Slashdot Mirror

You can look this page to read about a teacher who has successfully employed the socratic method to teach binary arithmetics to third graders.

But how much of a special case is it? Our language has a word for the concept of "one more", and so we're capable of expressing the concept of counting in words, and thus arithmetic.

Apparently it's possible to teach 3rd and 4th grade students about binary arithmetic just by asking directed questions:
              http://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
The class already knew the concept of binary arithmetic, they just didn't know how to express it.

This tribe should already understand binary concepts (zero or many), at first glance, it should be possible to teach them binary arithmetic. The problem is, since there is no way to express that 11 and 111 are different, or how to convert one to the other (just "add one") and thus we can't teach them to count.

What I think Whorf was trying to say is that words are the way our minds can express and understand concepts. If we don't have a word, but we can express a concept in a language, then the language we use doesn't limit us. For example, we may not have a single word that can express the concept of "wet slushy snow with ice crystals", but since we have a string of words that can do it, we can still express our ideas. The problem comes when we have a concept that we can't put into words no matter how many words we string together. Because we don't have words for it, the concept cannot be related to other concepts or use as a basis for our thoughts. In mathematical terms, they are the "basis" in a vector space. The concepts we think about is limitted by the span of this vector space. Anything outside this vector space span are inaccessible to us, in much the same way that the third dimension is inaccessible to a flatlander. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland )

I think that terevos makes a very valid point. The problem with science is, just like any other belief, there are some things that can't be explained. And when this happens, when there are things that not even science can explain, the hardcore scientists, fanatacists like the hard core religious folks, try to fill in the void with invalid theories.

This can be seen with evolution. Evolution explains one thing and one thing ONLY - how one organism may beat out another organism, and thus survive and proliferate. It does NOT, however, explain how things are first formed.

For example, if 2 organisms are born, and one is taller than the other, the taller one may outlive the shorter one because it has easier access to food, etc. This is what evolution explains.

What evolution does NOT explain is how, for example, an organ such as the eyeball was formed. No form of evolution can explain this, and trying to is just as bad as a ID or creationism believer.

A quote from http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/evolution.htm, which all objective atheists should ponder:

" In that insightful book, he had a most ingenious argument against evolution as a complete explanation of the origin of life -- an argument that is still relevant today, particularly when put in biochemical terms at the molecular and genetic level. Specifically what Paley argued was that if we found a watch out in the middle of nowhere, we would postulate that someone designed and made it - even if it did not keep perfect time, even if it did not work at all, even if we found that it could reproduce other watches (and thus might itself have been made by a prior watch - thus shifting our question to what made the first watch, rather than perhaps the particular one we had found). He argues that the human eye is far more sophisticated in many ways than a watch, and therefore it would be absurd to argue that the watch must have been designed but that the eye could have just come about by some sort of random chance, even in combination with some kind of theory of evolution - the idea of which preceded Darwin. We would never say the watch might have just evolved out there in the woods or the desert or the bottom of the ocean. Why should we take the watch as evidence of design, but not the human eye?"

I personally am agnostic - I think that religion is full of holes and only a fool could believe in it without seeing the fallacies. But I think science also has its share, and to believe fully in it without being objective is just as bad - i.e. to think that science explains EVERYTHING. It doesn't.

That's three different sources. But if you prefer a longer version: http://www.garlikov.com/philosophy/slope.htm
Or this: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/slipslop.html
The slippery slope is a logical fallacy, not a form of proof.

The slippery-slope argument claims that if one thing happens, a series of other things must happen without proving any of the subsequent claims.

How about, instead of making outrageous claims about what you think will happen, try to prove those steps or at least supply enough evidence to make them highly likely? What makes you believe that the introduction of ID cards would lead to a totalitarian police state? Especially when there are so many countries that have adopted ID cards without turning into police states?

Besides you can not replace one Neuron with anything. Each is unique not only in it's "logic" but it's biology as well.

Spam amounts to a distributed denial of service attack. Are you going to argue that DDOS should be legal as well? Additionally, you're using a classically weak "slippery slope" argument. Here are a few links on the subject of slippery slopes:

link1
link2
link3

Now, you ask where do we draw the line? We don't draw the line. The politicians you have elected do. This is a republic, not a democracy and therefore if you are concerned with this problem, contact your representative and find out where he or she stands. I hope you know who your representative is.