Quote from: nullius on February 10, 2018, 11:33:21 PM

Quote from: actisstupidname on February 08, 2018, 12:49:46 AM

You won't win here, buddy. It's already a cult. Noticed the merit stats? It's one big circle jerking group of guys giving merits among themselves. And the concentration of the merit activity is centered here in the Meta section.

Some few merits are spread out to parts of the Bitcoin discussion, but the larger sections of this lame forum have almost no merit activity at all. And that speaks volumes of what kind of people the seniority here are.

Not true. I will use myself as a handy counterexample.

Counting with a 1-based index unlike a C programmer, I am currently #7 on the list of all-time top-merited users. My rank is currently Member; I already have sufficient merit to skip up two ranks to Sr. Member. Whereas the soonest I can reach the activity threshold for Sr. Member status will be on 17 July 2018 at 20:40:00 UTC.

Following is the breakdown of where Ive earned my merit thus far. The largest proportion has come from Development & Technical Discussion, where I am proud to have recently become the first (and thus far, only) person yet awarded merit by Core developer gmaxwell. Here in Meta and elsewhere, Ive also been trying to contribute to the efforts of DT members who are protecting the integrity of the merit system; but in the ordinary course of discussion, I havent been awarded as much merit for that as for my tech posts.

46.4%	137	Development & Technical Discussion
31.2%	92	Meta (in the ordinary course of discussion)
16.9%	50	An unrepeatable historic forum first-and-only in Meta: I flamed a man so harshly that he gave me +50 for it! My pen is a mightier sword.
3.4%	10	Reputation
2.0%	6	Bitcoin Discussion
99.9%	295	Total

(Percentages do not always add up to 100.0% due to rounding.)

So much for your absurd theories. The merit system is very simple: Meritorious posts earn merit. For example, one of my highest-merited posts, Bitcoins Public-Key Security Level, is currently +18 (including +5 from the tech forum moderator). Make good posts, and you will earn meritor dont, and you wont.

Quote from: Lauda on February 08, 2018, 08:26:11 AM

d) Empathy is a weakness. All it does is cloud your judgement, thus severely impacting your ability to think rationally.

I gave +1 for the rest of your post, plus +1 for that alone.

Quote from: JohnUser on February 08, 2018, 11:40:33 AM

Empathy is a weakness ? Without empathy human would not have live so long time, it's the base of our society/family/clan !

You have it backwards, upside-down, and inside-out (as most people who make armchair historical arguments usually do). Society collapsed (past tense) in large part from a surfeit of empathy. Society/family/clan worked by honour and the sword, hierarchy, obedience, group loyalty, and merciless shaming and shunning of social traitors and misfits. Not by bleeding hearts and sob stories. The world today is drowning in empathy. The meek are inheriting the Earth; and of course, they will wail and gnash their teeth over a merit system which stops them from inheriting the Bitcoin Forum, too.

Quote from: Lauda on February 09, 2018, 07:43:55 AM

Quote from: JohnUser on February 08, 2018, 11:40:33 AM

Without empathy human would not have live so long time, it's the base of our society/family/clan !

Appeal to tradition. Just because we might have needed empathy before in order to survive, that doesn't mean that we need it today. Furthermore, just because it might have been useful before that doesn't mean that it is useful today.

There, you are wrong; for tradition stands falsely accused of an empathy which it never had. This thing called empathy by our contemporaries who use it as a religious byword implies empathy for the weak, stupid, diseased, degenerate, cowardly, incompetent, and outright criminal. I have never heard anyone cry that we must have empathy for superior achievements. Think about it rationally: Empathy is inimical to survival. Any species with too much of it will prove to be an evolutionary dead-end.

Nature never had any empathyor for that matter, mercy. Neither does Bitcoin, whose first commandment is to keep safe your private keys: If you lose your private keys, then you lose all. If you fail to secure your private keys, then Bitcoin will reward a thief and punish you. You may cry, scream, shake your fist, preach about empathyit will not help, and nobody can help you. The judgment of Bitcoin is cold, merciless, exacting, mathematically preciseand final, without any court of appeal. It is the judgment of pure cause and effect, a financial law which echoes both physical law and the moral laws of older forms of Hinduism. And as such, Bitcoin excludes the vagaries of human arbiters, human emotionshuman corruption. For those who are willing to take ultimate responsibility for themselves in exchange for ultimate power over themselves, Bitcoin grants freedom. For the restwell, I am surprised to hear people whining about empathy in the Bitcoin Forum.

Quote from: Lauda on February 09, 2018, 07:43:55 AM

I have helped thousands of users here over the years, and felt no empathy towards any case. You do not need empathy to help someone. You were saying?

Being a reasonable person with decent premises, you miss the contrary unstated premises of the empathy brigades. The purpose of the empathy religion is not to induce people to help others, or achieve any other constructive goal whatsoever. Rather, empathy is designed to create an inverted moral hierarchy with pitiable wretches at the top, and you at the bottom. Its ultimate end is to destroy the very concept of superiority of achievement, and thus stop all achievement. The architects of the general class of philosophies which converge as antecedents to todays empathy were and are motivated by one or more of hatred for all mankind, blind jealousy, idealization of primitive hunter-gatherer societies and noble savages, and/or psychotic delusions (e.g. Auguste Comte; I categorize Rousseau similarly, on grounds that he frankly admitted being unable to cope with reality).

Please go on actually helping people, for whatever non-empathetic reasons you may have.

Quote from: The Pharmacist on February 08, 2018, 02:19:42 AM

KWH, I know you were being sardonic, but I got PMs like this when I was tagging shitposters:

Quote from: coinfast on January 25, 2018, 12:36:42 PM

I have two children, should I finance
I will not repeat it
I beg your remove my trust for negative. I will not repeat it
I have no work other than in the forums
I am sorry
Thank you

And I found it extremely sad, but the fact is that these people are ruining their "workplace" and should be "fired".

When I was young, I was given the advice that the hardest part of being a boss is firing people. When you call some incompetent fool on the carpet and his eyes get all wide, and you think a grown man might start to cry as he begins to stammer about his kids and his wife and how much he needs this job, then you yourself are being tested for whether or not you be boss material.

If you give a damn for his sob story, then you are cruel: Cruel to all the competent workers who also have wives and kids and families, and are breaking their backs carrying the incompetent fool as worse than deadweight. I myself empathize with competence. If you have a heart, then you must realize that firing the fool makes the workplace more efficient so that you can give everybody else a raise in wages.

Whereas here on the forum, the spammers are killing the goose which lays the golden eggs for them. Let them rot with their own myopia. I dont care if they are (or claim to be) poor, have kids, or whateverwhatever. Please, sir, I really really really need to spam is not an argument which moves me. Substitute any other crime for spam, and the same applies.

(Aside: I myself have real-life experience with desperation brought by ill circumstance, hardship, hunger, ailing health, and outright homelessness. I would win any game of one-downsmanship before a jury of bleeding hearts. I dislike mentioning that, and shant discuss it further, because I have something called dignity; and it does not give me any special credibility in this argument, as if only those who have had it tough can pass judgment on wrongdoing. I bring this up only to point out that in my experience, those who have had easy lives seem most susceptible to catching empathy. I infer from that a misplaced sense of guilt. Whereas those who face genuine life-and-death hardship either become degenerate beggars, or embrace the lesson that the strong survive and the weak perish. Builds character.)

Quote from: Wendigo on February 09, 2018, 09:50:59 AM

Quote from: The Pharmacist on February 07, 2018, 08:08:32 PM

[...]

Aren't you in here for financial gain too? The pot calling the kettle black. Disable your paid signature and then spend all your time here doing God's work spreading those well-deserved negative ratings for free out of the goodness of your heart Grin

It's so funny how the most vocal, narcissistic individuals on the DT network are running paid signatures. You all must have very peculiar psychological profiles lol.

Well, heres a Legendary who is unable to distinguish between a user who contributes to the forum and has a sig ad, versus a user who comes here only to spam the forum to make money off sig ads. F in logic.

Quote from: johhnyUA on February 10, 2018, 03:55:33 PM

You're wrong, lol. Empathy it's one of the most important principles of humanism. [snip tortuous armchair historian-psychologist argumentation]

No, not really. Also, please look up the word humanism. It is one of the words most abused by pseudointellectuals who have no idea what theyre talking about. I myself would claim (or at least aspire) to be a humanist, in the Renaissance sense. I totally reject the concept of empathy.

Quote from: Tyrantt on February 10, 2018, 07:23:05 PM

Quote from: johhnyUA on February 10, 2018, 03:55:33 PM

[...]

I think you've got it wrong. Why would you care for someone that doesn't affect you at all? You can't compare empathy in earlier years and now. Communities were smaller and you kind of got to know and benefit from one another.

You almost hit the nail on the head. See what I said above about group loyalty. The only part you missed is that to empathy advocates, this isnt a bug: Its a feature. So-called empathy is nothing more than a toxic social solvent which forces people to not only embrace the lowest common denominator, but expand it beyond your own villages idiots to include every poor wretch in the whole wide world.

Quote from: HodorHodl on February 07, 2018, 09:39:16 PM

Drop it, the lot of you. This is childish.

Drop the lot of you false equivalencies, or else I will stomp my feet and hold my breath until I turn blue.

Ah here comes another narcissistic nobleman trying to assert his superiority by pushing out these literary growing pains of mini-essays that nobody cares about. And while you are still at it, could you please give Lauda some private lessons in English punctuation 'cause I think his English textbook is not up to snuff and I am tired of reading his inappropriately used commas that tend to litter his nicely spaced out ramblings.

Thanks for your time and have a nice day, knobhead Grin