Humanity's biggest mistake (Page 1 of 2)

Too much fucking.

Not sure.  I just wanted to see what people would say.  But since you brought it up, what do you think spoecifically the biggest error would be?

They couldn't continue fighting a war in Asia and a war way over the pacific. The idea of the bombing of Pearl Harbor was just to cripple America so Japan could buy enough time to conquer Asia. I guess you could wish they maintained the attack after Pearl Harbor and lose earlier in the War.

Humanity's biggest mistake is killjoy

War3Pub's EVIL twatish mini-marsh martian
Mobo is good, he is without fault, surrender your will, into his cult!
Mobo Cult Drone #8, Offical Alien

Ignoring the signs of global warming.

Political Correctness.

That, and organized media.

Agreed, but that hardly falls within the last 100 years.

<Bill_> it really, really hurts to say this
<Bill_> really
<Bill_> but prencher, you were right

I would have to disagree with this.  There's no reason to say that a mistake is not a mistake just because there was no better information at the time.  But I do agree that a mistake in which the maker should haev known better is a worse mistake than one in which the maker did not.

I don't think semantics is the point of this discussion, but I think if you "should have known better" it supports Krall's view. Should have known better implies that you didn't. If you did know the consequences of your choice, then it wouldn't be much of a mistake, it would be intentional. I think a mistake requires that you do not know the outcome. Perfect knowledge does not imply that someone would be a perfect individual. It does imply that they would not make mistakes, but they are still free to make a bad decision.

For example, driving off a cliff would not be a mistake.

Dancing on someones grave when their relative was approaching unknown to you would be a mistake.

Sorry to break this down so much, but I think that if I didn't then the discussion would be too hard to follow.

It's not a mistake if you make an intentional decision with full knowledge of the consequences, true. But it IS a mistake if you make an unintentional decision while knowing the consequences. Such as driving off a cliff because you were distracted by a fly. So really the only point here is that doing something unintentionally is a mistake, which I agree with.

Do you have any reason why you think this? It is basically just the opposite of what I said. Plus, there are lots of examples in which people do know the outcome, but they clearly still make a mistake, such as when they do something unintentionally.

However, if they don't know the consequences of their action, then it doesn't matter if they did it intentionally or not. There are no reasons why or why not to do it, so there can be no regret for going one way or another, hence no mistake.

I agree that Perfect knowledge does not necessarily imply that someone would be a perfect individual. But it does NOT imply that they would not make mistakes, because you can still do something unintentionally with full knowledge of the consequences. They have the potential to be perfect, since if they never made mistakes, they would always be doing the best thing they possibly could be.

Edit:

I don't really think it's a derailment to try to get to the core of what this thread is about. It would be enough for me to see just one person agree that despite the official definition, I might have a point. If it turns out that all these years of sending out radio signals invites a bloodthirsty race of aliens who annihilate us all, I hardly think that it's fair to say that us dummies made a stupid mistake lawl. We were doing what we thought was right. The same goes for our ancestors in a lot of cases.

I don't support required voting because it wouldn't require people to make informed votes. It would solve nothing and potentially lead to bigger problems because elections would be even more of a contest of who has the most appeal on camera.

On topic I would have to agree that the lack of commitment to environmental preservation would definitely be in the running for biggest mistake. At least people are pretending to care recently.

e: Wow Leymo, that's kind of eerie how much my post mirrored your first half.

Capitalism and with that, an increase in privatization and the makeover of public space.

Much of the the negative aspects of contemporary society can be traced back to within the past few decades when corporations increasingly grew in power and started to manufacture lifestyles instead of products. We live in a society where people are branded from cradle to grave and while the top tier reap the benefits, it is the middle and lower class that suffer the blow backs of environmental degradation, poverty, increasing costs of education and healthcare, as well as the negative aspects of globalization.

This.

There's just too damn many people on this rock, and once we are out of cheap energy to keep them all up, they'll die off in droves.