X-Message-Number: 33196
From: 
Date: Thu, 6 Jan 2011 13:15:35 EST
Subject: Re: Selfisf people take low paying nice jobs

Craig Venter spent his youth as a surfer (and I have the impression may  
have used recreational drugs). He then got interested in science and  did 

remarkable things. People do good science because they get interested,  not for
the money. Note that Venter has quite a lot of money but keeps doing  
science.
 
Alan Mole
 
 
Message #33194
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2011 11:53:18 -0700
Subject: The  arrival of Gunther Stent's "golden age"?
From: MARK PLUS  <>

Cryonicists can't take "progress" for  granted. Randall Parker
complains about how "Selfish People Take Lower Paying  Jobs" for
lifestyle reasons:

Selfish People Take Lower Paying  Jobs
http://www.parapundit.com/archives/007797.html

Molecular  biologist Gunther Stent wrote about this possibility years  ago:

http://stevens.edu/csw/?p=160

> Stent's prognosis for the  future was an odd mixture of optimism and 

pessimism. He predicted that science,  before it ends, might help to solve many
of civilization's most pressing  problems. It would eliminate disease and 
poverty and provide society with cheap,  pollution-free energy, perhaps 

through the harnessing of fusion reactions. As we  gain more dominion over 
nature, 
however, we may lose what Neitzsche called our  "will to power ; we may 
become less motivated to pursue further  research-especially if such research 
has little chance of yielding tangible  benefits.
>
> As society becomes more affluent and comfortable,  fewer young people may 
choose the increasingly difficult path of science or even  of the arts. 
Many may turn to more hedonistic pursuits, perhaps even abandoning  the "real 
world  for fantasies induced by drugs or electronic devices  feeding directly 
into the brain. Sooner or later, Stent concluded, progress  would "stop 
dead in its tracks,  leaving the world in a largely static  condition that he 
called "the new Polynesia.  The advent of beatniks and  hippies, he surmised, 
signaled the beginning of the end of progress and the dawn  of the new 
Polynesia. He closed his book with the sardonic comment that  "millennia of 
doing arts and science will finally transform the tragicomedy of  life into a 
happening. 

You have to wonder what Stent would have said  about all the time
wasted on social media transmitted through our "electronic  devices" in
our mysterious, far-future year 2011.

Mark  Plus

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