Does Bad Karma Have an Expiration Date?

If you mark the snip. In fact you were snipping stuff that was relevant to what you were talking about, but you were to dim to see the relevance.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

you're wasting your electrons on him.

Hi Clifford, I was not thinking about current civilization where women are no longer second class citizens. And have a role in family planning. (Of course there are some current places where women still are 2nd class citizens)

I'm assuming that in the past successful men had more offspring. That is certainly true at the highest levels of 'male success'. I don't know how that translates to lower success levels.*

Speaking of animals in general; Males want to spread their seed around as much as possible, and females have an incentive to breed with the most successful males, as that gives the best chance of success to their kids. The current situation in western civ's, with smart men and women having less children seems like a bit of an anomaly. Of course it is also recent history where you could reasonably expect that all your kids would reach adulthood. Things are very different today. In some ways I figure we'll start to 'take the reins away' from natural selection, and start making our own evolutionary choices.... that's kinda both scary and exciting.

George H.

*let me just note that this is a very 'male centric' view on my part. I would not be at all surprised if having a smart mom, turned out to be equally or more important for a child's 'success'. (I just haven't thought about it much.)

Even the expression "successful men" here implies women can't be as successful - I guess that was a historical perspective.

And the fact you brought it up in the context of being smart implies that you think our society is structured such that smart people are more likely to be successful. I just don't believe that smart people get rewarded by success, except in rare cases. Powerful people get rewarded, and their children get rewarded, and we notice that the smart ones are smart, but not that it's not the main reason for their success. Bill Gates might be smart, but didn't become who he is by being smart. Same for Elon and the other heroes of American capitalism.

Which is why women choose powerful men over smart ones almost every time.

This is the idea behind my yet unwritten novel, so I've thought about it a lot. It's presently unacceptable, but in the story, I suppose that it has already happened once in a global effect of an individual's escaped experiment, and folk have come to accept it - so the novel is about how society dealt with that change.

More important, I think, because they influence early development more.

Clifford Heath.

OK I think those guys are 'wicked smart'. Not all smart people are successful, but in general they are. As a single silly data point I'd guess most of us here on SED are successful... and I'm guessing most have IQ's above average. Again I'm going to recommend "Coming Apart".

There is a lot of data in it.

I'm not sure why you think smart people aren't successful. Is this just a feeling or do you have data?

(Caltech is the one school in the US that doesn't discriminate on the basis of race... go check out the mix of students there.)

There was a story on the radio today of people using Crispr to treat sickle cell anemia.

Well that's the other 1/2 of nature and nurture. But if you don't think that smarts/ intelligence leads to success in the US then what does? Who you know? Family connections? That was more true in the past... but obviously still plays apart today.

George H.

[Snip!]

[...]

Curing sickle cell anemia while keeping the improved resistance against malaria would be a neat trick! Did they? Do they even know?

Jeroen Belleman

I don't know... this looks like the story.

GH

Yes, they're smart. But I've worked my whole life with very smart people, many of them at least as smart as those two, but none achieved anything like them. The two people I have worked with who made a $billion for themselves were smart too, but not stand-out remarkable amongst the others. I reckon for every smart person who makes a billion dollars there are 100,000 others equally smart who led quite ordinary lives.

So no, I don't credit "being smart" with "becoming highly successful".

It seems you've moved the goalposts. I thought we were talking about success as achieving more than just a family, house, two cars, and a comfortable retirement.

I find the state of modern America a little depressing to contemplate, because although much is wonderful, I expected more. But I'll see if I can stomach it.

Neither - it's based on my experience working with smart people.

It seems necessary to be exposed to business operations early in family life, get a reasonable education, and be backed by enough cash (safety net) to be able to take risks in early adulthood. But from there, its mostly gumption and dumb luck (often via connections).

Clifford Heath.

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And if Charles Murray's previous books are anything to go by, a lot more le ft out. He has a history of cherry-picking his data to fit the case he want s to make.

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They might be using it to prevent sickle cell anemia in - as yet unborn - c hildren, but doing gene editing on all the billions of cells in an existing individual is a bit more ambitious. Since the treatment at conception has been condemned as unethically risky, treating lots more cells in a living p erson would see to be even more risky.

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And is more important in the US than it is in northern Europe. Annual incom e in the US is about as heritable as height.

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In Finland, nurture has less effect, because society puts in quite a bit of effort to make nurture pretty good for everybody. The US prefers to collec t less of the national income in taxes, and has less money to spend on maki ng sure that the children of the less well-off aren't short-changed.

The Finnish educational system is famously well-funded right across the cou ntry.

The US primary and secondary educational system is funded by the local scho ol districts, which are remarkably small, and quite a few of them don't hav e much money to pay for schools and school teachers.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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Chance favours the prepared mind. There aren't than many opportunities arou nd that let you make a billion dollars. The fact that lots of smart people haven't run into one of those opportunities isn't an argument that being sm art doesn't make it more likely that you will recognise and exploit such an opportunity when it does show up.

There are quite a few more opportunities around that looks as if they might have billion dollar pay-offs, and smart people will be more likely to noti ce them too, and lose their shorts when they don't pay off.

Charles Murray is in the business of making modern America look wonderful t o people who have made a lot of money there. He serves a particular branch of American publishing that sells books to rich Americans by flattering the ir vanity. John Larkin recommends that kind of book quite often.

He's not exactly an objective observer trying to present an unbiassed pictu re of reality

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But takes smarts to recognise and exploit useful information. Insider infor mation isn't peer-reviewed, and for every useful tip there are likely to be several tips that are likely to get you charged for insider trading if you exploit them, or designed to persuade you to put money into some kind of s cam.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

No chance it's hard work that leads to success???

--

  Rick C. 

  -+-- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging 
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It can play a part, but poorly directed hard work just leads to burn-out.

There are quite a few roads to success, but they are anything but clearly s ignposted, and quite a few more that lead to staying where you were, and ev en more that lead to failure (or a least very restricted success).

Working out the right thing to work hard on is a whole lot more important t han just working hard, which is frequently used as distraction from thinkin g about what - exactly - you are working towards.

I've got clear memories of working very hard to try to meet a totally unrea listic dead-line, and being too busy to take the time to point out that the corner-cutting involved was destroying any chance we might have had to mak e the dead-line.

I took away the weekly reports I wrote while this was going on, and the nex t couple of years worth of reports written when we were working on cleaning out the errors that we'd made when we were working too hard. They are now up on my web-site. Bitrex says that it is an obituary, which isn't wrong.

sets the context and provides links to the weekly reports and a couple of p ages of extra context.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

You tell us, are coal miners rich? Or construction labourers?

NT

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news:9697fc94-b9aa-4135-bcf4- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Coal mine owners certainly are.

Miners' arms are not chained to a rail as in the '20s (minor) textile mill setting, but they remain one of the worst paid groups in the nation. Almost as bad as Southern California produce field workers.

Construction laborers do a lot better, but that varies greatly with region as well.

Odd too. The metling pot of Southern California pushes the wage down, yet the melting pot that is NYC pushes general labor wages up. It is all about greed and what a given population is willing to endure.

Sad too in such a prosperous nation.

so hard work does not produce wealth. Many people in the 3rd world work 16 hour days sorting scrap, making around 8-10p a day. Yes, 10 cents.

NT