albania

It's an interesting question and an interesting(entertaining?) discussion. I don't see how one could defend a position that basically says some people are better than others in absolute terms. But, i do think most people would find it easy to say that some people are better than others at a particular skill, and I think most of the friction in this thread is how one interprets on what end of the spectrum the original premise was.

The question in philosophical terms is almost impossible to answer, it's too broad. Speaking from the heart it's as many have already pointed out in the thread: treat everyone with equal measure and then we're all the same.

EventHorizon

its obvious that we aren't all the same though. smart people get paid better, sexy people get more attention, and depressed people get lonely because nobody wants to hang with a downer. what sucks is that its almost impossible to quantify "better" but i think if someone sat down for 30 years or so to dissect every aspect of a human being into one dimensional value spectrums, it would be possible to give a mean (average, not unfriendly) score to everyone to include talents etc.

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Poetry

Yes, but how would we decide which talents and behaviors were desirable and which were not? How would we assign value to talents? Would all be weighted equally, or would certain talents/behaviors be assigned more weight?

It sounds, on the surface, like it would be easy. That would be incredibly incorrect. Give me any five people from this board and it would be impossible to have them agree on any such system and its value distribution.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

EventHorizon

yeah each skill would be its own category and the ability for a person to perform that skill a number of times successfully would be that person's score in that skill. at least in EH-land thats how it'd go

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Willravel

Humans are all humans. Some people are born with slightly different predispositions or physical characteristics, but if you're talking about bare-bones worth, all humans are equal. I am no greater than you are. Once we all can admit that to each other, then we can get to appreciating those little things that make us different.

EventHorizon

i disagree. i know for a fact my best friend is a better human being than i am because he is more athletic, more intelligent, more sympathetic to righteous causes, and 10x the ladies' man i'll ever be. i'm not resentful for it, but i accept that hes just worth more.

the way i see it is with those hypothetical scenarios of trapped on an island or earth is about to blow up, and you have to pick certain people from the folk you know to come with you. don't get me wrong i think my friends are awesome, but some of them did nothing with their lives, some are born to be congressmen.

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

filtherton

Athletic people consume more than their share of oxygen. Compassionate people ruin the Randian utopia that would surely ensue if no one helped anyone do anything ever. Beautiful people ruin the notion that the people actually deserve what they get. Intelligent people are invariably elitists who lord their intelligence over everyone else from their ivory towers. War is peace. etc.

Value is one of the most subjective quantities in existence. There will never be a day where we can all be reduced to n-dimensional data points and rated objectively by our value.

Poetry

Goddamn, it's times like this I want to make love to my monitor.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

Willravel

I never knew you felt this way about me. I'm flattered.

filtherton

Aww, shucks. Don't go making me feel special.

EventHorizon

truth hurts

---------- Post added at 06:57 AM ---------- Previous post was at 06:56 AM ----------

but it still doesn't change the fact that the person who possesses those qualities is better than you (in terms of personal ability, no societal impact) in some aspect that can be measured

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Poetry

What about really, really talented rapists? I mean, I know I'm a horrible rapist. Does that make someone who rapes three women a week a better person than me? They certainly have more raping skills.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

EventHorizon

haha well if you want to factor "rape" into the value of a human being, go for it. i was talking about things like reaction times, healing times, capacity to learn (administer identical tests over an interval of time), ratio of setting goals to meeting goals, and other such nonrape things

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Poetry

But rape has been a very necessary function of society. Most, if not all, of us would not be here if our ancestors weren't talented and successful rapists.

Which means talent at raping is much more valuable than healing time or how long it takes your mana to regen.

As a side note, I have these +2 pauldrons of raping that I'm willing to part with for 5 gold, if you're interested in buffing your stats.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

LunarEclipse

I believe our brain is our consciousness/"soul". There are one hundred billion nerve cells (give or take a few) and everyone is wired differently.

Here is a very good article which discusses this in depth and way better then I could.

In Praise of Self-Deception

So if we get down to physiology, if we are all wired differently then can one be wired better then another? Can rapists help raping, can psychopaths really control their urge to murder?

LunarEclipse.

__________________
"Know thyself?" If I knew myself, I'd run away. ~
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

EventHorizon

our means of reproduction doesn't hinge on raping people anymore so i say that all of your "raping people" WoW gear is just the stuff of an age gone by the wayside

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Baraka_Guru

All intercourse is rape.

Property is theft.

Subjectivity is illusory.

Deep down inside we're all the same.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

Ourcrazymodern?

Why not? You've already joined the club.

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

Poetry

In my defense, WoW is still one of the biggest MMORPGs out there. So that's relevant.

Our means of reproduction never hinged on rape. It just was the most successful way of truly conquering your enemies and claiming a territory with lasting success. Europe alone would be radically different if this were not so.

So, at one time, successfully being able to rape and have reproductive offspring was of top priority and, therefore, top value. (In fact, in some countries, it still is.)

And if you're saying that ability to rape successfully is no longer of any value, you're also saying that values change as society changes.

Which means that if any such study as you suggest was performed, it would only be able to apply to one time period.

And since there are currently a total of three (theorized) universal laws (and even that is under much debate) because societies have such varying values and ideas of talents at any given time, that further causes the proposed study to only be able to assign quantified values to talents in one small section of society during one brief time period.

Even with that, you have to get your researchers to agree on how to assign values to "talents" and behaviors. (Not to mention, behaviors is an entirely other mess.)

It's an impossible feat.





Sometimes, just sometimes, having a degree in Sociology is vaguely useful. The rest of the time, not so much.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

EventHorizon

...


but not our country, and not in today's society, which i think is the context of which the question was asked. would a different scoring system be needed in the future? absolutely. but the thought that every one is equal (some people are just better at other things and other people are better at others) or that somehow nature compensates for a deficiency somehow is ridiculous.

yup, but it'd be worth it.

which laws are you referring to?

i could care less about behaviors. also, i'm not making a prescriptive statement about what talents are bad and good, but i think you're getting too specific. think of it as IQ tests for more than just your IQ. not degrees or technical skills, but innate abilities like "probability to attract opposite sex after making an approach" or "rate at which person decreases their run time" or "number of fights entered/fights won"

this "different but equal" business sounds eerily similar to "separate but equal" when in fact we're all together and unequal.

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Poetry

Oh, god, too many quotes. I'm not using them to reply-- sorry, I'm a dick and am getting out of the office in ten minutes.


Means of reproduction did not hinge on rape, meaning that we could have children without rape.

However, rape was a necessary function to our current society and population distribution as we know it.

They're two separate ideas.

As for your reference to "today's society", you're being incredibly ethnocentric. What is "today's society"? Does "today's society" only include Western individualistic culture, or are we also including collectistic cultures (which have a radically different set of social values)? Does "today's society" include third world countries? If so, does being particularly good at performing infibulation count as a talent?

Universal laws are so much under debate that I could not genuinely give you one. I suggest Googling something like (sociology "universal laws") or ("universal laws" "human behavior"). Or if you have access to JSTOR, their library is amazing.

You don't care about behaviors?? This entire thread was started on evaluating behaviors. Check the OP.

You're trying to assign stats to talents like we're playing D&D. It doesn't work that way. We've established that some talents are good and others... not so much. How do you assign those values in a study? I'm specific because I've had to do this, because people think it's so easy to design some half-assed study because they want to know the answers or prove a point. So they do and then churn out some incredibly inaccurate information that they go screaming from the rooftops is the honest truth of the world and then people like Fox News and Yahoo! go putting it on the front page and warp the next generation.

Also, IQ tests are inherently flawed and were one of those piss-poor designs I mentioned in the above paragraph.

All the talents you listed (run-time, approach, fights) are all physical stats that can be improved with practice, not something that is necessarily going to be innate. Which leads them back to behaviors and personality traits along the lines of "desirous of personal growth" which others can read as "never self-satisfied" or "overachieving tendencies" (which are negative traits).

And I'm not arguing that we're all the same.

I'm just arguing that your blase approach to designing such a study and how easy it would be to determine talents and assign them values in such a way as to provide an accurate sense of a person's value with a total picture of each person shows a desperate need of education in the field of social science.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

EventHorizon

nuh-uh!

haha ok dude i'm getting tired of trying to get my point across, you win

---------- Post added at 06:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:48 PM ----------

and i was referring to just American society, isolationism ftw

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

KirStang

While you guys argue the merits of the case, I'm waiting to see those pics OP mentioned.

__________________

EventHorizon

back in the mood to debate i guess.... and to see OPs pictures


whats wrong with being ethnocentric?

also, i'm not saying that such a study would be easy at all, it would take generations to get it down. however i disagree with you that "never self satisfied" and "overachieving tendencies" are always negative traits. to me those both sound like traits of innovators who want to improve the world, but to someone else it might sound like someone with low self-esteem. i think we have two different ideas about what "talent" is. from what i understand of your posts, its the ability to perform a task. i dont completely disagree with that but i think the word "talent" relates more to things people are born with like a quicker wit etc...

since when do actions need to be good or bad? someone's ability to memorize text can be good or bad depending on what they use it for, but it'd still be possible to test them on that and quantify how good they are at it (how many characters/words/whatever they can memorize until they mess up). i challenge you to name one characteristic (not task) that a person can have a natural advantage for, and not be able to quantify it.

---------- Post added at 12:12 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:10 AM ----------

EDIT: i found a cool book on my shelf that i havent picked up in a long time called "The Measure of Man" by a dude named Stephen Jay Gould. its very relevant to this thread

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

LunarEclipse

LOL. That would get the thread going in a whole other direction. I don't have rights to post pictures yet, sorry

__________________
"Know thyself?" If I knew myself, I'd run away. ~
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

chinese crested

Surely the more well rounded people would have more of a place than you are giving them credit for event :-) . I also dont understand on like this totem pole of qualities, you rank as a skill 'ability with the ladies'. Like thats something incredibly special - not 'fantastic interpersonal skills that can get the most out of those the person is working with' but 'good at pulling the ladies'.
I am afraid you would think I mix with wierdos - people who judge a person - as we all do when we are deciding what we think of them - by 'heart and intent'. Maybe the fact that most of them are 'more mature' and closer to the grave gives them a different perspective on life and the world.

Poetry

This, and several other things in your most recent post, illustrate to me that you're never going to grasp concepts basic to social science. Hopefully you'll end up being forced to take a class or two and something will sink in.

Until then, I'm out of this thread.

__________________
"You know what? Fuck the moon! He controls our water and our women. I've had enough!"

EventHorizon

i've taken soc sci 101, i just dont see how making claims that something being "bad" or "good" is scientific at all. when was the last time any textbook made a prescriptive statement about a condition, viewpoint, or event? its personal opinion that makes certain things good or bad. but then again maybe i'm wrong and it sounds like you've spent alot more time studying this than i have. would you care to make like a DJ and break it down for me? (sorry for the terrible jokes, Jazz's influence is irresistible)

moving onwards:
@ChineseCrested, i completely agree with you. picking up girls isn't the ONLY thing that should be quantified; i was just throwing out examples. "competency at making friends" and "propensity to use words, not fists" are right up there too but being a 21 year old who is young, dumb, and full of common sense, that's what my mind jumped to first.
@Baraka, just you saying those things makes me think that you're reciting a creed for a secret guild of assassins... bookish assassins

__________________
Does Marcellus Wallace have the appearance of a female canine? Then for what reason did you attempt to copulate with him as if he were a female canine?

Quote:

Originally Posted by canuckguy Pretty simple really, do your own thing as long as it does not fuck with anyone's enjoyment of life.

Baraka_Guru

Ourcrazymodern?

__________________
BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

chinese crested

Back to the original post. Not good taste to send a co worker unsolicited swimwear shots and that sort of thing. Chatting about how well you feel your work out stuff is going, and how much better you feel physicaly and emotionaly to fellow staff over coffee - thats acceptable. You might well look good in a bikini - but you wouldnt really expect to wear one to a Buck House tea party and be let in - unacceptable dress code.

kowalskil

Yes, a "better person," in general, is very hard to recognize. On the other hand, I see a lot of people who are better than I am in terms of specific attributes--better memory, better physical strength, better health, etc.

Ludwik Kowalski (see Wikipedia)
.
.

__________________
Ludwik Kowalski, author of a free ON-LINE book entitled “Diary of a Former Communist: Thoughts, Feelings, Reality.”
It is a testimony based on a diary kept between 1946 and 2004 (in the USSR, Poland, France and the USA).