BillyClark

I suspect that one disconnect is that we’re not specifically talking about DND. This isn’t an RPG community or a DND community. It’s just a comic strip community.

The comic has a cloak of wisdom, but otherwise seems to be entirely in a modern setting.

The person I responded to just mentioned “intelligence” and “wisdom”, and people do talk about these with regard to real life and not games. In fact, my aphorism about looking both ways at a one-way street is one that was created referencing real life.

I’ve heard many different explanations of intelligence vs wisdom, and I used to think it made sense.

Like, intelligence is raw processing power while wisdom is having the advantage of experience.

Or like a smart man looks for oncoming cars before crossing a one-way street, while a wise man looks both ways before crossing a one-way street.

But the more I know about the world, the less I think experienced people are necessarily wiser. They’re only wiser if they have the intelligence, clarity, and willpower to learn from their past.

So to me, it seems that wisdom is more like the area under the intelligence curve. Which would make them inexorably linked.

Yeah, the joke doesn’t really work, does it? Any decent programmer will have a better shot at fixing a printer, because any decent programmer is good at finding information on the internet and then following the instructions.

Programmers complain about this situation because once people know that we use the computers, they expect us to fix everything for them for free. So, it’s just annoying. But I wouldn’t sacrifice my life to avoid a minor annoyance, so the joke doesn’t really work.

If you’re a programmer that doesn’t generally know how to find instructions to fix things like printers on the internet and then follow them, then I’m on the side of the guy who wants to shoot them.

It’s possible you’d get on a “no fly” list, which could be a problem for some people.

There are probably all sorts of ways that a corrupt government like ours can find ways to punish even perfectly innocent people.

Humans used to be smarter

When was that?

Well, patents only last for 20 years. I’m sure they have newer processes that have been patented in the last 20 years, but I’m also sure that they are using refineries more than 20 years old.

Wait, you can learn about something just by searching for that thing on Wikipedia?

There’s also a huge barrier to entry in fossil fuels, since the existing industry owns the oil wells and refineries.

Any dumb asshole can just go build a wind turbine.

I respectfully disagree. Humans are a part of the universe, and they care about themselves.

I guess if you tend to look at things scientifically, you are more likely to see it as a responsibility. Humans are something that came about in the universe, and we are trying to learn about the universe. Another way of saying that is that we are the universe trying to learn about itself.

Of course, otherwise, even if you didn’t ask to exist, it’s quite presumptuous of you to make that decision for everybody else. If you’re going to judge civilization for bringing about your situation, it seems hypocritical for you to think it’s okay to make a different decision unilaterally.

The premise is only true if people, or even animals, never get hit by trolleys unless they are tied to the tracks. But we know this not to be the case.

Without civilization, there would be nobody to judge civilization, either.

I recently heard a science popularizer like Neil deGrasse Tyson or maybe Brian Cox talking about tangents to the Fermi Paradox. Essentially, even if intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe, it’s possible that we’re the only scientifically advanced intelligent civilization in the Milky Way galaxy. As long as we don’t know otherwise, it’s not a terrible assumption.

But anyways, if we do happen to be the only intelligent civilization in the Milky Way, it’s quite a responsibility. It’s a shame that we seem to be racing towards our own doom. We should be doing whatever we can to save our civilization. Of course, it may be that most civilizations that reach this point destroy themselves.

This was Esquire Singapore, by the way, for those who mostly just read titles.

blacked out and came to at a Waffle House

I have a proposal to add this to the Waffle House FAQs, if they have them.

Q: I teleported to Waffle House. Am I a god? Was I abducted by aliens? Am I the most important person in history?

A: While we cannot definitively rule out any of those things, every time this has happened in the past was due to the customer blacking out and going to the only place that was open at the time. In fact, this situation accounts for a large portion of our revenue. Don’t think of yourself as a pathetic brainless drunk loser. You’re an important part of the economy.

Jesus needs to be an only child and conceived by god or he’s not special enough.

I seem to recall that back then, there were a lot of myths about virgin births. So even that lie wasn’t particularly special, in the grand scheme of things.

No it isn’t

I disagree

Who could argue with that?

I used to say things like, “I’m straight but” whatever. This was about 30 years ago, and I just didn’t know what to do with the idea of gay men, so I would occasionally say things to virtue signal that I was okay with it.

But it turns out that I was just overcompensating and dealing with a bit of “main character” complex. I really didn’t need to say or do anything overt to be accepting of gay people.

You’re not getting up an hour later, though. You’re getting up at the same time as before, they’re just counting it differently.