Personally I suspect that the IQ of a political leader is somewhat independent of their decision making abilities. Judgement, in the sense of obtaining and assessing the opinions of experts, is much more valuable, and while there is some correlation with IQ the two are quite different qualities.
WRT to Bush, regardless of his actual IQ, he strongly portrays an image of a person who isn't particularly intelligent. Whether this is deliberate, or a side effect of an effort to portray other qualities ("trustworthiness" "down to earthness"), ...
"But humor more than most, because humor relies on surprise - the ridiculous, the unexpected, the absurd.
(Satire achieves surprise by saying, out loud, the thoughts you didn't dare think. Fake satires repeat thoughts you were already thinking.)"
Actually I've always felt a large part of humour is depicting saying what everyone thinks but nobody says. How many comedians make jokes about spouses, traffic, their own minority, how often are those jokes things people in the audience don't already think about?
"A building labeled "science"...
I think the problem with trying to come up with a concrete definition of morality is the only real problems are ones without real solutions. In science we can solve previously unknown problems because we're constantly building on newly discovered knowledge. But with morality the basic situations have existed mostly unchanged for most of our evolution and we don't have any real advantage over previous generations, thus any problem worth solving is there because we can't solve it.
For instance you're never going to get a leader who's complete moral argument f...
This made me think of a specific instance of hindsight bias that always annoys me. Consider any game of chance where at some point the person is given the choice of whether to make a wager or not.
Once they see how the wager would have turned out one is almost guaranteed that if the wager would have won they'll say to make the wager would be the right decision and if the wager would have lost vice-versa. This holds even if they were already aware of the odds before hand.
I think the graph comparison isn't a completely valid metaphor. With the graph you describe the relationship between two nodes is binary, either it's present or absent. But between topics there are numerous types of connections, for sure the statement "everything is connected" conveys no useful information but I believe that it's very difficult to find two topics with no type of connection. For instance Wikipedia couldn't be considered an artificial intelligence but I would not be surprised if there are certain topics in artificial intelligence t...
For self regulation I think the problem is there isn't a straight path to a more optimal solution.
In similar situations I generally try to wait in my seat until the congestion dies down (if I'm not in a rush). While I get the benefit of a more relaxing experience this has the effect of significantly delaying my departure.
But for a real solution I think you really need some simple modification you can make that benefits the group without significantly costing yourself. Other than delaying I can't really think of any other simple changes passengers would mak... (read more)