Nice Guys suck...

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I am volunteering at a homeless shelter out of sympathy for its victims. Many of them have schizophrenia or clear physical abnormalities.



I feel that sexual selection is one of the biggest philosophical problems we face, because there appears to be no easy solution. Promoting public awareness may be a start.





I find his writing to be lofty and overblown at the expense of readability.

I'm curious, what other philosophers have you read? Schopenhauer is one of my favorites.

For the first time in my life, I'm finding it incredibly fun.

It's a game, you see; try to find the most elegant way to get there that isn't being taught in the class, but doesn't actually use more advanced techniques. The best is when you can get the teacher to mark it wrong on the test, then give you the points back when they realize it's valid.

My favorite are optimization and related-rates problems.

It involves learning a lot of extra background theory, but I'm lucky enough to have a lot of support that way.

I think you read too much into the phrase. By "Nietzsche fans," I meant people who were familiar with some of his works and could discuss and critique his ideas knowledgeably. Nietzsche is a rather opinionated author to accept uncritically as an Internet fanboi might be turned on by Ubuntu Linux, Mozilla Firefox, iPods and iPhones, or a fad social-networking website.

I think Nietzsche is expressing dissatisfaction with the self-depriving ideals espoused by some forms of Christianity. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche spends a good deal of time talking about how the Übermensch will transcend narrow-minded restrictions and essentially write his own destiny and his own ethic. Nietzsche's phlosophy is an embrace of the good, on equal footing with the bad, a relish for pleasure as well as suffering, and exercising one's will to forge a life that one would be ecstatic to experience over and over.

Much of this lies close to my own particular worldview although I don't share Nietzsche's obsession with power relations, contempt for the masses, and compulsion to put oneself above all others.

Fah! The last time that I took Integral Calculus,
I had to drop it, because a TA marked my test
as a low C. Turns out, I had to reinvent methods,
all of which were correct. I submitted my exam to
the Prof, but he didn't get it back to me until after
the drop date. There was no way I was going to allow
that to stand, so I had dropped. Ended up getting a
decent grade, after he looked at it.

I've taken stuff which depends on that level, but never
actually made it through a whole class there. I found
real analysis a lot more enjoyable as a way to look
at the same material.

I've heard real analysis is a lot of fun.

How did you get in without calculus?

Also, what do you study?

Nietzsche can be a slog to read, but his quotes are great.

"Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good."

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."

"Morality is herd instinct in the individual."

"Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil."

"Is not life a hundred times too short for us to bore ourselves?"

"In heaven all the interesting people are missing."

"In large states public education will always be mediocre, for the same reason that in large kitchens the cooking is usually bad."

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

I could go on...

I'm not seeing the connection here. Sexual selection is a problem with those with physical or psychological "abnormalities," or sexual selection contributes to these problems? Or both? And how does this connect to discussion of the matter?

And I'm hoping your homeless shelter doesn't have victims.



Could you elaborate on how it's a major philosophical problem?



I'm afraid I'm much better read in literature and politics than in philosophy- though I'm not all that well read in either of those fields- most of my philosophy background is either spillover, or gleaned in conversation.

I did read some Camus (L'etranger, and Sisyphus in English), Voltaire (Candide), and (of course) Antoine de Saint Exupery in French back in high school; also covered a decent amount of absurdist theatre in English, along with Brave new world, 1984, etc. Right now I'm reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Ethics of Ambiguity, in English, sadly- I'm rusty.

I've also read parts of Kant's critique of pure reason and Mill's Utilitarianism; given one particular interpretation, I agree with Mill completely. I've read On Liberty. . . there have been lots of bits and pieces, don't remember what all. Oh, and Kafka's metamorphosis, Moby Dick, a decent amount of Steinbeck, some other stuff. . . reading Crime and Punishment now. . . what constitutes philosophy?

What should I remember about Schopenhauer?

Last edited by Jainaday on 16 Aug 2007, 8:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"You must have chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star."

*laughing*

I didn't even cheat, that came straight from thus spoke Zwhatsits. . . or rather, from the portion of it I've read.

The last boy I dated used that as a pickup line of sorts. . .*laughing more*

Sexual selection is automatically a problem for those who already have such abnormalities, and animal signalling theory shows us that certain traits called costly fitness indicators, such as peacocks' tails, may evolve as a form of sexual advertising. When these fitness indicators fail in humans, they are believed to result in more abnormalities and possibly schizophrenia.

The book I read is Animal Signals by John Maynard Smith, and I've written an essay on Dr. Andrew Shaner's new theory of schizophrenia as the "ugly extreme" of a sexually selected fitness indicator (http://www.geocities.com/zinites_page/schiz.html). You can find Shaner's original article here: http://www.unm.edu/~gfmiller/new_papers/shaner%20miller%202004%20schizo.pdf. I don't disagree with the theory, but I find the possibility of its truth very upsetting.



We may find cures for cancer and other diseases. It's a simple matter of finding the right chemical compounds and their modes of action. Sexual selection is much more difficult because it does not involve a specific disease, but a natural mechanism of evolution that improves the overall fitness of the human race at the expense of the less fortunate who must suffer.



I've read about Mill's Utilitarianism and have Kant's Critique of Pure Reason on my bookshelf. The Critique has been hard reading for me, but it definitely doesn't strike me as nonsense. I think I respect Kant more than any other philosopher.



Schopenhauer believed that all our actions together with the phenomena of nature belong to something called the will of nature, or the World-Will. He was a pessimist who believed that our desire to get what we want inevitably brought us into conflict with others, and that the World-Will is essentially wicked, shaping the intellect to fulfill its own desires. He praised art and especially music as means of escape from the ceaseless striving of this will.

While Schopenhauer was kind to animals, he was never very successful with women. Yet he knew how powerful the emotion of love was, recognizing that our survival as a species was dependent on it. That is why he's my favorite philosopher.

Eh. Too much calc related. I like graph theory, number
theory and abstract algebra a lot more.



Nepotism. I got into multi-variate calc the
same way. Found both easy enough, at my
advanced age, but I doubt that I would have
had the stomach for them when thinking
clearly.



I just finished my MS in comp sci.
Prior to that a BS (also in comp sci)
And a BA in BS.

The way this theory is presented makes me feel like vomiting many times and then never interacting with another human being again.

I have had enough in my life of other people telling me that it's selfish of me not to have sex with them.






I'm not sure I'll ever come around to believing free will has a cure. . . or that it should.




Uh. . . so you think Schopenhauer was right?

There's some conglomerate of all decisions made that somehow has it's own will or conciousness?

This doesn't make a lot of sense to me. . .



I'll read the original article when I have a chance. . . so far, I obviously don't get. . .something.

Want me to tell you something about me, Jainaday? I vomit almost every day. No, I'm not kidding. If you look at bottom of my essay, you will see that I retch. Look up "retch" and you will see that it's "dry vomiting." Yet I go to work anyway, out of sympathy for the starving, mutated rejects of society. I care about these people.

I dread the thought that all the happy and successful are playing a blind game of mate choice in which I am metaphorically left unnoticed to drown in my own puke. I need others to recognize that I exist, so that I and others are not ignored in what would be a crime of God against the less fortunate.

Edit: Just so you all know, this vomiting is nausea induced. I am not bulimic.



I completely understand about the "selection pressure" to mate only with whom you find attractive. I feel the same way. But my telling others that I'm in pain is not just a desperate plea for sex. Like I said, people need to know that my pain is real.



That hurts my feelings.



I'll explain it to you if you want me to. Right now I'm feeling rejected.

Natural selection was never fair , especially for males .

Just look at animals , in most primate species only the alpha male is either picked by the female to breed with(in some species) or wins the fight over the females (in other species ) . The beta males usually never score (the betas are the big majority of males) .
As for female primates , they all enjoy sex lol .

but this is necessary for evolution tho.

Systems in nature are not meant to be fair.
What does it matter, if a weaker male's genes
aren't passed on?

Kinda wanted to study that very question, trying
to see what the particular advantages of herd
mating structures gave. Did a brief test, but
it didn't seem to show anything exciting.

For MikeH106-

Very, very sorry. I realized as I was walking away that I dealt with something obviously important to you in a very insensitive way; unfortunately, due to my lack of internet access (I'm at a friend's house now) I was unable to do anything to rectify it till now.

I do want to understand; please try. I hope my mishandling hasn't made that impossible. . .

What I should have said was something along the lines of;

Philosophically speaking, it seems to me that one's right to control over access to one's own body should always be more important than someone else's right to access to it.

not very well stated, but I've little time. . .

If it helps, my personal reaction was literal, and comes from some pretty severe experiences. Sorry. . .

Thoughts?


and FYI, sometimes bulimia is expressed via nausea. . .