singularity took place. At that time, human + computer became more intellectually powerful than any human was alone, even if the computer alone was far from being smarter than a human. The explosive pace of technological development that has occurred since machine computing began to spread should be indicative of this. We're already on the post-Singularity exponential curve made possible by the superhuman intelligences that are the merging of humans, advancing hardware and increasingly sophisticated software.

Are you looking on desktop or mobile? The desktop site gave a breakdown by state, race and allowed to filter by total or per capita. New Mexico has a scary per capita police shooting rate. Total number of white people shot so far by police was 388 and total number of black people was 194. The per capita was, iirc, 1.9 something white people per million shot by police vs 4.56 (I think) black people per million shot by police. Native Americans were actually the highest per capita group killed by police.

So based on that, exactly twice as many white people as black people have been killed by police this year in the US, but because of the population disparity, a black person is about 2.5 times as likely to be shot by police as a white person.

Do you think you could cite two or three instances of police gunning down an unarmed white man in the past month? Also, how does the fact that police taze people more than they shoot them change the fact that they also shoot people? The instances of police shooting unarmed people in the news aren't false, and those alone are too frequent, regardless of what else the police do. Nobody believes that every single police interaction ends with someone getting shot, but the fact that it ends with anyone who isn't an immediate threat to police or others getting shot is a problem. The fact that lots of people don't get shot by police doesn't make the instances where people do somehow less important.

Is there a reference to what that actually means? Because I was pretty sure that IQ scores were normalized for a 100 average for both genders, with the primary difference being that men tend to group slightly more at the extreme ends with women bunching more towards the center. That could easily be an artifact of women being acculturated to squash their academic potential combined with the process of bringing everyone to a 100 hundred average with a bell curve for the total population, and the difference could be being eliminated or even swing slightly in the other direction now, but it's difficult to tell exactly what they mean because it seems like the article is implying that women are scoring higher than men on average, which I didn't think was physically possible based on how the tests were scored. Then again, I'm not an IQ test expert, so I could just be mistaken.

I think Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" actually does a remarkable job of addressing much of the criticism of Black Lives Matter in this respect despite being written about an entirely different set of protests and ones that are today largely seen as heroic. Relevant excerpts: "You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative." "We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." "I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured." Full text for reference: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I used to obsess over that stuff and take all the online IQ tests and looked at things that attempted to approximate IQ by SAT scores and things like that. In truth, though, I have no idea what my IQ is because I've never sat for a pro tired test, and frankly, I don't really care. It's just a number. It doesn't mean anything. How you score on a test of any kind of talent or ability matters far less than what you use that ability for. You could be the smartest person in the world, but if all you use it for is to sit at home on the couch posting about how you have a super high IQ, then good for but that's not really very impressive. Likewise, if you do truly brilliant work in any field of human endeavor, nobody is going to care what number you got on an intelligence test. Internet IQ tests are for eggheads what standing in front of a mirror and flexing is for meatheads.

I'm more or less content with us all having the time that we have, however much that is, but I wouldn't mind knowing what happens after I've gone. Where humanity goes from here. The overall fate of the universe. And, ultimately, where it all came from and what is "really" going on on a deep level. All questions I'll never get a real answer too that I'd like before I check out.