I see the point you're making, but you're also pretty quick to dismiss Hawking's point.
You don't know what else he's studied....he's relegated to a damn wheel chair, probably all he does is read and research things.
I have a strong idea of what he's studied from the depth of the comments he makes.
When you've spent time researching and wrapping your head around an issue, it's not difficult to read someone else's thoughts on the subject and get a feel for the level at which they've engaged in it. Hawking talks a LOT on the subjects that he knows something about. Even when he only has space for a short statement, you can tell that he's got some background on the topic. But on the subjects that he doesn't know anything about, his statements always comes off as general platitudes, and he never adds depth or explains his reasoning and background in any other place.
He attributes the coming destruction of the world to simplistic things like, "overpopulation" and "stupidity". No one who has read and thought seriously about the topic talks that way about it. First off, "smart" people are destroying the world much faster than stupid people - being intelligent doesn't seem to impair people's ability to be greedy, destroy pieces of the planet for profit, start wars, support multinational corporations and gigantic agribusiness, and so on. And overpopulation is vastly exaggerated as the root cause of the problem - our consumption and destruction has increased much faster than our population, and overpopulation tends to solve itself when a population reaches a developed state, while overconsumption has shown no such bounds. Even if we kept a completely stable population, or even a decreasing one, our major global issues would remain largely unchanged do to the unsustainable and increasing consumption of the population we do have, and the continuous desire to convert natural resources into money no matter how much money we already have.
If you can find
any place where Hawking shows that he's meaningfully engaged in the debates and read up on the background in these topics, let me know. Does he ever quote a particular book or author? Acknowledge a debate in the field and explain why he sides with one side rather than the other? Mentioned what expert i the field that he learned something from? Explain the logic behind his thoughts at a level higher than a high school student who watched "An Inconvenient Truth" could have?
Literally the only topic I have ever seen Hawking comment on outside of physics that appeared to contain a degree of serious, studied knowledge was Artificial Intelligence. He's obviously spent a lot of time thinking about A.I., much more than me, and is familiar with a good amount of the conversation going around on the subject.
But when he talks about philosophy, religion, politics, overpopulation, or the issue of human resource exploitation, he comes off as the average smart person who likes to pontificate on everything when he has an audience, but hasn't actually done the hard work to develop a perspective worth listening to on any of those subjects. In other words, my grandpa.
And as for your comment about posters here with i.q's just as high as Hawking's...that seems ridiculous and I want to see your evidence of that.
Why is it ridiculous? Do you even know what Stephen Hawking's IQ is?
The belief that IQ correlates strongly with intellectual achievements is vastly exaggerated. Once you get above 125-130, IQ has very little to do with life outcomes at all. There are plenty of Nobel Prize winners in the 120-130 IQ range, and people viewed among the "smartest people ever" often had IQ's no higher than 140. Meanwhile, the guy who has one of the highest measured IQ's in history, Chris Langan at somewhere around 195-210, never graduated from college and spent most of his life working as a laborer. Other than the fact that he's done very well on IQ tests, you never, ever would have heard of him.
IQ is good for solving highly abstract puzzles. But whether your ability to do that can correlate to solving real world problems depends on a whole lot beyond IQ - on how you were raised, your opportunities, your work ethic, your integrity, your chosen goals, your social connections, and often a ton of luck. The variance in those things explains a lot more in whether a physicist will make a brilliant discovery than whether that physicist's IQ is 135 or 175.
Stephen Hawking says he's never had his IQ measured. You can go around the internet and find people randomly guessing 160, but that's just a vague guess. Because Hawking's work in physics has been in one of the most abstract fields, and he's been good at it, I would be willing to say that he probably has an IQ above the normal range even for a good physicist - maybe anywhere from 140-170 and quite likely on the higher end of that range.. But there's no particular reason to believe his IQ is uniquely stratospheric.
As far as Coli posters go, I know of one regular poster whose IQ has measured at 155-160 (he wouldn't want me to say his name). I've seen other posters who, from the way they are able to develop arguments, appear quite likely to me to have IQ's that are at least 135+ - beyond that it's impossible to tell from internet conversations. I know people with IQ's around 100 who have thought much more deeply than Hawking on this topic, and are therefore much more likely than him to come up with meaningful statements on it.
I think you have a problem with the fact that Hawking has infinitely more credibility than you do regarding pretty much anything scientific
But he doesn't.
The average person with a bachelor's degree in biology has more credibility than Stephen Hawking on literally everything related to biology.
The average person with a bachelor's degree in geology has more credibility than Stephen Hawking on literally everything related to geology.
That goes for every scientific topic except for chemistry and physics. And even within them, I'm not sure that Stephen Hawking's expertise levels in, say, biophysics, biochemistry, and a number of other fields unrelated to his own work is that high. He works in general relativity/astrophysics/cosmology. Even when he's stepped a little bit outside of that (like venturing into particle physics with his bet that the Higgs Boson would never be found), he's looked a bit amateurish.
Heck, you could probably put together a reading list of 3-5 books on the topic in question, and the average intelligent, open-minded person would immediately have more credibility than Hawking on that topic, because he's unlikely to have done that research.
Asking Stephen Hawking to comment on the social future of the world is barely any more productive than asking Ja Rule to comment on politics. It ain't his gig, and no amount of celebrity status or IQ cred can make up for that. Only him doing the work to understand serious background on the topic would do that, and he shows no indication of having done that work.
Steve just pushes play on his computer and takes a nap right in front of everybody for an hour.
