Otto Kretschmer

Forum members, what's your opinion on Sharia law in general?

@MigL Aren't Patricia Crone's ideas rejected by majority of historians?

Muhammad did not travel much. IIRC he made a single trip to Damascus on behalf of his wife, selling her merchandise and buying what she requested. That's it.

I am not sure about this. Muhammad's life is no better documented than the life of Jesus - all information about him comes from sources written over a century after his death (the first biography of Muhammad comes from ca. 750 AD while he died in 632 AD). Confucius and Buddha aren't better documented either.

I wonder... Unlike say, autism which does have it's positive sides, psychopathy has none I can think of. It's existence seems to be a net loss to society. If that's the case, why haven't genes responsible for it been bred out of the gene pool yet? Should we use gene editong to eliminate potential psychopaths given the harm they cause, once the necessary technology becomes available?

Most discussion on this forum seems to be about Christianity. But what do you guys think of Islam? My thoughts about it are mixed. I appreciate parts of it like a strong emphasis on charity and support of free market but I dislike other parts of it like death penalty for adultsry, apostasy and blasphemy or a generally lower status of women. What are your thoughts?

BTW there are two kinds of empathy, emotional empathy and cognitive empathy. Psychopaths lack emotional empathy but not cognitive empathy which means they're perfectly aware of other people's feelings, they just don't "feel" their pain. Autistics are the other way around - they do feel the pain of others, they just don't have the capacity to read their feelings/thoughts. It's a bit tricky to understand but those two disorders are essentially polar opposites of each other.

What's the genetic mechanism behind this? It happens quite often. One mechanism is de novo mutations. Anything else?

Why do you think so many US universities make it to top ranks?

I often hear a claim that US universities are the best in the world, often backed up by lists like the Shanghai Ranking. So, are they? This claim gets my inner skeptic on for a simple reason - they are not free unlike universities in my.country (Poland)

Deprivation of what? Nutrition or information? Is this the case in developed countries?

Any evidence that his parents' methods were non standard? To my knowledge little is known about his early life other that he showed extraordinary mathematical ability from an early age. I'm not saying nurture did not contribute to his success. But my reasoning tells me that in his case nature was the dominant factor.

Having support and tailor made education certainly helped him realize his potential. But it did not create it - he showed extreme math aptitude since age 2-3 so his brain somehow has to be wired differently... If education and support was the key here then the same pattern of lifetime achievement would repeat itself in other children. Yet there are thousands of math or physics teachers' kids who don't achieve nowhere near as much as Tao.

What's the future of quantum computers? I recently watched a video by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Michio Kaku on which the latter claimed that quantum computers will replace classical computers since they are thousands if not millions of times more powerful. Do you agree with that assessment or not? Neither Tyson nor Kaku has any specialized knowledge of computer science, both of them have PhDs in different fields and likely don't know more about computers than an average science enthusiast. So they might be wrong... Or are they?

What's your opinion on Dharmic religions i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism? I personally like them more than Abrahamic religions since they are more tolerant and don't have the same "who doesn't believe in me goes to hell" approach. A nice introduction to Buddhism:

You're sure of that? Most people struggle with high school math. At the same time Terence Tao was already learning university level math by the time he was 9 years old and had a PhD at 21 and a professorship at 24. Those people simply are different from an average person.

Have any studies been done on individuals with very high ontelligence? How exactly are the brains of guys like Terence Tao or Ed Witten different from an average brain that makes them so smart? Is it about brain size? Size of some brain areas? Some unusual synaptic properties? Whatever?

Since IQ tests have the celling of 160, are IQs higher than that possible or not?