truth or dare - readers' answers

1/Feb/98

A selfish gene is more human than genetic. True or false?

False. Surely the idea of a gene being selfish sounds very human-like, but it is designed to sound catchy to human ears so that the idea itself can spread like a virus. It is a meme. But if we look at what it really means, it refers to the nature of any self-duplicating entity, whether it is of human or not.
Kenji

2/Feb/98

News media and terrorism go together well. True or false?

True. What news media do is to arouse our sense of hazard, which terrorism can easily make use of.
Kenji

3/Feb/98

Carrying a knife is one of the deepest desire of a human being. True or false?

True. Think of what the first human beings did. They made knives out of stones.
Kenji

4/Feb/98

Progress in medicine is a menace to the human race. True or false?

True. Human bodies are optimized for the world without advanced medicine through millions of years of evolution. Progress in medicine would make the bodies lose their balance, and cause for example allergies, or in a larger scale it would break the balance of society by letting people live longer.
Kenji

5/Feb/98

Reality is fragile. True or false?

True. For anyone, reality would disappear by a hit of a bullet.
Kenji

6/Feb/98

Democracy promotes mediocrity. True or false?

True, because majority wins in democracy and majority of people are mediocre.
Kenji

7/Feb/98

Imagination is important for survival. True or false?

True. It requires the power of imagination to think of possible hazards. A Japanese TV announcer commenting on the opening ceremony of Nagano Olympics said he couldn't imagine there are so many land mines in the world, having spent whole of his life in Japan. I'd say, "Imagine."
Kenji

8/Feb/98

Water is the ultimate fetish. True or false?

True. Every fetish must have a reason, which is deeply connected with the structure of our brains. Water is where every life on Earth is from, and perhaps strongly affects us because there are receptors in us.
Kenji

9/Feb/98

Olympic games are the greatest entertainments. True or false?

True. Our mind is designed to focus on other human beings and Olympic games feature astonishing people.
Kenji

10/Feb/98

There are many different professions because the ability of one person is limited. True or false?

False. Many different professions are not necessary for human beings to survive. There must be a desire to expand our activities which is the real reason for their existence.
Kenji

11/Feb/98

Politicians should please tax-payers. True or false?

False but at the same time they should not kill themselves.
Kenji

12/Feb/98

Doping is unfair in sports. True or false?

Not particularly true. Winning already partially is a matter of having adequate financial power, and can be considered an unfair business.
Kenji

13/Feb/98

Children should be fought against. True or false?

True in a way that it requires a lot of energy to face children. We should not spare any strength when we try to communicate with them.
Kenji

14/Feb/98

Love is no more than a habit. True or false?

True. It's a mental inertia.
Kenji

15/Feb/98

More gold medals means more economic boost. True or false?

It depends on how the people regard winning Olympics. If the nation is on its way to modernization then perhaps it's true, because working for the nation's sake makes sense in such a state. Even if the modernization is over, the people can still project themselves to the winners and gain confidence, which is good for the economy.
Kenji

16/Feb/98

Prohibiting human-cloning is chauvinistic. True or false?

True as long as cloning other animals is not prohibited. Obviously, the human race is more important for us, which is rather a natural tendency for an animal.
Kenji

17/Feb/98

A murderer has no privacy. True or false?

Part of his or her privacy can be of my interest if it is concerned with a possibility of me or someone close to me getting or having been killed. But there are things I will not be interested even in such a case (e.g. how he or she spends their time in the bathroom). Therefore, false.
Kenji

18/Feb/98

Meaning is boring. True or false?

True. By making sense we can only see a very limited subset of the whole. Nonsense is broader, however the kind of nonsense which we can perceive and enjoy is also limited.
Kenji

19/Feb/98

Discoveries are the enemies of scientists. True or false?

True if the number of possible discoveries is finite, because then it will narrow the area the scientists can work on.
Kenji

20/Feb/98

Being beautiful is being correct. True or false?

True in human minds only, because these two concepts are both human and both considered positive.
Kenji

21/Feb/98

We should kill other animals in humanistic ways. True or false?

False. It shouldn't matter for other animals if they are killed in humanistic ways because they are not human.
Kenji

22/Feb/98

The Earth is our home. True or false?

True only when we are talking to someone not from the Earth and none of us is nomadic. The latter shouldn't hold in general.
Kenji

23/Feb/98

Incompleteness Theorem tells us our minds are incomplete. True or false?

True because all axiomatic systems lie in our minds.
Kenji

false! the incompleteness theorem tell us our mind is able to see that *our tools* (axiomatic systems) are incompletes. it would be true if and only if our minds were part of an axiomatic system.
Marcos Estevam

24/Feb/98

Males always want their genes to spread and females always want better genes. True or false?

False. Males always want as many partners as possible, and females always want a better partner. As a result, successful males spread their genes, and successful females get better genes. The question has a problem in its usage of the word "want."
Kenji

25/Feb/98

Symbiosis of enterprises is friendly to our surrounding environment. True or false?

True as less competition would mean less exploitation of natural resources.
Kenji

26/Feb/98

Any human being cannot get away from fighting. True or false?

False as a human being is a natural being and the nature always provides us with exceptions.
Kenji

27/Feb/98

Truth lies in extreme situations. True or false?

There are some examples which tells that truth is found in extreme situations: high energy physics and what you really are. Maybe these are connected, and maybe the proposition is true.
Kenji

28/Feb/98

Keeping promises is an obsession for you. True or false?

True.
Kenji