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That's because Alva Noe has no clue about what it's talking about. I have programmed and used biology much like we do a computer, and just because we prefer our computers not use basiean inference to give us answers to problems, which is arguably the way that we think, doesn't restrict us from programming them that way.

As a statistician, I am seriously annoyed with the usual Left-Right dichotomy we see in most press articles. While I like the Political Compass I am a bit nervous of their clustering algorithm, and the questions they use to feed the analytics. Even more interesting is Johathan Haidt who has achieved some TEDTalk fame describing a five-dimensional feature space (though he does try to reduce to two clusters - liberals and conservatives). So I pose a two part question, (1) do you think the public discourse is hampered by the popular press always reducing politicians and voters to "liberals" and "conservatives"? And if you are concerned, (2) what can we do to push back against such simplifications, especially here on Slashdot?

Hi,

Perhaps you are the man; please, please, have a look at this talk by Hans Rosling: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_...

If you find it inspiring enough, kindly contact back at georgatos _at_ ewb-luxembourg _dot_ org ;
I play as the secretary of the board, at EWB Luxembourg organization (other mundane roles included).

As a number of people have responded to you, the issue, while simple, is not what you're stating. That's something that can be adjusted for and overcome pretty easily.

The real issue is that more developed nations have found methods of mass-producing cheap consumables -- cheap to produce, cheap to buy, lacking in nutrients, rich in other stuff that causes obesity (or sometimes just the wrong balance for your body to process as "working" food). These consumables have replaced grown vegetables in the diet of people with less income, because they're more easily affordable at the time they're needed.

Ron Finley spells it out pretty clearly. When his poorer neighbourhood converted abandoned lots and street easements into places to plant edible food, obesity levels dropped, vandalism dropped, and most importantly, diabetes levels dropped.

It's correlation and not causation, but this is a pretty damning result suggesting that convenience "foods" are a major contributor to the obesity issue (likely because of what they use as fillers, preservatives and growth hormones).

In fact I think overpopulation will be a problem in the future.

We already know from Hans Rosling that population tops out at 10 billion or so, which we can easily support (and again, a warmer climate helps with).

It's the ice ages you need to fear, those fuckers will slaughter billions.

I've never once seen the right wing give me a good answer that didn't boil down to "let 'em die for my profit and glory" or some form of back door socialism. If you've got the balls (and they psychopathy) to let 99% of the world starve while 1% live like Gods fine.

Well, the irony of course is that it is socialism that leads to "letting the 99% of the world starve while 1% live like Gods". How do I know? I experienced socialism first hand, the real kind, behind iron curtain and everything. That's why I find the positions of US liberals and progressives on socialism and welfare states so disturbing: you simply have no idea what you are advocating and how miserably it fails in practice, time and again.

This idea that free markets lead to starvation, poverty, or exploitation is simply a lie. It has been free markets and free trade that have brought unprecedented wealth, health, peace, and freedom from privation to the world.

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_...

Free markets do lead to more inequality than socialism, but inequality doesn't matter if everybody is still better off.

The problem isn't "how do we train people for new jobs" it's "what do we do with people when there _are_ no jobs?". What do we do when only 20% of us have any useful work to do? What about 10%? 1%?

From the point of view of the 19th century, less than 10% of us have useful work to do these days: less than 10% of the workforce are engaged in producing the entirety of the stuff that people 200 years ago needed for work, and those 10% are producing stuff that would have been fit for kings back then. Does that mean 90% of people are out of work? Not at all: the labor participation rate is higher than it has ever been (well, except for a modest dip due to Obama's screwy policies).

Human labor is always scarce. The real problems with welfare and unemployment we have are the consequence of increasing government policies that encourage people not to work, in particular at the low end. It is demeaning and hurtful for the people involved, and it is destructive for our society.

What you're asking for is called the "Oxford Comma," and is considered optional.

There's a really interesting TED video on the debate about the Oxford Comma, and usage, on TED

The failures of this hospital in dealing with a novel and gravely serious situation are in no way indicative of remarkably incompetent individuals or sub-standard hospital policies.

Even the most complete training cannot provide experience. Day to day work in a hospital is boring and routine, and when faced with the unknown people are going to fall back on that routine, not what they were trained to do briefly and long ago. Nurses who haven't dealt much with explosive diarrhea or projectile vomiting won't have practice being meticulous about preventing splatter on every part of their skin or porous clothing. Simply telling someone to be careful and then sending them off unsupervised and unaided isn't terribly effective.

Hospitals cannot afford to maintain a full wardrobe of gear to deal with even one Ebola patient throughout the course of treatment, nor are they set up to dispose of that gear at the rate it piles up after use. Adequate supplies will need to be provided on a reactive (not proactive) basis. Protocols, however, simply assume that the gear is there and ready to be used by people well versed in their use. It doesn't do any good to have well thought out procedures in place if it isn't possible or practical to implement them.

People who blame the nurses, or the hospital, or the patient are holding them up to an unreasonable standard. These people are not special. They're not clowns and they're not villains. They're just normal folk reacting the way normal folk will, and neither the CDC nor anyone else has some magic wand to wave to prevent this exact same scenario from playing out the next time. It's unfortunate, but it is manageable and we should focus on making sure the right lessons are learned from it.

Some interesting viewing, somewhat related: http://www.ted.com/talks/atul_... http://thedailyshow.cc.com/vid...

http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_...

This was enlightening...

That's funny, because I watched this TED talk, where the guy explicitly states his teacher-free environment boosted a rural Indian school class to biochemistry levels well beyond the most prestigious private school in the country.

https://www.ted.com/talks/suga...

I tried this once. I installed a rather obscure open source app that that turned out to be quite useful to me. But it took me a couple days to get to the point where I could do anything useful with it. And I was only able to do that because I can read source code and have lots of software installation and configuration experience. And because I enjoy a puzzle.

After using the app for a month or two, I thought to myself, "There's got to be thousands and thousands of people who'd benefit from this app, but I bet 99% of the people who try it give up before they have any success. What this project needs is documentation." So I contacted the development team with an offer to write some. I explain that while I'm a developer, not a tech writer, I had written early-adopter oriented documentation for several successful commercial projects, so I knew how to get those people up to speed while the app was still something of a moving target. I also offer to maintain that documentation for at least a year.

I got back a quite haughty response from the project leader stating that he *might* let me write documentation if I became a regular code contributor to the project. Now I'd assumed that his ideas of what documentation was needed might be different from mine, but it turned out he didn't seem interested in documentation at all. Also the response had a weird, hostile vibe; it was as if I'd asked him for hundreds of hours of his time rather than offered him hundreds of mine. So I thanked him for *his* invitation and declined it.

I guess the point is that there are other, social dimensions to choosing a project to contribute to. One of them is whether the project even wants what you have to offer. Another is whether the team seems like people you'd enjoy working with. There are some projects, like the Linux kernel, which are so prestigious that you might well take a lot of crap to be a contributor. But most projects aren't like that.

If you do start our own project, watch the TED video How to Start a Movement.

Slashdot is a bit slow on this one. Here is a TED talk from the researcher posted last year.

https://www.ted.com/talks/greg...

I am not sure you have the right chain of events. This TED Talk is an interesting (and scary) explanation of why the bank crash happened, and why it will happen again, unless you get proper regulation.
https://www.ted.com/talks/will...

While Western nations (certainly not just the US, but also almost all of Europe) have reached a democratic impasse in which very little changes, China seems able to reflect on changes internally and externally, and develop drastic new regulations when necessary. It can self-correct. I could give a long explanation why this is true, but Eric Li explained it a lot better in a TEDx presentation. It's 20 minutes, but very relevant when comparing governments of China and US (and other Western countries).
https://www.ted.com/talks/eric...

I would not be surprised if China adopts its own pollution and climate regulations that are beneficial for the country, where benefit can include anything they think is relevant: e.g. health, economy. And it might be that these are more strict than we have here, or not. Time will tell. But they will decide on their own terms. Don't forget that China has to import a lot of fossil fuels, while it has most (all?) resources needed to produce sustainable energy production (solar/wind), and they also already have the factories within their borders. There may be a large economic incentive too.

I see Obama's challenge only as an excuse for the USA's lack of action.

I hate fatalism. My goal is to live forever. I'll go out kicking and screaming every bionic body part I can get.

Watch this: https://www.ted.com/talks/aubr...

You can all die if you want, leave me out of it.

Any google search will provide any info that you'd be interested in reading. Here are some pages that you may want to read:
gut-and-weight-loss-connection
A Hidden Trigger of Obesity: Intestinal Bugs
New Study Reveals Bacteria Could Prevent Obesity and Weight Gain

There is loads of information regarding this. Don't trust me, go find the info yourself. But my point (and I'm assuming that ruir has the same point) is not that the food sits in the gut and causes the weight gain, but that improper digestion of foods leave the body in an improper shape.

There's also a few good Ted talks related to this concept:
Jeroen Raes (not sure why I can't find this on ted.com)
Heribert Watzka
Jonathan Eisen

Any google search will provide any info that you'd be interested in reading. Here are some pages that you may want to read:
gut-and-weight-loss-connection
A Hidden Trigger of Obesity: Intestinal Bugs
New Study Reveals Bacteria Could Prevent Obesity and Weight Gain

There is loads of information regarding this. Don't trust me, go find the info yourself. But my point (and I'm assuming that ruir has the same point) is not that the food sits in the gut and causes the weight gain, but that improper digestion of foods leave the body in an improper shape.

There's also a few good Ted talks related to this concept:
Jeroen Raes (not sure why I can't find this on ted.com)
Heribert Watzka
Jonathan Eisen

Check out this TED talk. I'm agnostic and it almost made me hurl:

http://www.ted.com/talks/richa...

Further, as Sam Harris argues quite well, one need not be a theist to have moral values. Science + secular society are perfectly capable of agreeing upon ethical and moral rules, without resorting to theism.

He essentially goes for utilitarianism (by a measure of "human flourishing"). Which when put in to practice at a national level has repeatedly had the same result: "clearly my political opponent would rule poorly, and severely diminish the flourishing of the people, therefore the only moral action is for me immediately to order their imprisonment and execution".

Atheists will be in for a rude awakening when they die as they will realize that their belief was incomplete. Regardless, they can be just as good, (or as bad) as theists if they practice the golden rule.

Why would they be in for a "rude" awakening, when one would think that any awakening at all should be a pleasant surprise?

Further, as Sam Harris argues quite well, one need not be a theist to have moral values. Science + secular society are perfectly capable of agreeing upon ethical and moral rules, without resorting to theism.

For those who want something more useful than webm:

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video...

... things that are basically common senseor at least have been for about a century are 'discovered'?

Everything said here reads exactly like a bona fide copy of what alternative educational - i.e. non-mainstream one-dimensional eductation - methods have been preaching since the dawn of broad public schooling, right down to the insights into the development and function of the human brain. So diversity in education helps the brain and soul develop better? Wow, what an insight. ... No wonder our culture is in such a sad state.

Fungi based solutions like this really need more good press. For those interested here's a video from TED Talks of Paul Stamets giving a presentation on using Oyster Mushrooms to decompose diesel and other peptroleum waste among some other amazing uses of other types of fungi. Paul Stamets: 6 ways mushrooms can save the world - http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_...

We should certainly NOT stop making up words. We don't want a dead language thank you very much. Here, watch this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/erin_...

In any case, it's not "a gigafactory" it's "The Gigafactory". It's a proper name. Tesla can call it what they like, just as you can call any children you have exactly what you want.

Or how about a series of these things mixed with a system of really small (but obviously big enough for skateboard and package) tubes (like the banks use, but without the vacuum or clear tubing) probably underground. The main problem with flying items is their weight. As long as you are able to push the weight, then that solves a lot of problems. Remember, at least I think, we're trying to do away with problems that drones bring to the table, right?

But man the loss of jobs...

https://www.ted.com/talks/dona...

Basically the same technology used in aluminum smelter, with liquid salt for the battery...

Does anyone know if this ever got off the ground?

The question of how and why ideas, 'culture', religions, new scientific hypotheses, etc. are transmitted and compete with one another is really a very long standing one. [. . .]

Cultural transmission is a very solid social science topic, and internet memes have the dual virtues of both potentially being novel(they might actually follow some traditional propagation pattern, might be something new, either way would be interesting to know) and being amenable to large-scale analysis because the internet is just so conveniently searchable and heavily cached in various places.

While a bit dated and somewhat intellectually renegade, Marshall McLuhan has done much to talk about how print fostered literacy (duh) and the transmission of ideas in a stable form across human cultures in The Gutenberg Galaxy (i.e. Gutenberg Bible and the enablement of Christianity as a proselytizing religion with a relatively stable population of "practicing" Christians all "reading" the same text). However, his writing style is a bit mimetic of the illuminated manuscript and he communicates his point in a way that makes sense to scholars of literature and critical theory. McLuhan's work is not your usual dry, codified sociocultural study of the effects of media!

But the above was only a momentary detour on the way to the work of Susan Blackmore who is interested in the evolution of life on Earth and the question of whether life on Earth will make it to the point where it can successfully leave its planet of origin. Her talk is entitled "Memes and 'temes' " (yes, it's a TED talk) and is fascinating in terms of how she thinks about memes and the transmission of ideas in a Darwinian model.

I wonder if the researchers in Indiana have any interest in the area Blackmore stakes out in her talk. Would be great if they did.

That would be all well and good if it was true but actually having great disparity between winners and losers everybody is worse off even the winners.

There is a talk here https://www.ted.com/talks/rich... if you want skip to the relevant section it starts at about 11:06

http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_andraka_a_promising_test_for_pancreatic_cancer_from_a_teenager.

That one seems on the surface better. It's not just statistically significant. It's basically just correct.

Stallman is crazy. Even crazy people can be right about a few things here and there, but overall he's a zealot. The jokes goes "even a stopped watch is right a couple times a day - though you need a second working watch to see when."

The Hurd has been under development since 1983. Three decades, and still not a stable version? When he started the HURD we didn't have the web, nor the Internet. If we waited for Stallman to actually ship, we would have lost out on a lot (both good and bad, but mostly good).

The issue with Stallman is where do you stop? OK, so now you have an OS totally under your control (well maybe, but lets pretend yes). Now, the hardware! OK, rewrite the BIOS/OpenFirmware. Now you're under control! No, there may be stuff in the chips.... lets go grab some sand.

Soon enough, you either have to say you write everything (and this is the mess you get from making your own toaster) or just realize you need to have faith in some companies you may or may not want to trust.

Indeed capitalism does, globally. Such a shame western countries have been abandoning its core principles of rule of law, individual property rights and laissez-faire, for cronyism, forever-debt and militarism.

This. A thousand times this. As it's been said before, "where you have liberty, you will necessarily have prosperity."

Indeed capitalism does, globally. Such a shame western countries have been abandoning its core principles of rule of law, individual property rights and laissez-faire, for cronyism, forever-debt and militarism.

TED Talk by George Dyson on Project Orion (the original): http://www.ted.com/talks/georg...

It's called eating well, exercising and losing a significant amount of weight.
I know, I came very very close to having it. Break the sugar addiction, quadruple your vegetable intake, vastly reduce your sugar / heavy foods intake and do a little, tiny bit of basic light exercise.

In a couple of years, guess what,...?

Watch this: https://www.ted.com/talks/pete...
Get some compassion.

Quite so. Tangentially related, have you seen this talk on reversing desertification? The fellow seems to be on to something, and even if you're mostly growing grasses and meat, if you can drastically increase the biomass in areas where vegetation is currently extremely sparse that's an enormous amount of carbon sequestration potential, in addition to the numerous other environmental and climatological benefits of nurturing a thriving biosphere.

  http://www.ted.com/talks/allan...

That's because of this! Without regulations, you only see apparent cost. Then someone sees the negatives for that particular activity and (a) estimates cost for recovering from that negative (b) tacks on additional cost to discourage such activity.

Not really a big surprise given their big brain size. It's virtually impossible to get enough calories on a daily basis on a diet of raw foods. Cooking food makes the nutrients much more accessible for the digestive system. Here is a TED talk about this subject: https://www.ted.com/talks/suza...

He answers this in his talk at TED

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.

I knew which TED talk you were parroting before I even got to the bottom of your post. Frankly Pallotta's position is cynical and insidious, he recommends people make that money on Wall Street, I'm sorry, but I make enough to avoid jobs with moral ambiguity and these types of folks have the same luxury, telling them they need to go into jobs that sell their souls so they can give more to charity is sort of fucked up. I'm frankly nonplussed because the types of people who do this kind of thing and then sleep well at night are NOT the charitable types, at least not while they're young.

Pallotta additionally bitches about how we need to pay charity CEOs "more" so they can compete with Wall Street salaries, it's seriously mind boggling how this guy is viewed as anything but an elitist. Oh I know it makes a rather logically sound argument (anyone with a good education ought to be able to do so, after all) but the cracks in it are pretty worrying, if not outright disgusting.

this is why they need to be autonomous, see http://www.ted.com/talks/raffa...

Aside from the literal connotations, profit is potentially more valuable than charity to charitable work itself.

Let's say you want to help decrease the spread of disease in africa. You can get the necessary training, go to africa, and along with thousands of others, actually DO that, and you'll have an obvious impact.

Or, like the folks he's talking to, you could go to a prestigious college, get a fancy degree, and potentially land a job that can pay for 3 or 4 people to perform the duties of the charitable worker above, while still maintaining a very comfortable lifestyle. You could even end up higher in a profitable company, where you direct millions of dollars to aid programs just for tax breaks, if not altruism.

So it's a problem to encourage new grads to focus on charity. They are at the peak of their earning potential, and no matter how you look at it, focusing on altruism is a quick way to retard their ability to make potentially world-changing decisions later, when their potential has been realized.

The view most cultures have for this sort of work is very odd. I think Dan Pallotta spells it out in his TED talk about how we think about charities. We often direct involvement and financial sacrifice as the only acceptable path to social gains.

I certainly didn't mean to imply that Schimdt is not doing responsible science, just that JQP's hope is a pipe dream. I have tremendous respect for Dr. Schmidt. He gave a TED talk recently on The emergent patters of climate change that covers the study of climate from the smallest scale up to the big picture.

You can't understand climate change in pieces, says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt. It's the whole, or it's nothing. In this illuminating talk, he explains how he studies the big picture of climate change with mesmerizing models that illustrate the endlessly complex interactions of small-scale environmental events.

First, You are confusing belief for knowledge.

Agnostic = without knowledge.
Gnostic/Mystic = with knowledge.

Second, ALL Objective truth is first built upon the Subjective Experience

Calling a supernatural creator a "psychedelic" proves you don't have the first clue about another man's experience. You are like the blind man arguing there is no such thing as color.

The parable of Buddha is appropriate in this context:

When the Buddha started to wander around India shortly after his enlightenment, he encountered several men who recognized him to be a very extraordinary being.
They asked him: "Are you a god?"
"No," he replied.
"Are you a reincarnation of god?"
"No," he replied.
"Are you a wizard, then?"
"No."
"Well, are you a man?"
"No."
"So what are you?" They asked, being very perplexed.
Buddha simply replied: "I am awake."

I am simply telling you "WAKE UP", you are dreaming and don't even realize it.

If you would spend more time Knowing Thyself, you would discover your Higher Self, and eventually the experience the Creator. You would see the oneness in everything. You would understand the Universe is like a hologram: That there is no separation between the internal and external. You would discover your purpose. You would see that other people have had the exact same experience.

But like most ignorant atheists you are continue to argue about things you have never experienced.

God is indeed knowable BUT you first must Know Yourself.

How to rob a bank ... /citation

Here is the man himself giving a TED talk on the limitations and capabilities of climate models: http://www.ted.com/talks/gavin...

The government and politicians will listen eventually, and all it takes is a lot of letter-writing and actual voting.

That just shows how little you know about how government works. I suggest you watch if you want to learn the truth.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lawre...

Lawrence Lessig's SuperPACs might be the only thing that could actually change things and even that is a long shot.

http://www.ted.com/talks/edwar...

What percentage of the global warming predictions have come true? Less than 5%?

Now I use the word "skill" advisedly: Models are not right or wrong; they're always wrong. They're always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells you more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it's skillful. This is the impact of the ozone hole on sea level pressure, so low pressure, high pressures, around the southern oceans, around Antarctica. This is observed data. This is modeled data. There's a good match because we understand the physics that controls the temperatures in the stratosphere and what that does to the winds around the southern oceans.

7:09 We can look at other examples. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 put an enormous amount of aerosols, small particles, into the stratosphere. That changed the radiation balance of the whole planet. There was less energy coming in than there was before, so that cooled the planet, and those red lines and those green lines, those are the differences between what we expected and what actually happened. The models are skillful, not just in the global mean, but also in the regional patterns.

7:38 I could go through a dozen more examples: the skill associated with solar cycles, changing the ozone in the stratosphere; the skill associated with orbital changes over 6,000 years. We can look at that too, and the models are skillful. The models are skillful in response to the ice sheets 20,000 years ago. The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades. Models are successful at modeling lake outbursts into the North Atlantic 8,000 years ago. And we can get a good match to the data.
  Gavin Schmidt: The emergent patterns of climate change

When I saw this article's headline, I first thought it was about this, but this is clearly something quite different. Do you know anything about the hydrogen sulphite idea discussed in the video?

A difficulty here is that you are attempting to apply science to something that is not within the realm of science.

I'm applying one small part of the scientific method.

But I'm fairly sure I can agree with most sane people on this basic without using the word science. It's simply a matter of "does it work or not".

If it can be measured and tested, it is science. If it cannot, it is religion. That doesn't necessarily mean there is nothing in religion, it just means science (at least within our current understanding) can't touch it.

Nonsense. There are two ways to interpret "it cannot be measured". One is "...with current technology and/or knowledge", which simply means that in the future it probably can. The other is "...in principle", which means it doesn't exist. Because if it exists, it affects the world in some way (if it doesn't affect the world in any way whatsoever, then you cannot prove its existence). If it affects the world, that effect can be measured. Thus, the thing can be measured, indirectly. In fact, there are many things in science that are measured just this way, by their effect on other things.

But because they are a subjective experience by nature, science can neither confirm nor deny them. It can at most quantify a statistical effect on behavior that may or may not be felt in the subject as an emotion.

Nonsense. We can measure brain activity (crudly, yes, but technology improves). Even if we don't know what the fuck is going on, we can take our measurements and compare them to the emotions the subjects reported, and we can make correlations. It's a very early science, but we have made some very interesting progress. For example, Helen Fisher has done brain scans on people in love and her speeches and books about her research are incredibly fascinating. Here's one of her talks.

I have seen the idea that religion and magic live inside those impenetrable probabilities much like a signal may lie in the noise floor. It's there, but you can't prove it. It may have effect in a manner similar to the way insiders used to embezzle from banks by pocketing the rounding errors.

There's a difference between Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle - which puts limits on the precision of measurements - and the esoteric bullshit excuse "you can't see or measure it and if you look, it will hide away (but I can feel it and use it to do things)".

If the signal is indistinguishable from noise in principle (and not just because your instruments aren't good enough), then it is not a signal at all. It is the very definition of signal that it is discernible from noise and contains information.

The insiders are a totally different thing, they are just a low signal that stayed undetected because nobody was looking for it. Of course there are signals we don't know about, much like people just a few hundred years ago didn't know much about the Universe because they only looked at it in the visible wavelength, and if you've seen pictures of galaxies showing them in far UV or IR light, you know there's more to it all then we see in the visible spectrum.

So yes, we cannot be sure that there isn't other forces that we don't detect, yet. However, we can exclude that they are strong and important or any kind of explanation for magical effects of any kind, because within the world that matters to our life, there aren't that many phenomena that we are puzzled about. We're busy working out some details, but there's simply no space for some big undiscovered force.

We still have dark energy and dark matter and such, which are basically the scientific terms for "we have no clue what the fuck it is, but we know it's out there", but they're not important to what matters to you and me today