..except when surfing on a cellphone in between bites of my Sausage & Egg McMuffin.

Becoz mat salleh wan more cheong hei mah... got more figures to crunch, more fun, lol. Anyway, after my recent experience with feng shui wisdom in Guangzhou, I decided to take old sayings with a little salt.

Behavioral science and mathematics don't mix? Well I dunno. What if I say there's an 90% chance my mum will flip when I blast my CD above 110 decibels. Why can't I express that as a formula?

P = 0.9 if sound > 110 decibles then mum flips. How is that for fomula

Here's another one for behavioural science... the probability of forumers who exceed X posts starting a new thread is Y% coz only newbies seem to post new threads. Oldies with 4-figure posts are mostly lurkers and snipers.

But in all seriousness, if altruism is the critical factor in closing the tech/wisdom gap and if Richard Dawkin's selfish gene theory is true, then its bad news becoz as far as kinship is concerned, we're less likely to find wise people with high tech relatives than we are finding high tech people with high tech relatives. Does anybody know if Bill Gates or Steve jobs have got wise sages in their family trees somewhere?

Hamilton's formula suggests that the kinship factor is critical if there is to be a regulating influence in the direction of tech development. Would you agree with him?

learned a lot from this thread

Does that mean you will take the lead and become a good samaritian, Compos?

Hamilton formula is okay except for the weakness pointed out.

Here's a related question to the topic, since we're talking about ancient east Asian wisdom.

The age of Confucius, Lao Tze and the Buddha crossed the timeline of the invention of paper, gunpowder and the self-loading crossbow, a leading weapon at the time. At that point in history, we had a high wisdom, high tech civilization. We were like the Vulcans. Yet looked what happened.

In the last 5,000 years the most number of the people killed on the planet were killed in the stretch of land covering the middle East to the Indus valley to the Middle Kingdom (China). The belt of great wisdom and innovation.

The great irony is, the barbarians of the west - the vikings, celts, etc - who were burning witches at the stake as people were talking about enlightenment in India and China, have now become more 'civilized' than the once-wise East. In last year's survey of gross national happiness, the top 10 countries were all lands of barbarians.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/05/05/world-hap...st_slide_2.html

I bet the unhappiest places would be places like Burma, india, Pakistan, Iraq... where the great gurus once walked.

Again a contradiction that I can't resolve.

If there was a nuclear war, I bet it would be started somewhere in this belt of great wisdom.

this thread really grouped with those master or phd.. all those thing too high level till i cant understad it at all

Back to the question why should I start being the Silly A-hole? Thus these silly a-holes are the unhappiest people.

This post has been edited by faceless: May 27 2010, 11:53 AM

Becoz they'll get fed up of you and let you have all the ice cream?

The place may have the wisdom. They not necessay apply it.

For India, I am amazed why they cant make a come back. The best they did was to unify and fight for independence. After that is fighting among themselves. China is always at civil war. Without the civil war now, they are a force to be reckon with.

Agree with TS.
In China, there were many intelligent and wise men in pre-Qin. It was a period in which the development of literature (文學-莊子） and logical thinking (thus science ； 公孫龍子) were blooming. However, once after Qin dynasty had started, it greatly impeded the progress of logical thinking in the ancient chinese and also the progress in literature. Since Qin dynasty, emperors were only concerned with tyranny and how could they prolong it as long as possible. And the best weapon that those emperors since Qin-dynasty had is 韓非子。His writing teaches those emperors how could they control the people (social engineering) and the inhumanity of his teaching far outweighs that of Karl Marx. As a result, China has been slow in the progress of scientific thinking.

The best human killing machine in modern century is neither bombing suicide nor war but scientific medicine. You cannot imagine how many people have they managed to kill.

Chemical warefare is not a mordern thingy. Poisoning the water is one of the tactic used by chinese strategists long ago.

This post has been edited by faceless: May 27 2010, 02:37 PM

Exactly. Shall we go a bit deeper and try to ascertain why one society is more likely to apply wisdom than another?

Greed is the same everywhere. So is hatred, anger, cunningness. So what makes Asians so special that we've killed more of each other than any other people on the planet? Are we more spiteful and vengeful in nature than our gwai loh peers? And if so, why?

The alternative question to what makes us kill each other is, what makes the barbarian societies peaceful?

I must think more about this question. For now, I blame the difference in the DNA make up.

My suspicion is that living in heat and humid climates increases the chances of psychosis, which coincides with the long history of brutality and conflict among people living in the deserts and tropics. I'm still looking for the data I once saw that supports this hypothesis.

TS,
You might be interested in a book called Thiaoouba Prophecy as the message of this book is directly addressing the issue you've raised. The book is free over in the internet, just google it. If you have trouble obtaining it, let me know, I'll drop the ebook to you.

There you will find desciption of people who are truly in a "high tech, high wisdom" society.

The Thiaooubans sound a lot like Visitors.

Whoa... astral travel, auras, levitation... sounds like one of those new age thingies. Didn't go far enough to see if there's any lizard people there but I did get far enough to read this:

"The message from Thiaoouba is that ‘‘material technology, without spiritual knowledge, is leading us to inevitable global catastrophe on Earth.""

That bit I can agree with.

Those are not the things that you need to associate yourself with at the moment and is not important. It is the book that you should be looking at, if indeed you are trying to look for answers/clues to the questions that you've posted.

Sure, I'll be happy to keep an open mind. While I read the book, could you post some of its salient points to keep the discussion going?