Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 March 17

= March 17 =

Evolutionary reason of good/bad distinction
Hi, I'm trying to found out the evolutionary reason behind the distinction between good and bad. Obviously, good and bad are purely subjectively ideas, and humans co-exist peacefully and procreate while having completely incompatible views of what is good and what is bad. I myself don't even see the point in it, what is "good" for some will necessarily be "bad" for some others, so how do you even decide if an action is "good" or "bad" in the first place? Is there anything behind this that I'm missing, beside some mystification of human empathy? 78.0.219.174 (talk) 00:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Is there some reason to believe the distinctions live/dead, pleasant/unpleasant, functional/disfunctional adaptive/unadaptive, successful/unsuccessful, fertile/infertile, have no objective meaning? Good and bad, assuming you mean good and evil, are simply the analog of this distinction in the realm of personal responsibility.  Or one can simply stick with good and bad.  They concepts follow from living and unliving.  See the immortal robot argument. μηδείς (talk) 01:02, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, good and bad definitely have meaning and purpose if understood as "good for me" and "bad for me", but my point is that those ideas are hardly the same for all people. What's good for one person can often be bad for someone else, whereas if someone is alive/dead/fertile/infertile, he/she bears the same quality from everyone's perspective. Nevertheless, it is common in our society to assume that there is some "greater good" or "greater evil", which appear illogical to me. 78.0.219.174 (talk) 01:28, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The greater good that you're talking about is simply the social good, I think. Stealing someone's possessions benefits you, all else being equal, but it's bad for society if it happens a lot, and that's why we've evolved mechanisms to limit it: both a built-in social conscience and a tendency to ostracize or otherwise punish other people who do bad things. -- BenRG (talk) 02:19, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yeah that kind of makes sense, and having it "mutate" over the evolution of our society into a large moral system of today. It still doesn't feel right to me, but you're very probably right. 93.139.105.228 (talk) 03:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * An immortal robot, if it was built by people to serve people, would be motivated to help us because we would design it that way. Selfishness, like social responsibility or hunger or libido, exists in us because it's evolutionarily adaptive, not because it's in the laws of physics. The argument that you linked presupposes what it seems to want to prove, namely that all goals derive from a meta-goal of self-preservation or self-improvement. That's not even true of humans, and certainly wouldn't be true of a robot. -- BenRG (talk) 02:19, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * You're simply parastizing its morality of its human creators programming their preferences (which they have because they are living beings) into it. If it were a natural object, which is the entire point of the argument, it would have no need of values or any code of morality. It is an objective truth to say sunlight is good for sunflowers, and arbitrary nonsense to assert that not committing blasphemy is good for hurricanes and asteroids. μηδείς (talk) 05:41, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I believe you mean amoral, not immoral. StuRat (talk) 03:31, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * No, immortal with a t. -- BenRG (talk) 04:16, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I see. I apparently read it as "immoral", since this Q was about morality, not mortality. StuRat (talk) 22:15, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * It's all those redundant apostrophes you've been using, Stu. Every time you use one needlessly, your brain makes a mental note, and now it's reached its capacity and is overflowing into the space behind your eyes and causing vision impairment.  The solution is to make a sincere act of contrition, resolve never to offend again, and always use apostro'ph'e's' appropriately in future going forward from now on.  :)  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:45, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * You also presuppose what you want to prove -- if the robot wasn't built with any purpose/programming (such as to serve people), then the original argument stands quite well. Of course, there would be no useful reason in spending resources on building such a useless robot :) 93.139.105.228 (talk) 03:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * A robot with no designed-in purpose would have no reason to do anything, but that has nothing to do with its being immortal or not. It's simply because you can't logically derive a statement of the form "I should do X" without at least one axiom that contains "I should", or a rule of inference that introduces it, which amounts to the same thing. My point was just that there's nothing special about self-interest as a motivation; it's not a default behavior of rational systems in the absence of other motivations. -- BenRG (talk) 03:29, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * What's the difference between the statement, "If I wish to live, then eating is good for me," and "If I am an asteroid, hen following Kepler's Second Law is good for me"? μηδείς (talk) 05:45, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Good and bad originate from the principle of "tat tvam asi" ('Thou art that') which expresses the unity of (to start with) the atman as the basis of self. It is approximated in various religions - Golden Rule, in a very partial manner in reincarnation, in the apparently vague Daoist sense that people are a part of the flow of nature, etc.  To take the case of a (nearly) immortal robot, if it were conscious, it would gradually get to wondering how it is the same robot when it has replaced each of its redundant CPUs and buses and motherboards and RAMs and disk drives and other peripherals on multiple occasions.  As a Ship of Theseus it has its memory to link it, but it has suffered enough failures over the years, and swapped memory records with enough other robots, to realize that forgetting this and that doesn't make it stop being itself.  Inevitably, the robot would seem bound to recognize that what makes it itself is simply that it has a certain configuration of components, which it shares with other robots of its model, and therefore, those robots are simply other instances of itself, much as the threads running on its parallel processors are different instances of itself.  Therefore, for it to harm itself would seem as disordered whether it is done to a "second" robot or to the same one. Wnt (talk) 04:11, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Insofar as I can understand that, are you saying morality depends on reincarnation? Don't answer that.  Instead, had God not stayed Abraham's hand, and Abraham sacrificed Isaac at His command, would God have been evil?  μηδείς (talk) 05:49, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Reincarnation explains morality if one considers past lives that are contemporaneous with one's present life. The second question begs the question of how one knows God is God.  If you have a second method by which you can evaluate the morality of an action that contradicts "God's command", and that is more fundamental than the command, how do you know the command is not a voice in your head, a demonic compulsion or possession, an orbital mind control laser, etc.?  I would suggest (though I don't know how to provide evidence to 'prove' such a thing) that especially in the Christian tradition, divinity seems to reveal itself primarily in that only the divine can control what is logical, what is true, what is right, rather than in terms of temporal power. Wnt (talk) 13:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Infinite reincarnation is the sole reason I'm not questing about like a Final Fantasy character, stabbing everyone for gold and experience points. Eventually, I'd be responsible for my own stabbing (many times over, if I get far enough the first time). My selfishness alone breeds my altruism. Lot easier than trying to do it for another. InedibleHulk (talk) 13:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Perhaps this is a sidetrack - it's so hard to tell with religious and philosophical matters - but I'd say that at least in a sense it might not be the only reason. This understanding defines morality, but it may not define what can be accomplished with it.  In particular, people often feel that their individuality is somehow, at least potentially, worth preserving, which is the basis of individual judgment concepts as in Christianity.  This is most readily expressed in the terminology of the Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul (which I don't know practically anything about, but seems like a fervid tapestry of preposterous and self-serving ideas mixed in with a few interesting concepts that are hard to find elsewhere).  Among the different souls they consider, there is the ba, which expresses the individuality of a person, and the ka, which is the life force of a person.  As it would appear to not be the individuality, we might, with considerable forcing, try to draw a parallel between ka and atman.  Anyway, the idea, very sketchily drawn out by the Egyptians, Jews, and Christians, might arguably be portrayed that the ba (perhaps expressible as the soul of a dead person?) may or may not be considered for inclusion in some future revision of the universe, where it is once again alive (i.e. reunited with the ka) in a more perfect world.  In this sense, enlightened selfishness informs morality in regard to the fellow atman, but the pursuit of this may lead to a different kind of enlightened selfishness in what I suppose pertains to the hope of Heaven.  There's also the potential in such concepts for religious observance which is not necessary to avoid evil (self-harm of the Atman) but which might somehow assist in the desirability of the ba for being included in a future cosmos.  This might reflect the Great Commandment notion of loving one's neighbor and loving God.  So while people should avoid evil, the evil is yet in a sense not truly real, because the cosmos that exists will be unmade and remade in a way such that it never existed, with people retaining the virtues they would have chosen had it been real.  Now of course I don't need to say that whenever attempting this level of philosophical syncretism, it is easily possible to be wrong and almost impossible to define whether it is right. :) Wnt (talk) 15:56, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I can't think of a response that doesn't turn into a real sidetrack. I tried a few times. Suffice to say I'm not quite jiving with the ancient Egyptian concept, but it's cool to hear about it. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:36, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * "If God is perfect, He is always at peace and cannot become angry or upset at anyone or anything because only an imperfect being can be disturbed in these ways. Likewise, if God is perfect, He doesn’t need or want anything from anyone since if He did need or want anything, He would not be God but an unhappy and imperfect being." --Epicurus


 * μηδείς (talk) 05:52, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Having a characteristic which rules out the possibility of having another characteristic makes one imperfect. Hence, if God is perfect, He cannot be imperfect, therefore God is imperfect, because there is something he cannot be.  KägeTorä - ( 影 虎 )  ( Chin Wag )  09:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * That would be Babelfish logic. The flaw in the "perfect" argument is the notion that we can know and define what "perfect" means in reference to God. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:05, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Since an evolutionary explanation/speculation is what you asked for: One evolutionary advantage of a society deciding to develop notions of Good/Bad would be to preserve that society, even at the cost of what might be good or bad for some individuals. Note that the notion of Right vs Wrong may be an older idea than Good vs Evil, as suggested by the metaphor in the development from a Bicameral_mind. If so, then Good vs Evil might only be applicable to humans. I have seen many studies showing altruism among animals, and it is easy for us to label these "good", but it may be anthropomorphism. Star Lord -   星王 (talk) 10:29, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * If you believe Richard Dawkins, his Selfish Gene theory or Memetics, explains selfless behaviour. Alansplodge (talk) 10:32, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yup, he and many others make a good cases, both theoretically and experimentally for altruism. There may be a distinction between altruism and Good vs Evil. Perhaps altruism was what the OP was after? Star Lord -   星王 (talk) 13:18, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * This article that I just googled has one aspect of the distinction. Star Lord -   星王 (talk) 13:31, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Do you have a link for it? In the meantime, we also have an article Altruism, which has a section on Altruism. Alansplodge (talk) 13:38, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I do apologize. Here you go, Alan. http://atheistethicist.blogspot.se/2008/12/what-makes-altruism-good.html Star Lord -   星王 (talk) 13:39, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Suppose we start with a society of (virtual) robots whose algorithms evolve as a result of genetic programming. We can set up things such that the system can evolve to different final states that will be mutually incompatible, i.e. robots behaving in one end state like they do in the other would cause problems. Whatever final state one ends up in, is the result of a symmetry breaking; there will be random processes moving the system to one rather than the other state and then the system will then move rapidly toward that state. Count Iblis (talk) 15:16, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The point of bringing in immortal, indestructible robots is to show there would be no reason for them to have any values, preferences, or moral code by their nature. They would be like ears on a cantaloupe, or jealousy in a god.  Such beings would not evolve, since they would be indestructible--there'd be no selection, let alone the question of why they would be reproducing.  If, however, we remove the indestructible part, and do let the reproduce with random variation, then we have evolution by natural selection, and of course they will end up having strategies that evolved for reproductive success. μηδείς (talk) 15:15, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

How do Jews really trace back to a common ancestor?
It seems to me that Jews can track their lineage all the way back to early biblical times. What is the historicity behind this lineage? How do Jews reconcile it with the modern understanding of population genetics, and how do they incorporate human evolutionary history (that is, humans can only be descended from a population of individuals, not just two individuals) with traditional Judaism? 140.254.227.108 (talk) 15:15, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * People certainly can be descended from only two individuals. Pedigree collapse gives some examples of smaller than normal family trees. On the other hand, one can become a Jew by completing certain ceremonies, so not all Jews are genetically closely interrelated. See Conversion to Judaism. Rmhermen (talk) 15:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Anyway, if you look at the Bible carefully, it only says that Israelites can generally trace back a patrilineal lineage to a common ancestor; beyond certain well-known Biblical personalities, wives and non-patrilineal lines of ascent are often omitted.  There's some discussion of this type of genealogies in a non-Biblical context in article segmentary lineage (which could be better)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:03, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * According to Jewish atheism, half of all American Jews have doubts about the existence of God. So for the average Jew, the answer to how they reconcile the Bible with population genetics is that they don't--they just don't believe in the Biblical version, at least not literally.  --140.180.252.228 (talk) 20:31, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I was going to point out that Abraham circumcised his servants. Note also that Abraham is described as the grandfather of Jacob/Israel with the twelve sons.  But in the meanwhile ... what really gets off the beaten path is that Abraham paid a tithe to a priest of Elyon - i.e. the Hebrew God - called Melchizedek.  Now I assume that a priest doesn't have but one parishoner, so this would seem to mean that, going by the Biblical account, the entire origin of Judaism is pushed back to some undetermined ancestor not even described as a patriarch. Wnt (talk) 13:29, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The problem is, even taking the Bible at face value (which I will not say we should or should not do, but let's concede it just to make the point) one has to draw clear historical distinctions between Abrahamic peoples (what an ethnologist might call Semitic people), the Hebrews/Israelites, and the Jews. In simplest sense, one can consider each group to be a subset of the other groups, but even that is too simplified.  They are also separated temporally, so that they exist in very different time periods.  Abraham was a monothesistic middle-easterner, but that doesn't make him, or his direct descendants or coreligionists or members of his local ethnic group/tribe/social circle/whatever Jews.  The "Hebrews" really become an identifiable ethnic group during the period of Egyptian captivity leading up to the Exodus.  If you want an analogy, before the Egyptian period the Semitic peoples would have been like the native people living in Africa prior to the Age of Exploration.  After some of these people were moved to Egypt and enslaved for generations, they developed a distinct ethnicity that was a hybrid of their prior culture and their enslaving culture, and a new ethnicity emerged, the Hebrews.  This is almost exactly analogous to the way that African American culture developed as it's own, identifiable culture during the years of slavery and Jim Crow laws in the U.S.  Then Moses leads his people out of Egypt and they settle in Canaan, establishing their own nation.  However, a second period of enslavement/subjugation (under the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Neo-Babylonian Empire) transforms the Hebrew people into the Jewish people.  And it isn't even all the Hebrew people.  The ten lost tribes are so called because the remaining tribes (Benjamin and Judah, from which we get the word "Jewish") were the only ones that maintained some semblance of connection to their former culture, and were the ones who returned to rebuild the temple and restart the nation.  It isn't that all Jews are descended from Abraham that makes them Jews (though mathematically they probably are, if Abraham existed he lived some 1500 years before the Babylonian Captivity, which is well long enough for pedigree collapse to ensure that all Middle Eastern people can rightly claim to be descended from him.  In that time frame, however, all Middle Eastern people at the time of the Babylonian Captivity were also related to all Middle Eastern people who were contemporaries of Abraham.  That's how pedigree collapse works!).  The Jewish culture, even from analyzing the Bible as historical record in an uncritical way, can only claim to date from about the 500s BCE.  That's because before that, they were Hebrews dating back to the period in Egypt, and before that, they didn't exist as a distinct ethnic group.  -- Jayron  32  02:31, 20 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The actual history behind all these things is remarkably uncertain. But I am indeed tempted to credit the account that Jews came from somewhere else before Egypt, and that they weren't originally native to Israel - to me, Roman accounts (some at ) that they originally came from Ethiopia is intriguing, since we know Beta Israel remains there to this day.  I wonder if by now there is sufficient genetic data available to make some interesting tests: for example, if there were truly male-descended "tribes" of Israel, some of which fell away from Judaism proper, then perhaps one might find a Y-chromosomal marker that is common among Samaritans but not Jews proper, and show that it is present in the putative ancestral Ethiopian population. Wnt (talk) 08:38, 20 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Jayron32 -- If Abraham lived ca. 2000 BC to 1800 B.C., that would not make him the ancestor of all middle-easterners in the patrilineal line (which is what is usually significant in Biblical genealogies). When tracing unilineal descent (patrilineal or matrilineal), there's no "pedigree collapse" -- you have exactly one patrilineal ancestor and one matrilineal ancestor in each ascending generation (and they can't be the same, since one's a man and the other's a woman).  And the first archaeological evidence for the existence of ancient Israelites is the word "Israel" being attested in the Merneptah Stele, followed by the spread of four room houses along the West Bank hill chain ca. 1000 B.C.
 * Wnt -- The current scholarly quasi-consensus is that the Israelites probably emerged out of local hill-dwelling peoples in the late 2nd. millennium B.C., including some elements with a desert-dwelling cultural tradition, but not ascertainably including any large number of migrants from distant lands. AnonMoos (talk) 15:17, 20 March 2014 (UTC)


 * That's a lot of ifs, but most especially, the issue is that it talks about the origin of "most" of the Israelites. Assuming that they've had some rate of converts throughout history, they would have taken on a Palestinian complexion over the centuries in Palestine, just as Dutch Jews look Dutch and Russian Jews look Russian today, pretty much.  The history of the genes wouldn't represent the history of the religion/race/culture.  It just seems so hard to picture people making up a really detailed cock and bull story about how their ancestors slaved under Pharaohs, built and later looted specific treasure cities, crossed a specific body of water and a specific desert, all on a lark.  Usually when someone tells a real howler (like Muhammad in Jerusalem) the story is left marked up with disclaimers like miraculous teleportation to prevent it from being proven untrue, whereas when a story is this detail (like Troy) it may be true even when it is not believed. Wnt (talk) 02:36, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * The evidence of the Hebrews living in Egypt has some evidence both within the text and external to it. The most interesting piece of evidence is the character of Moses himself.  Why would the Hebrews create a story out of whole cloth about their people being enslaved in Egypt, and then give their savior and leader to freedom a distinctly Egyptian name.  (c.f. Thutmose, Dedumose, Ramesses, Kamose, Ahmose).   At least some interpretations of the name of Moses only gives credence to the notion that the Hebrews were assimilating at least some parts of Egyptian culture during their captivity, as any subjugated people will tend to do. That isn't to say that one needs to uncritically accept the entire Exodus narrative as "happened exactly like this, for sure".  But, as with many of these stories, there must be at least some kernel of truth in the general story itself, rather than "some guy just made it up one day entirely out of whole cloth, and all of a sudden, an entire ethnic group started believing it."  That's as equally unbelievable as if it were entirely, completely, exactly perfect documentation of actual events.  Reality probably lies somewhere in between.  There's also some external evidence that certain stories from the Exodus-Joshua-Judges-Samuel period have archaeological or historical connections, such as the connection between the Sea Peoples and the Philistines, or evidence that Bronze Age Jericho was really destroyed by invaders at around the time of the events described in the Book of Joshua. -- Jayron  32  03:01, 21 March 2014 (UTC)


 * WNT -- It's quite probable that the some of the ancestors of Israelites spent time in Egypt, but the idea that a whole nation of fugitives from Egypt spent 40 years tramping around the deserts/wilderness of Sinai and Transjordan does not seem too historically plausible...
 * Jayron32 -- "Moses" includes an Egyptian name element, but it's not really an Egyptian name in itself (but rather a fragment of an Egyptian name). And the historicity of the city destructions described in the book of Joshua is a whole complex field of study and debate in itself, one which has yielded overall somewhat equivocal results... AnonMoos (talk) 06:00, 22 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Why? Haven't the Tarabin bedouin done just the same in recent times? Wnt (talk) 16:45, 22 March 2014 (UTC)

There is science around an element close to this question. There is some evidence that people who claim to be a Cohen may indeed be direct descendants of Aaron, the High Priest. see Y-chromosomal Aaron. Of course, as with just about any intersection of science and religion, it's hotly debated. --Dweller (talk) 10:29, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Iraq
We can dismiss all the following rationales for the 2003 invasion of Iraq:
 * Oil - because China has won the biggest oil contracts, not the US.
 * WMD's - none were found.
 * Saddam's support for jihadists - Saddam was secular
 * Bringing democracy - there are dozens of countries worldwide without democracy who have not been invaded

This leaves us with two rationales which are plausible: (a) Saddam's decision to stop trading in U.S. dollars. (b) An effort to maintain Israeli hegemony in the region. Am i correct in my analysis? Cinemwallz44 (talk) 16:21, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Or Bush just did not like Saddam Hussein very much and used all of the above as excuses when confronting congress. (Personally, I lean towards thinking that Bush made himself believe in the excuses). Star Lord -   星王 (talk) 16:28, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * No WMD's were found after the invasion, so that doesn't belong on your dismissal list. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:31, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

The rationale for the Iraq war has to be understood in the context of the aftermath of the first Gulf War. Much to the dismay of the US and Britain, after the end of the first Gulf war, Saddam had clinged on to power. That led to the US and Britain to decide that Saddam could never be rehabilitated. Sanctions that were formally imposed on Iraq because of the WMD issue would never be lifted as long as Saddam remained in power, regardless of any actual progress made on the WMD issue. Now, because any arguments made in the UNSC about Iraq did had to be based on WMDs, this drove the hype about the Iraqi WMD. Eventually the US and Britain started to be deluded themselves by this whole WMD issue. This is a bit similar how dictators like Saddam and Stalin tended to become paranoid over time.

The fundamental problem is that the UNSC members can be party to a conflict, police officers, judge jury and prosecutor all at the same time. Only when you have clear cut emergency cases will this not be a big problem. But after the end of the Cold War, the UNSC has invoked Chapter 7 in cases that are not cases where international peace and security were directly at stake. If we do want to address the more difficult situations where there are grounds to "prosecute" a country without the evidence being very clear, then one does need to use a system involving judges that are completely independent. Count Iblis (talk) 17:11, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * People seem to have forgotten what a pain this guy was during the 1990s. A colleague of mine, a Muslim yet, said to me, "Why are we messing around with this guy? Why don't we just go in and shoot him?" In essence, that's what we eventually did. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:42, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The answer was, of course, that we are supposed to operate witin the boundaries of international law. The reason why we could eventually do what we did was because the West is so powerful that it can bend international law to do whatever it wants, albeit that this takes time. Count Iblis (talk) 18:13, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The Iraqi attempt to assassinate Bush Sr might have influenced Bush Jr: List of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots. StuRat (talk) 21:50, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate. If you have a request for information, please make it.  Our opinions of your arguments are outside the scope of this desk. μηδείς (talk) 17:51, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

If you had asked "Why is it that cold fizzy drinks tend to feel so much more refreshing than non-fizzy drinks?" then that would be just fine. The Rambling Man (talk) 19:20, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Missing airplane
This is a question about the missing airplane, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. I understand that there are more questions than answers and that much is yet unknown. However, one theory (among many others) being proposed is that of the possibility of suicide. If that were to be the case here, can anyone think of any plausible reason why a person intent on suicide would fly around for four or five or six extra hours before doing so? If one was intent on suicide, wouldn't they just crash the plane and be done with it? Why fly around for all that extra time? Any plausible explanations for such conduct? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * You expect rational behavior from one intent on self-destruction? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:54, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * In a sense, yes. All of the rest of the actions were quite deliberate, well planned, and well executed.  Even though they were toward perverse ends, the conduct was still quite logical and rational.  No?   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 19:46, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * You could consider letting everyone pass out due to hypoxia, see Helios Airways Flight 522. To make sure the plane will not crash on populated areas, you would first steer the plane toward the Indian Ocean. Count Iblis (talk) 19:01, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, but it certainly doesn't take six or seven hours to be flying over a body of water. That's my point: why wait?  Why "waste" all that time?   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 19:41, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * If you choose hypoxia, then the plane will fly on by itself until it runs out of fuel while everyone on board is in a deep irreversible coma. Count Iblis (talk) 20:00, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Also note that while this is a subject matter, I do think you'll get similar responses to the following hypothetical question. Suppose we ask people on the street how they would prefer to die if they were sentenced to death. The options are 1) your body will be subject to a severe impact causing it to disintegrate upon impact. While you will be conscious when this happens, but be assured that the disintegration will happen so fast that you won't feel anything, or 2) the same as 1) except that you will be given drugs that cause you to lose consciousness first. Count Iblis (talk) 20:06, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * OK, what you say about hypoxia and the plane flying by itself (for several hours, until it runs out of fuel) does indeed make sense. I had forgotten that theory.  I was assuming (incorrectly) that someone was actually flying the plane for that extra six or seven hours.   Thanks.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 21:39, 19 March 2014 (UTC)


 * This would be a category error. Had the pilot been the sole person on board, suicide might be a possibility.  But taking even one other person down with you, let alone 250 others, would be murder.  That's why the expression "suicide bomber" is such a misnomer.  It's as if the only life worth mentioning is the bomber's, and the innocents they killed are just collateral damage. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:31, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Agreed on all points. But – whether suicide or murder – what would be the point in flying around for six or seven extra hours?  I don't know much about flying a plane.  But, I assume if one wants to crash, that can be accomplished in a matter of merely a few minutes.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 19:44, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * That's where such speculation comes to a dead end. And where this thread should also come to a dead end.  Far more knowledgable minds than ours are working on this issue around the clock and are still without clues.  We're not going to do any better, even if our rules allowed such OR and debate, which they in fact explicitly prohibit.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:19, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The first word of "suicide bomber" describes the technique, not the intent. (Compare "suicide mission".)  If you don't consistently say "murder bomber" or some similar compound for other people who cause deadly explosions, then GMAB. —Tamfang (talk) 20:15, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * No, a suicide bomber's primary motive is killing other people, with himself as collateral damage. This pilot's primary motive could have been killing himself, with the other passengers as collateral damage.  In any case, it's not unusual for people to hesitate for hours before committing suicide, or deciding against it.  I imagine this is particularly true if the suicide involves 250 other victims.  --140.180.252.228 (talk) 20:25, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, and actually doing something to kill yourself is a lot harder than not doing something to prevent it (in this case, not turning back before fuel runs critically low). And knowing he would be imprisoned if he turned back might give him the incentive to go through with it.  StuRat (talk) 21:36, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * That's why I call it a misnomer, 140.180. The whole point of such bombings is to kill other people.  The bomber is prepared to die as well, and knows they will almost certainly die - but their own death is not why they do it (otherwise they'd choose a desert rather than a crowded city market to blow themselves up, and not risk hurting anyone else).  Yet our name for these creatures ("suicide bombers") suggests their own death is the sole or main reason.  It's not.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:25, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not intentionally conflating you with them, but I hear the same remark from many Fox News types. Actually, Jack, it isn't necessarily the case that people think the bomber's own death is the sole or main reason for their act of blowing themselves and others up. The name is arguably misleading but it's just a convenient label for someone who happens to choose a method of homicide that also entails suicide--strong survey evidence would be required to prove that people frequently think the bombers are mainly or solely doing the act for the purpose of killing themselves.--74.72.255.103 (talk) 01:48, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'm not saying that people are generally unaware of suicide bombers' purposes.  It's still a misnomer, though.  That's all I'm saying.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  01:56, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * An obvious reason which has been raised by sources (although since I'm on an iPad I'm not going to bother to look for), is to make it difficult, with the hope it would be unlikely to find the plane and more importantly perhaps, the recorders. Consider that in the previous cases, suicide was generally identified as the cause by at least one group of investigators (in some cases another group, often the local investigators either rejected it or only listed it as a possible cause). Of course we can't be sure there aren't other cases where it's not known, but considering the efforts made to identify the cause of any crash it's fair to say that a missing plane is one of the best ways to try and stop people from knowing.
 * Remember there is the obvious question of why someone would commit suicide in such a fashion when they would kill so many other people, when there are other ways to do it that are less destructive. In most cases there's no evidence the destruction is motivation*. While these people may have psychological problems so we have to be wary about how we consider their motivations, it's frequently suggested (I mean in the known other cases as well) that their hope is that their suicide would not become publicly known.
 * And whatever the cause of the disappearance, we still can't be sure the plane would ever be found. And were it not for then pings (which presuming it was suicide which we have no idea, the person resposible may not have known about) or there radar (which they may have known were a risk but may have hoped they avoided), we would have no real clue where the plane could be or even that it flew for so long after.
 * (*)Yes, I agree with Jack that conflating suicides, with suicide bombings where the destruction is the motivation and the suicide is often incidental, is flawed. I disagree that suicide bombing is a misnomer. It's only a misnomer if you take the modifier to be the motivation. But I see no reason why this has to be the case. Although all this is largely an aside.
 * Nil Einne (talk) 05:52, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I should clarify I'm not saying any of the previous cases where it's suggested it's suicide but some significant party disagrees are definitely suicide. Simply that they illustrate once the recorders are found (and to some extent if the planes precise movements leading up to the crash are monitored on the ground) suicide generally becomes a significant possibility that gets major mention by at least one official report, and it's likely difficult to avoid this. In this particullar case, in the absence of those recorders and the plane, it's still much less certain. And that's with data that if it were suicide, whoever was involved may have been hoping didn't exist. (Of course if they are ever found and it were suicide, it's likely to be far more certain given the length of time it was flying. So there is a risk as well.)
 * And I'm not saying that this is definitely a reason evn if it were suicide,. There are clearly other possibilities like wanting to send a message. Or for the shock value or wanting it to be spectacular. (These may or may not involve the the other people on the plane intentionally.)
 * Nil Einne (talk) 17:18, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Very good points. Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 21:42, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

Divine authorship of the Bible
I looked up Divine authorship on Wikipedia, and they only mentioned the Christian perspective. It's also pretty biased towards the Christian perspective that when you click on the word "dictation", you think you would get the Orthodox Jewish view. Nope. It's just the Christian view, because it contains the belief in the Holy Spirit. Click on related term, "Biblical inspiration", and you still get the Christian perspectives. Gah! I vaguely know that Jews do believe that God is the author of the written Torah, but I am uncertain about the specifics. It sounds like Jews think that God is the author of the Torah, while Christians believe that God merely inspires the Bible, but does not really write it. By the way, why do Christians believe that the non-Torah parts are also inspired?140.254.227.103 (talk) 20:13, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Christians are a large diverse group, and there are a number of perspectives on the authorship of the Bible, include some apparently contradictory views, which are held by a large fraction of Christians worldwide. There is no universal Christian perspective on this issue, either on a individual level or on a doctrinal one.  -- Jayron  32  21:11, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The Jewish perspective, please. 140.254.227.103 (talk) 21:20, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Similarly, Orthodox Jews are more likely to take the Torah to be the literal word of God than Reform Judaism. StuRat (talk) 21:27, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Citation needed. 140.254.227.103 (talk) 21:46, 17 March 2014 (UTC)
 * the article titled authorship of the Bible contains a lot of information on the Jewish perspective. It also contains links to other articles, both inside and outside of Wikipedia, where you can read more on the subject.

140.254.227.103 -- since the defeat of the Mu'tazilites a thousand years ago, the mainstream Islamic position has been that the Qur'an is "uncreated", and has existed since the beginning of time. I don't think that either Jews or Christians commonly believe anything similar about the Bible... AnonMoos (talk) 02:33, 18 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually, AnonMoos, that is precisely the Orthodox Jewish view (about the Bible, of course, not the Qur'an), as expressed in all traditional Jewish sources since the Talmud. הסרפד  (call me Hasirpad) 03:05, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Does the Nerd/Jock dichotomy portrayed in American films exist in reallife ?
I am German and most of that I know about America is from Newspapers and american Sitcoms, so first sorry if I am talking in bad english or am stereotypical In american Films there are often two stock-characters, the Nerd and the Jock. It is diplayed that intelect and health are mutually exclusive. Does this dichotomy exist in reallife or only in Films ? It would be nice if an actual american could diskuss this.

What seems so strange is, that there is no rational reason, why theese properties should exclude each other. There are rare case then Health and Inteligence are impaired by a pestillence and theese cases could be ignored (and even they affect often both like mongoloid idiocy or cretinism). In normal individuals both health and intelect are determined by the intrinsic property Perfectionism. Individuals with high perfectionism do learn more and do exercice more, so health and intelect should coincide (as they do in Germany). That they don't coincide in american Films may be the result that the christian Extremists who rule america think, that everybody is valuable, and nobody should be better than someone else and they display the a fair world according to their "ideal" world (There is also less gunviolence and obesitiy in american Films as there should be). It would just be interesting to know if this also affects reallife ?

Here in Germany most people who are intelectual superior are also physical superior and most who are intelectual inferior are also physical inferior. True Nerds (high intelect, bad health) and True Jocks (high health, bad intelect) are very rare. As far as I know from Films of other Coutries, this is also the case there, so the Nerd/Jock dichotomy seems to be primary something american. (An interesting point is also, that the Entry for "Jock" in the Oxford English Dictionary (wich focuses mor on England than America)) lacks all the negative implication that american Media has and dicripes him as a man who does a lot of sport (and further as synonym for geek or jockey).

Another possible reason is, that typical american sports like american Football, Baseball have rather complicated rules and require more intelectual devotion. But I assume that reallife americans also do more "normal" sports like long distance running, football or ball throwing, so this shouldn't matter so much. Also to much devotion should only impair Wisdom, while american football players are often displayed as retards (low Inteligence) which couldn't be explained by a lack of devotion. --79.225.114.26 (talk) 23:16, 17 March 2014 (UTC)


 * As with other stereotypes, it it an exaggeration or perception based on bias or cultural differentiation. As I'm sure you're aware, there are plenty of stereotypes applied to Germans that you could use for comparison. 71.20.250.51 (talk) 00:48, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, you do have to decide how to spend your time growing up, primarily in studying or sports. Doing more of one necessarily means less of the other.  So, you could do a bit of each, but to reach the peaks of either, you would likely need to concentrate on one or the other.  I can't see how that would be any different in Germany. StuRat (talk) 01:49, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I think the dichotomy is real but it's not between intellect and health, since nerds (at least the ones I was in school with) tended to be healthy, though not generally as physically bulked-up as real athletes become. I would say jocks were usually involved in gang-like and surrogate-violent sports like American football, while nerds were more interested in recreational sports like cycling or skiing (actually one of the nerds I knew got onto a US Olympic ski team, but that was unusual).  Cycling also attracted nerds because the mechanical device (the bicycle) was interesting in its own right.  Many nerds built their own bicycles from parts that they purchased or scrounged.  It also seems to me, some nerds were control freaks and a number of those were into mountain climbing.  The stereotype pasty, overweight, zero-exercise nerd existed but was unusual and tended to be not all that good even at nerding.  You might like the book "Hackers" by Steven Levy, about a particular nerd subculture of some decades past. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 07:08, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * "the christian Extremists who rule america think, that everybody is valuable, and nobody should be better than someone else and they display the a fair world according to their "ideal" world" While it may have more influence than it does in some other developed countries, the religious right certainly does not rule America and has little impact on the largely secular and liberal film industry. This is also an incredibly flawed understanding of the worldview of the American religious right, which is fair from egalitarian in its outlook. -- Daniel  (talk)  16:11, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I suspect it's related to the rather bizarre American concept of Athletic scholarship, which allows students to get into universities based on sporting ability. This practice is virtually unique to the USA as far as I know, but it it must have an influence on creating/sustaining the nerd/jock distinction of popular culture. Paul B (talk) 19:16, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Are you saying the Christian extremists want to increase Hollywood's exaggeration of violence and reduce its over-representation of thin people, or is that what you think it "should" do? —Tamfang (talk) 20:10, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

Studying and Sports are not as exclusive as you think. Most people spend a large portion of their leissure-time with actions that are neither intelectual nor physical challenging (playing computer games, watching TV,...) so if you cur down on theese activities there should always be enough time to do both studying and exercise. Also isn't it possible to invest all possible time in a single activity. If you try to lern eight hours each day, you become forgetfull and if you try to exercise eight hours each day, you become unable to move. Also keep in mind, that more physical sports like jogging don't require much mental occupation, so you can use the time to think about smart things. The increased stress also helps to improve your mind.

@Tamfang I used Gunviolence and Obesity as examples that americans tend to present themselves more idealised that they are in real-life, because theese two things rarely pop up in their films even considered they are very common in real-life america. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.225.114.26 (talk) 21:36, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * There are jocks and then there are real jocks. The crowds at Ivy League football games where the locals are being whomped by non-conference opponents are known to chant, "That's alright / That's OK / You're going to work / For US someday!" ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:30, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Just my experiences: if I remember correctly, one of my oldest D&D buddies was on the wrestling team. One guy I went to college with was a sterotypical jock.  He was a bulky fellow, military, into football, and he still "hates nerds."  But he plays Magic: The Gathering and was one of the biggest D&D munchkins I knew.  When I transferred between schools in the seventh grade, one guy who was into sports (I can't remember which sports teams he was on, but I do remember he was on some) tried to mess with me for being the new kid and for being a geek.  When he tried to mess with my pencil while I was drawing with it, I almost broke a couple of his fingers.  In primary school, there was one guy I did not get along with, who probably became a jock while I became a nerd.  But toward the end of primary school, we actually found a common interest in Dragon Ball Z.  Ian.thomson (talk) 23:01, 18 March 2014 (UTC)


 * There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, errrm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi - with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock.... μηδείς (talk) 02:28, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

...there shall, in that time, be *rumors* of things going astray, errrm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi - with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o'clock....


 * And now for something completely different...  —: 71.20.250.51 (talk) 21:02, 19 March 2014 (UTC)