LogFAQs > #954916700

Kegran posted...

Turing? Not to minimize, but Germany was screwed either way, but that's a different story.

Most likely, but he was the reason Europe and America remained dominant instead of having the Soviets steamroll the Nazis and keep moving west to pick up what they left behind of the rest of Europe. His contribution really cannot be understated, which makes it even more disgusting that he was treated so poorly.

Kegran posted...

I don't think I have the words to describe how this isn't what I mean at the moment.

Oh, I know exactly what you mean. You believe that, without children to directly benefit from their contributions, people are less motivated to do anything meaningful with their lives that might make for a better future, and that non-reproductive lifestyles therefore should be discouraged during children's formative years to maximize their motivation to be productive.

Of course, that's a belief you could substantiate, if there were any merit to it. Randomly select a sample of a few dozen people that have made major contributions to the betterment of humanity throughout history, find out whether or not they've had children (preferably before making their contributions, but that data may be tricky to come by), and compare that to contemporary statistics for the general population to see if there's actually a significant difference in reproductive rate between those that contribute significantly to society and those that don't. If you want to make this claim, go do that so you have some actual data to back you up.

To save you some time, though, I'll point out that people are perfectly capable of caring about people that aren't their own children, and most people have already commited to the careers that ultimately lead to them making major contributions by the time they actually have kids. There's very little reason to suspect that having children is a prerequisite for making contributions to society. In turn, there's very little reason to believe that having more people reproduce would change much about the fact that the vast majority of people (parents or no) will never make particularly significant contributions to society. I encourage you to test your hypothesis regardless, since science rules and whatnot, but I don't expect you to find a significant trend there.

Kegran posted...

I'm even for gay marriage so I don't disagree with any rights or anything.

You just don't think that media should present anything other than reproductive heterosexuality as being legitimate, which would inevitably have serious negative effects on the treatment and rights of gay populations because it would reinforce the idea that they're bad and shouldn't exist. Didn't really think that one through, did you?

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