Walter, hope you're doing ok.

[Burton Radons]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Brad Roberts wrote:
>>
>> Not so fun fact: Numerous people died because they either brought 
>> their generator or charcoal grill inside. You'll poison yourself even 
>> running the generator in the garage with the garage door wide open. It 
>> got so bad that the newspaper ran front page headlines warning people 
>> about this.
> 
> With a judicial system that espouses random transfers of fortunes (the 
> words Punitive, Starbuck's coffee mug, and car mirror text come to 
> mind), every generator will have to carry a prominent tag that says 
> "don't ever use this, especially if you need to".

As far as I know warning signs have no effect on potential for 
litigation. If you put out a live wire and have a sign saying "don't 
touch this wire it's live and you'll die" and someone touches it, their 
family can still sue you successfully for making a public hazard in the 
first place.

So I think warning signs are put there simply because companies don't 
want their customers to be hurt. There really aren't that many 
sociopaths around.

> Not that it helps, I bet every charcoal grill already boasted a tag that 
> says "not for indoor use".
> 
> I think the worst possible combination of personality traits is an 
> enterprising attitude combined with profound ignorance.
> 
> OTOH, if these morons didn't get pruned every once in a while, the 
> average IQ of mankind today would be about 20. Mother Nature does 
> Eugenics for us, sparing us the moral conundrums.

I don't see much evidence that intelligence is a matter of genetics. I 
know a lot of smart children of stupid people and vice versa; like 
sexual preference it seems to be a massively-complex cog of womb, 
early-life, and explorational experiences. Smart children might be a 
somewhat more common product of smart parents, but I'd be willing to 
wager that that's because they're presented with stimulating materials 
early on (which they might or might not latch onto) rather than due to 
some kind of smart gene.

If there were a correlation, you'd expect that the most extraordinary 
thinkers would have exclusively come from extraordinary thinkers (since 
random mutations wouldn't cause such drastic and beneficial 
differences), but that's not how it's played out. Isaac Newton was the 
son of a farmer, for example. Albert Einstein was the son of a salesman. 
That their parents were moderately successful for their time (which 
might or might not be a sign of strong intelligence) might be seen as a 
precondition for them receiving the education their children needed to 
reach their potential.

In such a pseudo-randomised situation smart people will always tend to 
congregate and build on one another, and our duty is to make sure that 
pre-existing social conditions don't become the limit to a person's 
intellectual potential. That's not really helped by having a "snobs 
versus slobs" mentality, which you're not expressing here but is a very 
common consequence of this train of thought.