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(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.
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.
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.
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.
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