Slashdot Mirror
(Yet) Another Year End List
gordonb writes "New Scientist has yet another of those endless end-of-year lists, "13 things that do not make sense", including such topics discussed on Slashdot this year as the placebo effect, dark energy, and the ever-popular cold fusion. I know there are a lot more than 13 things that don't make sense, such as free markets, but, oxymorons aside, this is an interesting list, nevertheless."
All right! Always room for a little mindless, irrelevant editorializing, right?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Free markets make plenty of sense. Read your economics textbooks and your Wealth of Nations, and then you can start complaining about them....
That's not proving the placebo effect, because hypochondria's a mental state. The placebo effect is when a real illness is treated with a placebo, not when imaginary ones are treated with a placebo.
Think about it - there's nothing odd about make-believe cures being able to affect make-believe illnesses. It's like when you are kids, and your make-believe bulletproof vest stops your friends' make-believe bullets shot from their make-believe guns. The placebo effect is like when those make-believe bulletproof vests stop real bullets.
Firstly as somebody pointed out at the FIRST line and last lien it is writte "19 march 2005"... That is quite the start of the year. Second, as 4th position again some homeopathic non reproducible experiment, and cold fusion (13th). This rather sound like "unreproducible" research rather unexplicable stuff. I think jsut for a kicker I will have a look around to see what happenned as follow up from those... But since the only stuff we heard recently on homeopathy was the lancet(?) study, and since homeopath would jump on the gun for any study proving homeopathy works, I won't hold my breath. Probably again badly washed up test tube. I tell you, experiment on basophile are cursed :).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Yeah, because it isn't like everyone benefits from the freemarket system. Only the Waltons benefit from their stores. Not the millions of poorer people that are able to afford more goods and live better lives because they can afford cheaper goods. I mean, it isn't like you benefit from car companies owning their factories. It isn't like you benefit from computer manufactures creating new machines and innovating for the sake of the dollar.
no, the free market has never helped one poor person. we are so much better off due to socialism. look at all the luxuries we enjoy from that system of government!
This is getting ridiculous. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of stories here (not that they were USDA Grade A to begin with), accompanied by more frequent-- and more obvious-- trolling on the parts of the "Editors".
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to), but the editor who let a sneaky jab at free markets into the story text itself needs to be smacked. That was a troll, period. A blatant, bridge-dwelling, club-wielding troll.
No, I take that back. All the "Editors" need to be smacked. This is getting fucking ridiculous.
SlashDot: Trolls for nerds, stuff that was reported on the AP Newswire 5 days ago...
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
We need more journalism like this in the popular media, to teach our kids that we don't know everything, and that some frontiers of knowledge haven't yet been pushed beyond their reach.
The evolution/creation/intelligent-design debate has taken on the nature of trench warfare; the opponents believe that the least enemy victory will spell doom for their way of life, so they dig in and protect every axiom of their belief system no matter how fragile or poorly supported. As a result, young people are told that nothing in their religion's official interpretation of Holy Writ is open to question. In school they are told the same thing about the current geological, paleontological and cosmological dogma.
I'm sure that many church leaders honestly believe that if kids are encouraged to doubt and question, they will lose their nascent faith, and perhaps discourage others. Likewise many educators assume that students who doubt and question current scientific beliefs will never become scientists, and undermine others who might.
The contemptible response is that those who question religious doctrine are branded as nonbelievers, and those who question scientific doctrine are dismissed as ignoramuses. Nothing goes so far to discourage the development of the scientific and spiritual leaders of the next generation.
Healthy skepticism, not jaded cynicism, should be encouraged everywhere if there is to be true advancement in any field. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, and neither are knowledge and wisdom.
However, it doesn't just 'appear' to work, it does work for the simple matter that placebos do work.
This is a known medical fact, despite the fact it makes no sense. Placebos work better than doing nothing quite often, ergo, homopathy works better than doing nothing quite often.
Of course, it's idiotic to spend that money when you can just, I dunno, pray or something.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
You omitted a third option. Remissions occur anyway, so there is no need to chalk it up either to prayer or placebo effect.
Your justifaction is the suggestion that anecdotal evidence is better than systematic evidence, which is what quacks have always said when the systematic evidence reveals them to be quacks.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Mental illnesses are real illnesses and have hard, acute neurological expression in the brain. There is nothing "make-believe" about something that is chronic, repetitive and deeply seated. Depression is not just something that can be snapped out of, nor can PTSD be ignored into dissipating, the fear and desperation of hypochondria comes is real. These illnesses are not merely coming from a person who is playing a casual game of make-believe who needs to get a grip. Mental illnesses are the flipside of the placebo effect: It's when your make-believe bullets pierce your real bulletproof vests.
This isn't even looking at somatoform disorders (physical ailments that come from the toll of being in a mental illness). The truth is that the human mind is far more of a powerful, persuasive instrument than we are normally led to believe and the state of mentality is very much a physical rather than imaginary thing. Placebo effects likewise are not usually effective in helping such mental disorders, so the grandparent's point that it works is meaningful and should not be dismissed. Most likely, the tapping repetition forced the client to breath, and take note and prevent the panic that is prevalent in most anxiety disorders, which in turn backed the person away from their usual repetition compulsion, bypassing the worse part of her illness.
I don't get this. Maybe a Physics geek can clue me in. Why would we expect to see different temperatures? If the big bang exploded in a completely uniform way, I would expect the "shrapnel" to behave in a completely uniform way in every direction. What exactly would cause one direction to be hotter than another direction?
It would only then look uniform if you were are the center of it, and it all spread out from where you were.
If you were on one side, it would look hotter on the side it came from and cooler on the side it went to after passing you.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to),
An unregulated free market didn't lead to Microsoft, because we don't *have* an unregulated free market
in the United States. In a real unregulated market, without things like patents, and the bazillions of dollars worth of government restrictions and regulations required to start a business, there would be a lot more competition for MS. It would actually be much harder for monopolies like MS to become overwhelmingly powerful in a real free market, because it would be much easier to set up shop and compete with them on a level playing field.
Of course some people say that there would be no innovation without patents... I contend that such an assertion is not true, and that the lack of artificial government granted monopolies (patents) would result in a constant "arms race" situation where companies would be forced to innovate constantly or die. Look at how military technology advances... the US is forced to constantly work on developing better battle technology exactly because there is no way to prevent our competitors from using what has already been invented. I mean, it's not like we could patent the nuclear bomb and keep Russia, China, India, Pakistan, etc. from using it...
Give us a real free market sometime, and let's see what happens... until then it's all just speculation, because we damn sure don't have anything approaching a free market now.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
markets which are more free produce more wealth for the participants
EDIT: markets which are more free produce more wealth for some of the participants
A truly free market is like a sport without any rules. The winners are the people with bigger bats. It encourages participation to an extent; there is more to gain for the people who succeed. But eventually it bottoms out as people realize they don't really want to lose their arms wrestling with the 800 lb. gorilla who, without any competition, suddenly has no incentive to be nice to anybody and starts running around burning houses down.
Four replies, none of which address the argument.
Claim: Free markets make perfect sense! They are the most logical, sensible system.
Counterclaim: If you're on the top of the pile. Those being crushed on the bottom might reasonably feel otherwise.
Counter-counterclaim: [sarcasm] Yeah, because it isn't like everyone benefits from the freemarket system. Only the Waltons benefit from their stores. Not the millions of poorer people that are able to afford more goods and live better lives because they can afford cheaper goods.
Counter-counter-counterclaim: [paraphrased, for the benefit of those who missed the point] Some people can't even afford to shop at Wal-Mart.
Are you people unaware that people go hungry in the USA, which prides itself as being the richest, freest, fairest nation in the world?
Do you really think an unconstrained market would improve their lot?
Do you think they deserve to be crushed under the weight of the machine?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I wouldn't call a quaser 'mundane'. My God man where is your sense of wonder?
Display some adaptability.
Well, I should qualify the statement first. I meant "moderately" raising the minimum wage. If you raise it too much at once, then yes, it could.
The point is that if an employer is making so little money from an employee that paying them a decent wage is going to kill profits - then the business was never sustainable in the first place. The idea that companies are making profits solely because of the low minimum wage is absurd. It would mean that their business is actually about making razor thin margins off bad workplace conditions - rather than selling a product or service.
I'd like to see ANY real evidence for this rhetoric that increasing the minimum wage increases unemployment. Seriously. Those are the people making bold claims that need to be proved.
... and then they built the supercollider.
No. I don't mean a few molecules, I mean that some contain active ingredients in significant concentrations, of the order of 0.1% or more. Sometimes a lot higher - this, for example, is a 10% extract of arnica that I (quite anecdotally) find useful for bruises. (An occupational hazard.)
A "1X" solution is 10% concentration. If you Google for homeopathic 1X, you'll see many products made with these high-concentration extracts.
That's not to say that do or do not work. I don't consider myself a defender of homeopathic theory in any way. But I'm really disappointed to see self-described "skeptics" continually misrepresent it. Not all homeopathic remedies are extremely dilute.
Nor is it considered, in homeopathic theory, enough to simply create a very dilute tincture, like putting a grain of salt in a glass of water; first a fairly concentrated salt water would be prepared, then that solution diluted, and so on. The solution must be "prepared", shaken in some certain way, at every step. That theory may be absolute bullshit, indeed that's where I'd put my money. But intellectual honesty requires that we criticize it as it is, not set up strawmen.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood