Thread: End Game - Depopulation

Originally Posted by Black_Eagle

Look, a lot of what was stated in those links sounds like a bunch of religious paranoia created in response to a world that is increasingly losing its faith to be replaced with more tangible versions of truth.

Personally, I do buy into the idea that there is more to ancient civilization than we know. For some reason you seem to correlate the ancient people being more technologically advanced than we know with them being very intelligent. Therefore, they are correct about 2012 being the doomsday and therefore it must be the government blah blah blah.

I never said anything about 2012, i kind of just dragged this whole thing off topic about ancient civilizations and how advanced they were. Didn't the aztecs perform brain surgery?

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Anyway, there really is no telling what's in store for us the next couple of years, there's a lot of possibilities though. I'm going to stop posting all this conspiracy stuff on here. But if you really want to know what's going on, research it on the net, specifically infowars.com , it's not conspiracy, a lot of that stuff on that site is true but not on mainstream news. If anything you can check out that site, and compare it to mainstream news...then just sort out the bulls**t for yourself.

But one thing for sure is that the economic system crash is inevitable, and I see things going downhill from there. I really hope this will get better though.

Originally Posted by HaRd_WiReD

I never said anything about 2012, i kind of just dragged this whole thing off topic about ancient civilizations and how advanced they were. Didn't the aztecs perform brain surgery?

No ancient civilization performed brain surgery. They did perform skull surgery. I'm not in the mood to research it and don't know off the top of my head, but it has something to do with a condition where pressure builds up in the head. They would drill a hole through the skull to relieve the pressure. I believe that skulls showing the surgery have been found in Russia as well, though I could be wrong. That I know off, all the skulls that have been found were healed indicating that the patient lived for a good time after the surgery.

This does not mean that they were advanced: You or I could do it in the woods with a flint drill. It does mean that they were smart and made a good guess.

I'd dispute it was because they were smart; bore holes in the skulls were actually part of a religious ceremony to let demons out of the brain.

I don't know if releasing pressure was another reason but certainly the above was a factor.

I don't see how that impunes their intelligence. They had a problem and a model. The model was an accurate description of the problemto the extent that it allowed them to solve said problem. That's intelligence in action. We have better models today, not more intelligence.

It impunes their intelligence because there was no rational reason (i.e. evidence) that it either worked, or that there was a problem in the first place, and the result of the operation is a bloody big hole in your head and quite possibly death through blood loss or infection.

The majority of people in developed countries are definitely more intelligent than they were historically. Genetically it is disputable, but the intelligence which we learn, and the intelligent approaches we have learned as a society (for example skepticism) have clearly improved over time historically.

I.Q. tests also show a constant rise since their implementation (to the present day). Some say that's due to more visual environments, but whatever the reason, the increase is extremely apparent.

Originally Posted by Xei

It impunes their intelligence because there was no rational reason (i.e. evidence) that it either worked, or that there was a problem in the first place, and the result of the operation is a bloody big hole in your head and quite possibly death through blood loss or infection.

I'll have to do more research on this. I believe that the reason they would have had to believe that it worked was the cessation of pain though and that said pain would be their reason for knowing that there was a problem in the first place.

Originally Posted by Xei

The majority of people in developed countries are definitely more intelligent than they were historically. Genetically it is disputable, but the intelligence which we learn, and the intelligent approaches we have learned as a society (for example skepticism) have clearly improved over time historically.

That's just cultural bias. They were adapted to our environment, we are adapted to ours. I see no reason to consider scepticism to be an aspect of intelligence. It is something that is learned and hence not an adequate or even relevant measure of intelligence. The ability to learn scepticism however would be a measure of intelligence

Originally Posted by Xei

I.Q. tests also show a constant rise since their implementation (to the present day). Some say that's due to more visual environments, but whatever the reason, the increase is extremely apparent.

I was once asked who discovered North America on an IQ test. I don't see the relevance of IQ to intelligence. Again, It measures what our culture deems to be intelligence. How many members of our culture could reliably navigate the pacific in a wooden canoe by stars without a sextant? We haven't changed much genetically in about 60,0000 years. You could take a human baby from 30,000 years ago and raise them in a modern culture and they would be every bit as intelligent by our standards.

Well, I was reading something similar to this in Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman and he talks about how scepticism has been ingrained in modern people; think of my point like this:

You pluck somebody from modern society, and somebody from the ancient Aztecs, and put them in a tent with a witch-doctor, who tells them that their intestines will fall out unless they eat some mud, close their eyes, and dance around for a bit.

Would you not label the person more likely to follow the witch-doctor's advice (i.e. the Aztec) as less intelligent than the other?

I'd already said that we are genetically the same; the point is that intelligence doesn't have a heritability value of 1. Modern society teaches us intelligence.

(How this discussion arose I can't remember but let's roll with it ).