[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Heading: ‘evolution does not give a fuck’. One of the hardest things, I think for people to avoid doing when thinking about evolution is thinking that evolution has any kind of morality or purpose or anything because evolution is just that the species that are successful at reproducing or the variations …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 757: “Evolution does not give a fuck.”
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: I mean it is a weird thing because there's a too soon in comedy and mostly the too soon is a joke itself now, where you make a Hitler joke or a joke about something else that might be inappropriate, then you go too soon and then it's a joke on …
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: There’s a theme that some people like to emphasize that some great scientists including Einstein and Feynman said I'm just an everyday person who just thinks really hard, Crick or Watson also does that; brags about having a low IQ and stuff. That's fine up to a point but you got …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 755: Why this last one percent of human history?
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “I think some of the phenomenon we're going to be seeing and continues to be unexplained, and might in fact be some type of phenomenon that is the result of something we don’t yet understand” that's ex-CIA director, John Brennan. That was sent to me by Richard May, who's the …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 754: Richard May Credit for John Brennan
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: Okay. There are also the various flavors of cancel culture where people who spend a lot of time on social media learn about a bunch of sensitivities, that I would consider largely legit. I might disagree with the degree to how much vehemence with which these sensitivities are applied but there's …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I have to give credit to Richard May for this one. It's a quote that states as follows – “I know of no country in which there is so little independence in mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.” - Alexis de Tocqueville. Rick Rosner: Okay, sweet. So …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 752: Richard May Credit for Alexis de Tocqueville
[Recording Start] Rick Rosner: All right, so after we signed off I Googled between I don't know 100,000 and 200,000 horses across the across the five boroughs of New York City, each horse making between 15 and 20 kilos of shit a day I think plus the piss. The piss is significant too. It wasn't …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them” – Albert Einstein Rick Rosner: Are you sure he said that? Probably he said that. Einstein; he kind of paid a certain amount of attention to his public persona, so he was pretty good at …
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: How should people be skeptical about high range tests like the Mega or the Titan in ways that an individual with a long history of performing well in these tests would know better than individuals who have not taken them or being part of the societies, discussing them over years …
Continue reading Ask A Genius 749: Status of Admissions to Mega Society Now
[Recording Start] Scott Douglas Jacobsen: The quote is “Science is magic that works” - Kurt Vonnegut. Rick Rosner: That reminds me of the Arthur C. Clark quote that the technology of a sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from magic [“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”] that is, if aliens came to earth …
Rick Rosner 