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Studies Say Ideology Trumps Facts
Anti-Globalism writes "We like to think that people will be well informed before making important decisions, such as who to vote for, but the truth is that's not always the case. Being uninformed is one thing, but having a population that's actively misinformed presents problems when it comes to participating in the national debate, or the democratic process. If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief."
I guess that nothing supports false-facts better than trying to debunk them. It's all a conspiracy after all.
What if your ideology is based around the careful analysis of facts - like a good science education?
...Or some of us really are apathetic.
I'm not sure if I'm going to not vote as a protest, or to cast a ballot for whomever is going to make my life less miserable. And, no, I haven't decided who that is just yet.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Interestingly, an experiment was conducted a few years ago in which a completely incompetent ruler was set up as a head of state of one of the worlds larger nations. After four years of bad rule that included a record deficit, starting two illegal wars, and alienating most of their allies, the people of that nation were asked if they would vote for him again. And they did! So yes, I would say that ideology certainly trumps facts.
In fact I probably shouldn't be talking about this, since the experiment is still ongoing...
Good thing slashdot is here to set the record straight.
I haven't RTF article, but I don't need to-facts don't matter.
This is why we mock conspiracy theorists and computer "hacking" in cinema. Misinformation is what keeps the masses happy. Just like security theatre.
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
Once something believes in god, it'll believe in anything.
I think I read a similar article sporting the same statistics quite a while ago. Has ArsTechnia posted a dupe? Besides that, the questions they used to measure 'misinformation' aren't the best: There's quite a bit of different meanings to both of them. Could 'possessing weapons of mass destruction' mean having hundreds of thousands shells loaded and ready to go, or could it mean having no more than a couple of arterially shells with expired nerve-gas that even the Iraqis had forgoten about (I THINK we have found the latter). Does being involved with Al-Quida mean planning and bankrolling every attack and operation together, or does it mean that Saddam tentatively let some Al Quida members into the country? Ars' summery doesn't even agree with the graphic they used: The graphic says the question was "The US has found evidence that Saddam Hussain was working closely with terrorist groups" while the article says that the numbers represent folks who though "there was a credible link between the 9/11 attack and Saddam Hussein". Bit of a difference there.
The best example of this is how people of both major parties continue to believe in government.
Witness the current crisis, whose root cause is the concentration of power in Washington, D.C. Everybody proposes all kinds of solutions, and every one of them is to increase the power of government, which caused the problem in the first place!
That's just one example; this vicious cycle of government growth, especially at the federal level, happens in pretty much every area.
I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief.
--Gerry Spence
The American media has a good deal of power, and that power carries a good deal of responsibility. When the media creates false debates, unreasoned arguments, and promotes trivia above important things, they abuse that power. A single newsperson instilling spin into a popular story has done more evil than many purse-snatchers.
I speak of the American media because I don't understand enough of the rest of the world's media to comment.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Just ask twitter.
The cynic in me is beginning to believe that Winston Churchill was wrong in saying that "Democracy was the least worst form of government". After being a part of the American political process for the last 8 years I've seen how ideology has, time and again, trumped reason. Still I'm not completely impressed with other systems, the "meritocratic" technocratic bureaucracy espoused by the Chinese communist party seems flawed as well (don't buy Chinese Milk!). That's despite being described as "the Harvard Alumni Association with an Army".
Maybe the fact is that, as humans (and 98% chimp) we're only slightly beyond our animal forebears. Perhaps we just cannot handle a technologic civilization with complex issues like genetic engineering, nuclear weapons, climate change, nano technology. If Fukuyama is right in saying that Liberal Democracies are "the end of history" maybe it means that that's the end of our progress. - Then again maybe the United States (with its 70% of the population being strongly religious) is an aberration and the future lies with other less religious societies.
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=955999&cid=24911097#comment_top_24911097
I'll just leave this here
Start with a mass of people. Rile them up with talk radio. Tell them everything they hear and see outside of that is the "liberal media", demonize higher education, and encourage them to convert or drive away anybody who doesn't think like they do by loudly "arguing" whatever talking points are being pushed this week.
It's cult-like, and downright scary. For some reason, it didn't exactly cheer me when Air America came around either. People think it's enough to load up with a handful of "facts" from these shows and regurgitate/copy-and-paste them at the nonbelievers, and the result looks more like a verbal soccer brawl than reasoned debate.
Bring back critical thinking.
The real problem is that many Americans don't usually educate themselves about the issues, but rely on misinformation. You would be surprised at how many Americans still think Republicans are in control of Congress, or where Iraq is (even after all these years), or even that Obama is a Muslim.
Also, the other thing is that people tend to make opinions based on emotion, and then use facts to back these opinions up, not the other way around.
Ideology Trumps Facts...if you're a closed minded prejudiced moron who can't face reality.
The ability to learn, grow and change your opinion is something we all possess. If we choose to close our eyes and pray instead of looking at the facts, it's our own fault. It may be easier from an emotional perspective to deal with our limited existence and the hardships life throws at us by subscribing to a belief system handed down to us, or that we've found in a "time of need" but if you actively ignore reality you're doomed to end up destroying yourself.
The trouble with studies like this is that they tell us we can justify our own stupidity. Sure, go ahead, but you'll face the consequences.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
In other news, new studies say that Cookie Monster thinks cookies are more healthy than broccoli!
You just got troll'd!
I'm entirely not surprised.
In my opinion, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world; those who prefer an internal moral compass and those who prefer an external moral compass. The former tend to analyse things for themselves, look at all the facts and come up with a decision- is this "right/true/a good idea/etc". The latter tend to look to some higher authority- religion, the government, parents, spouse, boss, etc to make the majority of these decisions for them.
This doesn't mean that the former is automatically better than the latter- the latter have a vast pool of opinions to draw upon, while the former only have themselves and can be often actively disregard the opinions of others in the name of "doing what *they* want". Individualism for the sake of individualism, you might say.
Most people, I think, fall somewhere in the middle and lean one way or the other. I tend to lean towards the former, but I recognise the traps that can befall these kind of people and actively seek to avoid them.
Well, I'm entirely not surprised.
In my opinion, broadly speaking, there are two kinds of people in the world; those who prefer an internal moral compass and those who prefer an external moral compass. The former tend to analyse things for themselves, look at all the facts and come up with a decision- is this "right/true/a good idea/etc". The latter tend to look to some higher authority- religion, the government, parents, spouse, boss, etc to make the majority of these decisions for them.
This doesn't mean that the former is automatically better than the latter- the latter have a vast pool of opinions to draw upon, while the former only have themselves and can be often actively disregard the opinions of others in the name of "doing what *they* want". Individualism for the sake of individualism, you might say.
Most people, I think, fall somewhere in the middle and lean one way or the other. I tend to lean towards the former, but I recognise the traps that can befall these kind of people and actively seek to avoid them.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
This strong counter-reaction to the introduction of "inconvenient truths" is a classic product of pavlovian conditioning.
For more on this, read the battle for your mind
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
That all depends on your point of view and who you are. For many political parties then a misinformed populace is a major boon. If they're dumb/misinformed then you can tell them what you like and they'll support you. If they're intelligent/informed then you might get to that problem point where the voters actually question what the politicians are doing and whether it's for the best.
Still, at least ideology doesn't trump everything - here in the UK the Labour party are abandoning their "for the working masses" ideology and picking up a more right-wing ideology because it gets them votes. Then again, maybe that's one place where ideology should have won out.
Cue the Dem and Repubs pointing and accusing each other of doing just that.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
ideology trumps facts. ok. so what?
1. this observation is ideologically neutral. that is, it evens out in every ideological direction, such that no particular ideology is favored
2. this observation applies to everyone. this observation applies most of all to those of you who think you are immune to prejudice. that's you, reading these words. yes, you are guilty of this. how passionately you dispute the notion that you have prejudices is directly proportional to how prejudiced you are, blindly. meanwhile, if you start with the assumption that you prejudiced, you are better able to identify your prejudices in your thought processes, and work around them
3. this observation applies to all societies, in all cultures, in all time periods, including the future. in other words, make peace with the concept that ideology trumps facts. nothing you do will ever change that, it is a simple aspect of human nature. unless you seek to disrespect democracy and free will, and somehow "reeducate" people. which makes the cure worse than the disease
we are all prejudiced. individually, and as societies. so it is better to recognize your weaknesses and work around them than somehow fantasize it is possible to have no prejudices at all. the story summary is nothing more than the sound of someone shockingly realizing a truth about their world, and trying to come to grips with it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Now making sure we get one of those is the tough part. Since the 'making sure' involves, most probably, human action, the whole idea is bound to fail, naturally.
After four years of bad rule that included a record deficit, starting two illegal wars, and alienating most of their allies, the people of that nation were asked if they would vote for him again. And they did!
Interestingly, in the follow-up expiriment a group of people were set up to control the purse strings of the same nation, and after four years of exponential spending it appears people are still willing to vote for them as well!
Amazing what people will do, and further proof of the theorem.
Indeed the expiriment is still ongoing, with any luck the monkeys at the switch will pull the lever for once that gives them the smaller banana instead of pulling the big 'ol lever of "free" bananas forever, supplied by magical forces from above.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Humanity as a whole has definitely peaked. We continue to enhance out technology, but the lump of meat at the centre of it has a fundamental flaw, built in by the evolutionary process. Our imaginations that make all the technology possible is a double edged sword that also results in all the useless and often destructive ideology.
If humanity has something approaching a "purpose", it is to create a successor intelligence (machine, biological or hybrid) and at that moment we will have become the gods we conjure in our imaginations, and also obsolete.
Based on the article it is a simple matter of spinning things the way you want in order to make those you disagree with seem uninformed.
Actually, my best bet would be on "cognitive dissonance" rather than "conspiracy theory."
The best way to illustrate cognitive dissonance is via the classic experiment: you assign someone (e.g., a student) a Homer Simpson-esque job that's boring him to tears. Then you one day say he can stop doing it, you have something better to do with him. But you ask him if he can find a replacement for that previous crap job. You even offer a dollar if he does. So he'll go try to convince someone else that it's a great job to take. The fun thing is, after a while he'll have convinced himself too that it's a great job.
Apparently, having to reconcile between "I'm a nice and honest guy" and "I just lied to a bunch of people for a lousy dollar", he'll alter the latter to, basically, "yeah, well, it wasn't really a lie." Just to keep his mental model consistent.
It seems to be a function of at least the mammalian brain. When you have two contradictory ideas in your model, one has to give. With humans, though, if one idea is too important to let go, something else has to give.
Even more fun is that the strength of the effect is inversely proportional to how sustainable or justifiable that action is. If you offer him a lot more money, he has the escape of, basically, "yeah, well, I needed the money. So I have my price too. Bite me." If it's a precondition to getting out of that crap job, same thing, he has an excuse. But when there's no excuse he can wrap his mind around, he'll alter the truth so he doesn't need an excuse.
A similar fun effect is with kids. Apparently when they really want something or to do something, as silly deterrent like "mommy will pout" is often actually more effective than a harsh punishment, if applied consistently. When there is no real justification for "why didn't I do that, if I wanted to anyway?" something else has to give, and it becomes, "I didn't really want that in the first place." Fun stuff.
I find that the same applies to politics, religion, fanboys, or, for that matter, everything else. The least justifiable a position is, the more people will warp reality to keep it. And the more rabidly they'll defend that redefinition of reality, lest their whole mental model comes crashing down around their ears.
And, yes, applying more force just creates more resistance.
And for a last bit of fun, there's no defender more stalwart of a piece of bullshit, than someone whose model already broke down once and was patched to that bullshit. If they're going to have to admit "I was wrong and doing wrong" anyway, they'll run with that to the hilt, and make an even more warped model in the other direction. So funnily enough, there is no more rabid, say, XBox fanboy, than one who was a PS2 fanboy and felt betrayed by Sony and had to let their whole "Sony for ever!!!" model crash. And viceversa. There is no bible-thumper for puritan morals more rabid than someone who was a prostitute until last week. And viceversa: nobody does a good christian-baiting trolling like someone who still went to church last month. There is no Republican more rabid about every single aspect of that ideology, than someone who was a Democrat until they felt somehow betrayed. And viceversa.
But now they won't just change about the aspect where they thought they were cheated, they'll go for the whole list, from military spending to abortion stance to gay marriage to everything else. Now Party X is right in everything, and Party Y is wrong about everything, because I don't like Party Y any more. And I must enlighten the masses about how wrong and evil Party Y is!
And the least justifiable that position is (e.g., don't be silly, Sony didn't "betray" anyone and didn't owe you anything in the first place), the more immovable it will be. As I was saying, fun stuff.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ideal orgy thumps Ideology even.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
A Benevolent Dictatorship? That never works in any organization larger than the Python Development Community.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Accepting Scientific fact in the modern world usually requires an amout of thought and analysis. Accepting an ideology requires no thought at all. Humans are basically lazy.
Only a machine fits that purpose. Any mortal ruler would eventually die leaving a power vacuum and subsequent power struggle.
I would accept rule by a well programmed machine, but only if the source code was available and the whole system was transparent. On the flip side, no human is really fit to rule any other because they inevitably succumb to greed and corruption.
Scratch the above, they were greedy and corrupt which is why the pursue politics in the first place.
I know what you're getting at. OK, OK - I'll take the job. I was reluctant, but if I have to be the God-Emperor to keep things sorted, that's just a burden I'll have to bear.
I get a harem, don't I?
Cue the Dem and Repubs pointing and accusing each other of doing just that.
You know, sometimes, one side really is right, or at least substantially less wrong than the other.
From the immortal H2G2:
The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.
So true ; ) /sarcasm
Self awareness is a road to enlightenment, Anti-Globalism.
Keep up the good work.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
I don't believe it
This whole study goes against my worldview so I'm going to disregard it entirely.
Well, we don't have much proof... Just some VX munitions that had been drained of the agent. As I said in an earlier post, though, they probably just shipped it all out to Iran or Syria hours before the invasion to add insult to injury for Bush.
That, or they're still buried a mile underground.
Again, no proof, so the question will likely never be answered either way.
"If the findings of some political scientists are right, attempting to correct misinformation might do nothing more than reinforce the false belief."
Political scientists? That's been the finding of psychologists since Leon Festinger outlined cognitive dissonance 50 years ago. Even before it had that name, psychological operations specialists knew they could devise a falsehood that was so preferable to truth that people would adhere to it in the face of contrary evidence, including being told the falseness of the installed belief. And yes, they would hold to the preferable all the tighter rather than face the less secure situation of changing beliefs even to "truth". Throw some FUD (warranted or not) in with it, and people become desperate to believe the comfortable.
The only thing remotely novel about TFA is its overt application towards the US government and people. The fact that it occurs it not surprising to anyone who understands the concepts and applications. I'm thinking /. only finds it newsworthy because Ars Technica seems to. Well, it's worthy but it's not news. Unless you've been asleep since 2000. Come to think of it, that might explain things.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Why is this? Because what people believe is based on trust, not facts. They trust faces that are familiar to them and (thanks to the education system) are not capable of working out for themselves which answer is correct.
Ultimately it comes down to emotions
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Seriously, how can I mod the article redundant?
Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite (TM)
Still I'm not completely impressed with other systems, the "meritocratic" technocratic bureaucracy espoused by the Chinese communist party seems flawed as well (don't buy Chinese Milk!).
Or, maybe, don't by American Ford Explorers?
Sound Bites just implement association and association is the basis of our emotional responses.
Mass media typically just hit us with sound bites, knowing that most people will just skim the news. They see Obama and Muslim in one sentence and even if it's saying that he's not one, Obama-Muslim is still the association created in many minds. Couple this with a Muslim- Terrorism association similarly constructed and Obama is now connected to that too. The association creates an emotional response and that is what drives most people.
It's not about logic. Just association.
This is well understood by spin doctors. You may notice that newspaper articles contain spin in the form of opinion and association building sound bites at the beginning but still include the actual facts at the very end. They do this knowing full well that most people won't read to the end and parse the data and process the logical inconsistencies but they can still provide counter arguments about bias by pointing to the end and saying "Look we really did include all the facts".
These days, is there *anything* that doesn't trump facts?
BUY... grr. Must remember to actually re-read my post in preview.
I think you just proved the point. She never tried to ban anything. Expressing an opinion that a particular book "does not belong there" is not an attempt to ban anything. You might think that Mein Kampf or the Turner Diaries don't belong in a children's library, but expressing that opinion is not an attempt to ban them. But believe what you will. On the other side one could make the argument that Obama was raised as a Muslim in a portion of his childhood. He was registered as a Muslim when he went to school in Indonesia for instance. That's the test. Believe both are debunked or that both have some truth in them and you are healthy. Believe one but not the other and you are just as described in the article -- unwilling to accept that your point of view is possibly incorrect.
So should people pass a test first to see if they have the facts straight, before they are allowed to vote?
Hear this:
A journey through the minds of undecided voters. For months -- through the Swift Boat ads, the convention speeches, the debates -- we tracked a few of these voters to find out why they just can't make up their minds. Plus, a story of someone courting undecided voters, and another about people trying to sabotage undecided voters (and everyone else).
Prologue.
Host Ira Glass asks how it's possible that some people still don't know what they think of President Bush just a few days before election day. Act One. My Buddy, Hackett. Ira spends hours talking to James Hackett, known to his friends, and by the end of the story, to Ira, as Gig. He's a doctor in Cincinnati and a lifelong Republican. But he hates President Bush. Pretty much hates everything he's done since taking office. Over several months, he sways from Kerry to Bush and back again, sometimes with Ira's help, before coming to a final decision -- one that probably surprises even him.
With all this postering, media attention, UN speeches, and this righteous war, I was sure there were WMDs in Iraq. After all, Bush would not tell a lie, would he?
the study is absolutely right:
Most of the people in Russia still believe that their ancestors "liberated" Europe during WW2. In reality - the Russian communist regime MURDERED in total over 100 million innocent people from Russia and abroad, way more that Hitler did.
Of course, this is not in Russian historybooks. The communist party and also the current leaders of Russia have taken care of this...
Everyone that attempts to shed light on the REAL history and events of WW2 is immediately regarded as a fascist...
The truth is just too painful...
I was a poli sci major, now a law student (yeah, I know, what the hell am I doing on Slashdot...). I think the most useful discussion I ever heard in class was one on the general idea of "lenses" we see the world through.
The professor who taught the course had been in the Intelligence Community for some time, and this is an issue that analysts and other intelligence officers encountered constantly and is, in fact, encountered in essentially every career path. Analysts, who may not have visited the country they work on in years, will see it very differently than the man on the ground. The man on the ground, however, who is constantly tied up with a million small details, will likely see things differently and fail to see the big picture.
In my own life, I can think of a few instances where this has been particularly true. I had the "pleasure" of getting caught in the middle of a slum during the December 2001 riots in Argentina. Not a pleasant experience, needless to say. So now, every time I go back to Latin America, I'm paranoid. Once you've seen people getting stabbed and robbed all around you, you get that way. It's my "lens" - I always see things as less stable than they truly are, and always feel that I need to be ready to either batten down the hatches or bolt at any moment.
A more useful story would come from a recent work-related incident. A legal issue came up when I was an intern at a law office (yes, imagine that). I was in a conference with the other attorneys - all distinguished professionals with lengthy records - discussing the matter, and all of the attorneys handled it exactly like they would a case from a textbook - they played their "role". They took the facts they were given, assumed they were real, and attempted to find a legal answer to the situation. That's what lawyers do. After listening to discussion on this for several minutes, I piped up and questioned the very basis of the facts (the situation seemed a bit far-fetched to me - one not yet entirely corrupted by the practice of law - and I simply applied Occam's razor). I received strange stares for a moment, and then the attorney in charge of the matter said, "wow, I'd never considered that before. Let's look into it." Sure enough, I was right, and we saved a lot of money, headache, and effort on research and other costs.
People simply see things differently and will process information differently. Environment, experience, language, education, spirituality, family background, geographical origin, economic situation, genetics (to an extent), etc. all shape how we see the world - and how we even interpret - or even recognize - fact. It's only human. The best we can hope to do is to acknowledge it and to seek out those who view things differently in the hopes of honing our own vision and seeing things we hadn't seen before.
If you disagree with him, name which non-democracy you want to live in. Do remember that his quote included "except those which have been tried from time to time", so don't resort to imagined planned societies -- just past or present societies.
Now, you might claim illegality under the so called "international law". But here too, one can find a legal basis in various UN resolutions (e.g. 678, 687).
But, advocating for taking war actions only under the direction of the UN is fairly silly. There are plenty of situations in which the United States should be compelled to act even if various nations disagree with US policy.
Instead of focusing on the legality of the action in question, the more interesting question is if the war itself was in America's best interests. Here, one can most certainly raise all sorts of claims vis-a-vee whether the war itself was a worthwhile action (cost vs. benifeits).
Come on folks we all know that were the Colbert Nation leads the world follows. All this is saying is that politics these days is about Truthiness which is "Truth that comes from the gut, not from books". Back in 2005 Colbert was right.
His latest campaign is that we don't even want answers and should not be allowed to ask questions.
Its very sad how the two best political commentary programmes in the US go out on Comedy Central.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
But in 1995, Ms. Palin, then a city councilwoman, told colleagues that she had noticed the book "Daddy's Roommate" on the shelves and that it did not belong there
Talk about a straw man.
You handily glossed over the fact she only thought the book did not belong, and never did anything about it.
Further proving the main point. Something within drives you to ignore the very text in front of you, in the rush to demonize the Other.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Or, to quote Deus Ex:
JC Denton: "Rule the world? Why? Who gave you the directive, there must be a human being behind your ambition"
Helios : "I should regulate human affairs precisely because I lack all ambition, whereas human beings are prey to it. Their history is a succession of inane squabbles each one coming closer to total destruction"
JC Denton: "In a society with democratic institutions the struggle for power can be peaceful and constructive, a competition of ideologies. We just need to put our institutions back in order."
Helios : "The checks and balances of democratic governments were invented because human beings themselves realized how unfit they were to govern themselves. They needed a system, yes, an industrial-age machine."
Actually, democracy works pretty well. There are two types - representative and direct. The direct democracy works much better than representative, because you don't have to trust the representatives. In fact, representative democracy encourages people to blindly trust, and this brings these issues.
I like to compare this difference to difference with a contract system. Representative democracy is like spoken (unwritten) contract - you have to rely on trust. Direct (or semi-direct) democracy is analogous to written contract system - you use higher law - in case of contract the judicial system, in case of direct democracy the referendum, initiative and recall to enforce the contract. Obviously, the written contract is better than spoken contract. But people have trouble understanding that direct democracy is better than representative democracy for exactly the same reason.
I would also like to note that this result doesn't affect democracy in negative nor positive way, because the people who are wrong can be wrong both ways equally. I believe that facts triumph over superstition in the end, because there is no single superstition, but the whole spectrum. For example, those believing in evolution are united in their belief. Those believing in creationism are very fragmented - ranging from people who believe in ID without God to young earth creationists.
Still I'm not completely impressed with other systems, the "meritocratic" technocratic bureaucracy espoused by the Chinese communist party seems flawed as well (don't buy Chinese Milk!). That's despite being described as "the Harvard Alumni Association wit an Army".
That's a very naive characterisation of the Chinese system, or any non democracy. From my experience it's more like organised crime with an army. Fact is absolute power lies with the people with the money and guns, not with the Harvard alumni.
One of my friend's husbands works in China. One of his partners is in the PLA, and the main reason he is a partner is because people are scared of him. Let's just say if her husband's company makes a business offer and you're Chinese, you don't refuse it once you find out he's involved.
Very scary place.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
They didn't have to go to all that trouble to figure this out. Anyone observing human behavior for a length of time knows that people generally believe what they want to believe -- facts, logic, and common sense notwithstanding. This is why I eventually stopped trying to "convert" anyone's thinking in a rational manner, and avoid like the plague any personal conversation in politics, religion, or any controversial subject.
There is a very strong emotional bond to our beliefs. Strongly held beliefs, especially those that have a key role in shaping our concepts of ourselves and the world, are almost impossible to break. Someone once suggested that our key beliefs are preciously held "possessions," and when you try to show someone the error or illogic of their position, no matter how courteously or gently, it is as if you walked into their home with an axe and started smashing up their furniture.
Like it or not, man is a creature that still acts largely on impulse and emotion, not reasoning and logic. Once most folks get solidly into their adult years, their beliefs and attitudes do not change much, if at all. I've always said that if you have reached the age of at least, say, 30-35 or so, and have not in that time had at least one or two very strongly held beliefs turned 180 degrees because of evidence and facts presented to you, then you are not a thinking person, and will likely never really change.
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
... is the voice that can be used to correct falsehoods.
It is also the voice used to create falsehoods.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
A Benevolent Dictatorship? That never works in any organization larger than the Python Development Community.
Really? I thought Linux kernel dev community was larger than that.
Offtopic — related to your signature: I'm 3 degrees of separation (tops) from George W. Bush. And I'm not even American.
Ignore this signature. By order.
This has to be one of the most abused tags on Slashdot, attached to any freaking story with ANY connection to science, environment, education or religion.
Those who tagged this story, what are you even trying to say? People believe in global warming despite the evidence to the contrary? Or people disbelieve global warming despite the evidence to the contrary?
I'm betting the first, but either way, write a post you goddamn cowards, so people can see what you are trying to say and (god forbid) even come with a rebuttal.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
It just repeats the well known right wing/"libertarian" rant about "big government" and is intended to provoke angry responses. Which is what "flamebait" is.
Do people actually watch Fox News? I get my info from Alex Jones. :P
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
So, what you're saying is... facts come out of the backside of ideology?
Just as kidnapping CAN be legal, there can be legal wars. The state can for instance kidnap you, it is done in cases where a judge decides to hold an otherwise innocent person in jail to force their cooperation. You most often see this used against journalists to pressure them in revealing their sources.
The problem with understanding what a legal war is that it all depends on what set of rules you choose to use. International law as such does not exist, it more a set of rules that overtime have in general become accepted to be used as international law. Of course, by the time war becomes an option it would be fair to say that the parties who disagree to the extent that war is now an option are hardly going to agree on a common set of laws.
But a legal war WOULD for instance be if a party was attacked first. The right to defend yourself. Another legal war would be to come to the aid of a ally who requested your aid and after a decleration of war.
There are rules, and the US has been claimed to have ignored those rules in the case of the Iraq war.
The US had not been attacked by Iraq, nor did it come to the aid of allie.
This makes the war illegal, unless you accept the US claim the Iraq was behind 9/11.
The japanese war against the americans was illegal (no decleration of war) IN american eyes, the japanese didn't share the western practice of declaring war before attacking.
The american war against germany was legal. The german one against the US borderline. There was a decleration of war, but US property had been attacked before although not in attacks that could be seen as an outright attack.
The whole point of 'legal' wars is not just for the sake of argument, it is to prevent the world from sliding into anarchy. Basically, if everyone followed the concept of 'legal' wars, then war can't just break-out overnight.
That is what is so scary about the Iraq war. The idea that any nation with the means can just attack another country when they feel like it. The 'law' is a very thin shell we use to keep us all civilized. Wether it is that big guy who is 'restrained' by the law from punching your face in or the superpower who is restrained by international law to invade another country.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
There's nothing wrong with a benevolent dictatorship, provided that when a malevolent dictator takes the reins you can vote them out.
uum..
you do realize globalism only "works" in the economic sense if the given players in a multilateral trade agreement have equal labor and human rights standards, right?
you also realize china, india, and many of the places we most heavily import from do not have this parity, right?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The modern media is not the fourth branch, or estate, of government. It is the First Estate. Let me explain.
The estates have classically been, in order:
1) The Church
2) The Aristocracy
3) Everybody Else
Traditionally added to this list has been
4) The Media ("Independent of church and state")
This was the rule up to one should think about 50 years ago in most countries. It's still the case today in many, especially latin american, countries. However, one should realise that the estates we not so much defined by WHO they were so much as WHAT they did. For instance, one can easily replace "aristocracy" with "very rich people", and the second estate model still fits modern society.
However, how does one replace "church" in modern society? Even in america, religious leaders wield only a small fraction of the power they once did. Do we then conclude that the model of the three estates is therefore outdated and does not apply? I would argue that this is not the case, and that the three estates model is in fact a valid model for how almost all societies operate on a basic level.
What did the first estate do? The church was closer to the people that the aristocracy. It wielded great influence over them through its sermons, traditions and omni-presence in society at large. It mostly sided with the aristocracy, to maintain the status quo. Though it would disagree with their policies when it suited its own purposes. The general idea was that the aristocrats ruled, while the church helped keep the people in line. In turn, the aristocrats would confer legal status, benefits and privileges to the church. It was a symbiotic relationship designed to keep power out of the hands of the masses.
Who replaces the church of the Ancien Régime in our 21st century society? No-one? Look beyond outward apearance and to the actual substance of the matter. Who is close to those in power and spreads their message to the masses? Who is close enough to the average citizen to influence their opinion? Who generally agrees with the government, but can disagree when it suits their purposes. Who benefits from their patronage?
The modern media, or at least the majority of it, constitutes the first estate in our modern society. I'd like to stress that I do not believe this to be the result of a conspiracy or plot. Rather, I would hold that the three estates model is a natural state towards which human societies will gravitate, without anyone ever consciously planning or realizing it.
The demise of church power in western society has left a vacuum. The Media has filled that vacuum. When people talk about the Daily Show being the only source of "real news", they are in effect pointing out the inherant difference between the "New Media" of the First estate (Bill O'Reilly), and the "Old Media" of the Fourth estate (Jon Stewart). These two model of media have always existed together, but in recent times, the First estate media has become the dominant type.
In order for idealogical to work, it needs propaganda. It needs a first estate. In order to resist ideology, we need the truth. We need a fourth estate. Right now, we have too much of the former and dangerously little of the latter.
May the Maths Be with you!
You know, sometimes, one side really is right, or at least substantially less wrong than the other.
Yes, but not necessarily because their analysis and thinking are more sound... You can be a bloody-minded partisan and still hit on a good idea every now and then, even if it's just because the other side opposes the idea.
"not always the case" or "usually not"?
I'm from the UK and recently took a holiday in San Diego to visit some relatives. Great place, but unfortunately they had a limited Sat TV package that only gave a choice of a few news channels, and Fox News was the one that got turned on most.
Now I've never seen Fox News before, and coming from a country there the TV news has a mandate to be unbiased, Fox News was quite a shock to the system. I've never seen anything like it. It's completely one sided (towards Republicans) crammed with emotional rhetoric deliberately aimed at misinforming the viewer. It so over exaggerates the current level of the "terrorist threat" to America, that an outsider viewing this crap would think you're on the cusp of being invaded.
Watching it reminded me of the kind of news propaganda that the Nazi's used in WW2 to convince their population that their cause was just and righteous, and demoralize their enemies.
I know that sounds a bit strong, but I was just so shocked at the level of dishonest manipulation Fox News are involved in. And horrified that there are people in the USA who actually watch this trash and BELIEVE that it's real news!
If you believe an Iraqi Air Force general.
Of course, only Fox News interviewed him, so maybe that's why Fox viewers think Saddam had WMD.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
In a real democracy, a "legal war" would be one in which the population has voted for it. Full stop. (Some countries even have a framework for it, emergency decisions by referendum, but rarely used.)
Of course, reality doesn't work that way in most places because people in government are always self-centred control freaks, and the whole idea of "democracy" (even representative democracy) is in reality just a fraud, in the west at least.
Of course, governments make up other definitions of "legal war" to suit themselves, but if you accept those then you're just buying into the agendas set by your masters, who in a real democracy would of course be your servants.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Well, in the end, the scientific method is just a way to _avoid_ clinging to some dogma and building cognitive dissonances to support it. There is no immovable "truth", or rather, we don't know it yet. Your pet theory is likely to be not quite the whole "truth" yet. There will eventually be some data which require it to be refined even further. Be honest to yourself and admit that you could have only an incomplete understanding of the universe, and that way we can all continue to learn more.
Anyone who sees science as some immutable dogma, or as some choice between this dogma and that one, isn't doing science in the first place. That's religion. It's the exact opposite of science. And, yes, it's funny to see people rant against religion, while using science as a dogma. That's not science vs religion, that's religion vs religion. One of them uses pseudo-science trappings, but it's used as a religion nevertheless.
I don't see how you can qualify the real thing as, basically, self-delusional, or conversely claim that only sticking to a bullshit fairy-tale as The Truth is the only non-self-delusional behaviour. Science is all about avoiding that kind of absolute truths and abandoning any pretense that you know everything. This is the data we have. This is the theory that explains that data. When we'll have more data, we'll refine the theory some more. If some of those axioms don't fit the data, we'll discard the axioms. It's just about as intellectually honest as it gets.
So, pray tell, in which way is that kind of admission that we don't know everything "self-delusional"?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well what would anyone logically expect after years of influence and propaganda being foisted upon the populations of the world, through television. Instead of being the invention that would revolutionize the world in positive ways, it's more or less used to control populations to any number of observable outcomes.
The "awakening" if you will has been the internet. It has become the great equalizer. I'll give one example.
The Gulf of Tonkin
It never happened. Given this fact why hasn't the MSM channels done huge docu-journals on it? Why hasn't the American president apologized for the war?
I find it rather unnerving that so many people are caught up on calling others' "conspiracy theorists" now days as well. It's as if it gives them some secret insider holier-than-thou french tickle inside, while climbing the moral mountain of so what....
Ignorance tends to go both ways.
I tend to think it comes down to one thing. People simply hate to be proven wrong. That derives mostly out of a fear of ....well fear. Fear they will seem inadequate or untrustworthy to friends, family and co-workers, etc.
Skynet our savior!
This is more then just religion, and politics. It can be a lot of things. Proof may exist that you me below average in intelgent (1/2 of the population is) you will probably fail to beleave it saying the test was faulty. Then you will go to a less scientific example like I am the best programmer in my class and I know stuff my professors dont know.
Or a recent argument on slashdot that asked for a rational argument for beleaglving in God. So I showed using discrete math without anyone giving me any flaws in the logic that I couldn't defend. As well using other historacal reasons by pascal. Even using a more math like proof that was inspired by Douglas Adams. My goal wasn't to proove that there is a god just that there exists logacal reasons to do. But people found this against the idology of people who beleave in god has to be stupid. The main argument was a common logic error saying a theorm if it is true needs to be proven, or if it is false it needs to be disproven. Not finding a proof the either accecpt or rejects the proof means the theory is out in the open. So saying yes it is true or false is an emotional idealistic issue.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Yes, I can show you the path, but it is you who has to walk the path.
You've obviously never met the ruler of the universe. He lives in a shack, but you'll need an improbability field generator to get to it.
The cynic in me is beginning to believe that Winston Churchill was wrong in saying that "Democracy was the least worst form of government". After being a part of the American political process for the last 8 years I've seen how ideology has, time and again, trumped reason.
Churchill was right, actually; what's wrong is the implicit assumption that we actually live in democracies. We don't, though - we only have the power to choose the lesser of two evils, just like the death row inmate who's given the choice between hanging and shooting.
Looking at the paper on the Roberts study linked to TFA:
Tell some people bad stuff about a Republican, then tell them it isn't true. The pro-Democrats in the audience believe the bad stuff and ignore the rebuttal. The pro-Republicans... mostly ignored the bad stuff in the first place (or maybe didn't think it was so bad?)
Film at 11. Or, to put it another way, mud sticks.
I can't quickly see any link from the paper to the specific rebuttal of the ad which the participants were shown - but the paper assures us that it was a "a sharp, factual, bipartisan evisceration of its insinuations" - so that's alright then. (I'm reluctant to criticize a paper too deeply after a 2 minute skim, but that line made my red pen itch).
The authors of the paper seem to be taking as axiomatic that the ad was completely untrue and the rebuttal was compelling. After all, the title of the paper says "False political beliefs".
Note that the question in the study was "do you support Roberts for Supreme Court Justice" and not "do you believe that the ad was accurate". Any good propaganda will contain a grain of truth - however disingenuously presented. In this case, it was that one of the "nonviolent" protesters was a convicted violent protester. That shouldn't count for anything in a court of law, but it might reduce your audience's enthusiasm for the right to protest.
This study would be more interesting if it were done using a nice, well-defined reproducible or falsifiable scientific or mathematical fact and a common misconception. Actually, this has been done in science/math education and there is evidence that merely telling someone "your belief is wrong - here is the right answer" is ineffective unless you force them to see the absurd consequences of their belief. (go Google for "cognitive conflict").
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Tfa presents a scientific study, with *facts* that show that ideology trumps facts. This guy refuse to belive it cause he thinks it only applies to "close minded prejudiced morons".
I say- Don't be so hard on yourself... ;-)
Ah but next time you have some cute gal trying to give you a copy of the watchtower talk a little bible with her.
Song of Solomon 2:3: Like an apple tree among the trees of the forest, so is my beloved among the young men. In his shade I took great delight and sat down, and his fruit was sweet to my taste.
Song of Solomon 5:1: I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.
Spit or swallow? Nope, you can't spit
Leviticus 15:16-17: And if any man's seed of copulation go out from him, then he shall wash all his flesh in water, and be unclean until the even. And every garment, and every skin, whereon is the seed of copulation, shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the even.
Finally found a use for the years of Catholic schooling...
as opposed to what you THINK, then facts become a threat. When ideology is what you think, you can revise your thinking without a threat to your ego.
Fostering brand loyalty is a cost effective way to get repeat customers. But you don't <em>have</em> to be a mindless consumer of political ideology.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, that was metaphorically speaking, and using the term "wiring" rather inexact.
The actual "wiring", as you noted, is largely the data. That's how we learn.
The metaphorical "wiring" I'm talking about is actually in the DNA and proteins encoded by it. It's how the neurons themselves are built to work. They don't rewire the network randomly, they have a bit of code in the DNA that says how they should work. The BIOS and bootstrap code of that neural network, so to speak. That's really what I'm talking about when I say "wired".
I hope it didn't cause too much confusion to anyone.
As for how would you check for consistency, I dunno, by running a proof through it and seeing if you get two contradicting results? There's even a conjecture that that's what dreams are: the night job that runs simulations through that data.
But in truth I doubt that there's anyone who can tell you exactly how the brain works, and which pathway belongs to the consistency checking job. If we knew that, we'd already have a working AI.
We can however look at it from the outside, like at a black box, and notice some things it does. And there is strong evidence that it does that kind of a model consistency check and cleanup. Even if we don't know exactly how it works, we can see what goes in and what comes out, and it looks that way.
Same as I can look at a plane and say it tries to keep its altitude constant, even if I have no fucking clue which control surfaces are used for that, and even less clue what the code running on its computers is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
President Joe once had a dream The world held his hand, gave their pledge So he told them his scheme for a Saviour Machine They called it the Prayer, its answer was law Its logic stopped war, gave them food How they adored till it cried in its boredom 'Please don't believe in me, please disagree with me Life is too easy, a plague seems quite feasible now or maybe a war, or I may kill you all Don't let me stay, don't let me stay My logic says burn so send me away Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen You can't stake your lives on a Saviour Machine
How much does a cow weigh? If you ask ten people to estimate the average weight of a cow, then the average of their estimates will probably be a little off. If you ask 100 people, you'll get a number that's closer. If you ask 1000, you'll get a number that's even closer. Why? Because, 90% of us (hypothetically) don't know what a cow weighs, so our guess is going to be off. But, statistically, 45% will be too high, and 45% will be too low, so they cancel each other out. That leaves the other 10% who grew up on a farm, or are veterinarians, or for whatever other reason know what a cow weighs. As the sample grows, the correct answer rises to the top. Which means that, since 90% of us don't know enough about politics to make an informed vote, then the best candidate will rise to the top because the other 10% will know what they're doing. But that doesn't work, does it? Why not? Because we're not just randomly guessing. We're deliberately choosing the wrong answer - the wrong candidate - based on something other than the facts. Our ignorance is getting in the way.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
Science education may help a little, but it doesn't fix the problem for making judgments based on given data or information: you're still subject to the same biases and failures of rationality.
What good scientists do is that they realize that they are just as fallible as everybody else and as a result set up their experiments such that the experiments are not influenced by their own biases That's why medical studies are double-blind, not merely blind.
In different words, if you're a scientist and listen to FOX, you're in as much trouble as any random Joe. The scientific thing to do is to turn off FOX and do you own, careful analysis of the data, checking and cross checking data and hypotheses.
You're letting your prejudices and biases cloud your judgment.
Of course, Palin didn't literally ban books from library shelves: she simply doesn't have the power to do so. But it appears that she opposed the presence of particular books in the library and exerted pressure.
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5766173&page=1
The story is credible also because Palin is in trouble for several other abuses of power.
Really ? Anyone who looks at physics immediately sees the immutable dogma : that the laws of physics exist and are utterly dogmatic, final and eternal. You will find this on page 1 of any decent physics book.
Now this is an abstract and untouchable dogma, so let's get a little bit of dogma that's been in science for over 2000 years already : that the current models for the natural laws are approximations that are, at most, a 10^-30 factor (just some number) removed from the "perfect" models. And that number has been going down, and down and down. But to be honest, there is much more variation in biblical interpretation than there is in variations in physics about the laws of physics, so you could easily call phyics more dogmatic than the bible.
And that's just physics, these laws are more or less "morally neutral" (even if some muslims seem to disagree). If you go looking in economics, those laws that they study, are equally dogmatic, even if much less precisely known, are often very much moral laws. (e.g. the result by John Nash that a capitalistic society without the "thou shalt treat your neighbour as you want to be treated" will catastrophically collapse, could easily be coopted as a "Jesus was right" type argument. Same goes for the "tragedy of the commons" and "capitalism is the best system"-retoric)
Haven't watched network "news" in ages but I find it interesting that my ranking of local news from propaganda-to-facts has little correlation with the results he got that correlate one-to-one on both questions. As a recent example, the scale of "all anarchists all the time" when reporting on the Republican National Convention protests I would rank NBC, ABC, FOX, CBS worst to best. Perhaps it is a distinction between parroting outright lies from the White House and a station's "slant"?
What's the message -- just accept it?
Or would we rather establish a Ministry of Truth rather than allow people to believe in wild religions, pink elephants, or political controversy presented as fact?
We need the freedom to be "wrong". That's what it means to be an adult.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Most people I meet are so indoctrinated as either republicans or democrats that they merely parrot back the party line. There is no attempt to think for themselves whatsoever.
Lemmings should not have the right to vote, but unfortunately in our country they are encouraged to. The truth is politicians are afraid of an educated constituency, as their job would be tougher.
This is just another sign of the sorry state our society is in.
I'm a big believer that people are entirely rational and that their conclusions are based on facts, and no study is going to persuade me otherwise!
You mean, "I thik, therefore I... may.. not... am"?
Because, as far as I know, there is a significant difference between dogma and axiom...
The representative part thoroughly quashes the notion that my vote counts for something. I live in the state of Indiana. My vote (for President) only matters if I vote the same way the majority of voters within my state vote.
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Reality is fact: Gravity, Inertia, those are facts.
Whatever is in your head are NOT facts... even how you preceive actual facts. Knowlage is really the only determining factor between wild speculation and at least a partially correct view. Another key is being willing to adjust what you think is real as new evidence is supplied.
Short version: Anything you have an opinion about is subjective; but reality itself doesn't give a shit what your opinion is and wilie e coyote will still fall like a rock after stepping off a cliff.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
The lazyness of physics book writers doesn't make physics into dogma.
The laws of physics are not final and eternal, the fact that newtons law of gravity has been proven to be wrong should be proof of that.
Hub? Hub?
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
(Leviticus 11:11)
This is one of my favorite Bible quotes. I ask people if they take the Bible literally, then (if yes) ask them why they eat shellfish. If they do not take the Bible literally, then why are they against homosexuality?
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
well there is a finite chance that there is no such thing as gravity and ever since the universe came into being all the objects, gas etc have merely coalesed into bodies by chance and every time you drop an object it only moves "down" by chance.
if you have a 2 compartment box with a divider, one compartment a perfect vacum, the other filled with gas then open the divider and one minute later close it again there is a finite(although stupidly unlikey) chance that all the molecles in the gas will be on one side of the divider.
Nothing is 100% certain, "facts" are merely things which are extremely unlikely to be chance.
Certainty is for priests and children.
Ya know the facts are also based on interpretation of those facts, and how we percieve them. ....sometimes things happen because they need to happen, so says the universe.
If I say the sky is blue, and someone else says the sky is blue, we do not necessarily see both the same blue, he may be seeing my red, yet would not know because all his life he was told it was blue...
So let's take it a step further, if we know that the facts are irrefutable, yet we make decisions based on theories that have no proof of being right, we are making a decision on gut feeling or a hunch... these hunches can not be wrong , not to us, they can be wrong to someone looking at the present situation and may be more experienced about it, but at that moment in time, you were supposed to do what you did, hence the feeling we get to do this and not that.
We swerved into the other lane, causing that person to be a little more cautious, which maybe later affected him in such a way that had he not been more alert would not have seen the car slow down half a mile up and could have been in an accident
Facts don't stand alone. They need to be interpreted in the framework of a world view.
But that's not what the studies found.
In this case, all the article stated was that people who were told the wrong things (by Fox) about something that happened far away (Iraq) that the individuals involved could not confirm on their own, had the wrong view of reality. How on earth could this be otherwise?
Let's take a concrete example. The moon landing. You and I believe that it happened? Did it? Can you actually confirm it yourself? Practically, no (unless you are Bill Gates). So how do we know it happened? We have a trust network that verifies this fact, and that trust network has proved reliable in the past, so we have no reason to doubt it. That's just the way it is and we have to live with the consequences. The best we can do is to show that Fox has been unreliable in things that an individual can verify directly.
BTW, no form of science is possible without this sort of trust network. No person is an island. If you believe everyone loves you, and everyone tells you that they love you (but laugh at you behind your back), you'll likely believe you're lovable no matter how many experiments you run to truly verify it.
The funny thing is, the study's conclusion have been verified nonetheless, simply by the reaction to the objective facts. The objective facts said something that any 5 year old knows, but those trivial facts were extrapolated to support pet prejudices against the Bush administration (which is guilty of many things and can't be defended anyway), religion, and prejudices in favour of a "Science-only" ideology (as if Mozart has anything to do with science).
After analyzing and considering the study, I still think that, while the facts are compelling, ideologies take a back-seat to logic.
Conscience is the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.
The poll in the article is bogus anyway because WMDs were found in Iraq: 500+ munitions containing degraded mustard gas and sarin nerve agent. Their usefulness is dubious and they were not what we were looking for, but to simply say that WMDs were not found in Iraq is just untrue.
I agree we should be free to think as we will.
Although I don't believe we have a right to correct information, it'd be real nice if politicians and corporations were held responsible for their misinformation. Our choices (in Truth, wild religions, pink elephants, or political controversy) are only as solid as the information on which they are built, and unfortunately, our Public Representatives (from city council members on up) feed us only the information we require to achieve the goals they desire. There seems to be no regard for the validity of the information.
It's our responsibility as citizens to hold liars responsible for their lies. As we've seen with Clinton and Bush, though, lies are accepted as truth, even in the face of physical evidence.
Oh, well. I guess we (as a population) also have the right to accept any gilded bullshit as gospel, and build our worldview on that.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
You deleted the journal so maybe you figured it out, but if the answer to a math problem is larger than 2^42, google converts it to a floating point number. Apparently once you get around 333333333333334, the floating point precision is greater than 1, so 3.33333333e14-1 is still 3.33333333e14.
Incidentally, this is related to the reason why when dealing with floating point numbers in an application where you may possibly be asked to sum big numbers and tiny numbers together, you either sort the list smallest to largest or keep two sums, one for "small numbers" and one for "large numbers" (and add them at the end).
brilliant, and i'm very happy to see someone here take on the science as a dogma that permeates this website. i feel the majority of posters lean towards the militant atheist variety...
Any ideology based on facts in today's world will admit there is a lot of important stuff out there that we just don't know.
It will also admit that some of the unprovable hypothesis theories out there could be true but we'll never be able to prove or disprove them in this universe, so, scientifically and practically speaking, they are useless. But they still could be accurate. Maybe the world was created by some divine being 30 minutes ago en medias res , but practically and scientifically speaking, there's no distinction between that scenario and if it started 10-20 billion years ago. But it could still be the truth.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You've come pretty close to my definition of evil: "Fucking over someone else for your own gain."
You've also described something I like to call, "Casual selfishness." It's those actions that only slightly inconvenience other people, but really gain you very little at all, done without consideration, and with forethought only about your own slight gain. I see casual selfishness every day on the ride in to work -- from those who don't queue up in slow moving traffic until they force their way in at the very end of the merge, for instance, or those who ride your ass though you couldn't go any faster.
Fortunately, those people are in the minority. I'd say it's only a percent or two who do things like that.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Scientists need to stop saying "Newton's Law" and start saying "Newton's Theory" or "Copernicus' Theory" and so on. Nothing is absolute in science. Nothing is law.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The "science as dogma" argument is often used by creationists trying to refute evolution (and other religious-based arguments trying to "unseat" science). Having spent time with very religious people, I know first hand that they take great comfort in "knowing" that their holy books (whichever ones they may be) contain all knowledge. They are used to having a certainty that there are no real unknowns in the world. Sure, we humans might not know it all, but the holy books prove that God, Jesus, Flying Spaghetti Monster, whoever, *does* know it all and by praying/studying real hard you can get a glimpse at that knowledge.
When these religious folks look at science, they just can't conceive that scientists would be OK with not knowing everything. They assume that scientists must look to "science" as their holy book and thus they must pray to/study science in an effort to gain greater knowledge the same way that the religious folks pray to God. Of course, all religious folks also tend to believe that all Gods who aren't their own are false gods. This means (to them) that science is a false god to be banished.
Getting back to the subject of cognitive dissonance, they are presented with two conflicting world views:
1 - This holy book which you have been studying for years holds all knowledge. Pray to The Great Whoever to attain this knowledge.
2 - Science can learn many things about the world without prayer and while being OK with the idea that their theories can change at any moment (e.g. with new evidence).
Their brains can't accept both as true and they've invested a lot of their lives in #1, so #1 becomes "TRUTH" and #2 gets warped into Science Is A Threat To My God.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
You might want to check the accuracy of that statement. It has most certainly not been proved to be wrong. It has been proven to be extremely slightly inaccurate in a few cases.
Besides, the law that replaced it is VERY similar to newton's law of gravity. It just contains extra terms that correct for a very, VERY insignificant inaccuracy. Note that this factor is always simplified to "1" for any calculation that applies to anything relating to humans.
So what has really happened to newton's law of gravity ? It's been proven that for certain required accuracy, in certain extreme conditions, there's a better - but equally dogmatic (in fact more dogmatic) and non-negotiable - alternative. Which still contains newton's law in it's entirety, but corrects it by a tiny, tiny factor. (you might say that the old dogma is a 99,99999999999999% correct simplification of the new dogma)
You might compare it with Pi. For millenia everybody used the 22/7 approximation (because it's much more useful if you're working with paper instruments and without calculator, not because they necessarily didn't know there were better ones. In fact, several did know there were better approximations, and chose not to use them. The 22/7 approx. was still used in my math classes barely 10 years ago everytime we drew something involving pi in gemoetry). That was a dogma.
That dogma has been "changed" the value of pi to 4 * atan(1), in radians, an infinite series yielding a "real" number. In other words the change of dogma, has "changed" the value of pi from 3.142857... to 3.141587...
To say that the dogma has been changed is perhaps literally true, but the "nature of the beast" hasn't changed. Pi was constant, was about 3.142 and still is about 3.142. In other words, I'd say the dogma is unchanged, we just know the dogma itself better.
The problem is, the same goes for moral laws. "help thy neighbor" is a statement everybody knows, including where it comes from. John Nash proved that if "too many" (the value of "too many" is being thorougly searched for, it certainly doesn't exceed 12%) people don't do that, our society will collapse.
So the "law" "everybody must try to help his/her neighbor, only mistrusting when there is reason to" is changed to "at least 88% of the population must help his neighbor"). Change in dogma. Obviously you'd want to keep well away from that line, esp. since it's a lower bound.
To do what many people here would like to do, to actually change those dogma's, those laws and consequences (e.g. the value of pi) to something else, that will never happen. You can however, destroy many, many, many lives trying to change them. (comminists destroyed at least some 100 million, muslims a billion, attempting to bend reality, and its dogma's, to their will)
Yeah, get back to Groklaw where you belong!
Just kidding, it's good to know there is at least one lawyer out there with a brain.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Facts are negotiable. Perceptions are pretty much carved in stone.
She did try to do something about it.
I am from Alaska. I have family in Wasilla, some who know Palin. The facts: Palin asked the city librarian if she would remove books from the library. The librarian said, essentially, "Not on my watch." So Palin attempted to change the watch.
She did try to do something about it, at the cost of a well-liked city librarian. She did so because of her scary fundamentalist ideology, the same thing that caused her to push through measurements requiring rape victims to pay for their rape test kits.
This "censorship" thing is not a strawman. I'm not sure if two cases make a pattern, but the "Troopergate" (stupid name, I know) affair indicates she likes to fire people she doesn't like, or who stand in the way of her doing things like censor libraries.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I believe Dennis Kucinich is much more liberal than Obama. And I was certainly ready to vote for him. He'd barely be "moderate" in most mentally-healthy countries.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
There's always so little to choose from...
Jedis are stupid. If they were so powerful, why couldn't they handle counseling for a kid who missed his mom?
As stated by the great Adam Savage:
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own!"
'Nuff said.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
The biggest hypocrisy of modern times is the blind faith people have in science.
You can quote me on that (now I wish I was signed in).
I keep hearing how the government "practically forced some companies to make loans." This isn't supported by the facts. The bill in question (passed by Clinton in '93) essentially mandated fairness in lending -- that if banks gave a loan to one person, they couldn't refuse a similar loan to a similar person.
In fact, deregulation allowed standard banks to behave as speculative agencies. It wasn't Fannie and Freddie that gave these sub-prime loans, and nobody was forced to do so. The fact is, they were highly profitable in the short-term (say, 15 years, which is plenty to make a killing and get out). Other banks purchased up blocks of loans. Couple that with increasing privatization of Freddie and Fannie.
There was so much return on these subprime loans, that Fannie and Freddie were financially pressured into purchasing up blocks themselves. As they are the biggest mortgage lenders, they ended up with huge numbers of these loans.
The economy started spiralling down about the same time the ARMs came due, exacerbating the rate of mortgage defaults.
Jeez, doesn't anybody listen to NPR anymore?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
There was a book written about this many years ago. Its called Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky & Edward S. Herman. It goes into the mainstream media's role in shaping public opinion which most of the time is very far from the truth or what actually happens is not the truth and this is where you get an actively misinformed population. Reversing the public's perception after said information is released becomes close to impossible. Hence you get Obama being Muslim, Palin the book burner,etc. For instance, I have a cousin who is about 19 years old and just came back from bootcamp for the marines. I asked him why were we in Iraq and he still believes that Saddam & Iraq attacked the USA on 9/11 and that's why we're over there apart from WMD in which I told him that its plain and simple not the truth. It has been confirmed by the FBI and CIA that there was no link between Muhammad Atta and Iraq despite what Mr. Cheney would have you believe. We all know about the mythical WMD. But almost 6 years and 2 wars later some people still believe the misinformation. 20 years later "political scientists" have come to this conclusion?
At some point, there has to be reality or exsistance is meaningless... and because I know some 'intro to philosophy' college brat is going to say "well it is", I'm going to go ahead and say "Then mass-suicide if there's no meaning". If it's meaningless then you shouldn't bat an eye at ending it.
I enjoy reality as I can see it, and while it's subjective to the way we see it, it's still there. It's sickeningly egotistical to think that just because you can't understand it perfectly it isn't real.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
The real problem is the use of a superlative in defining the 'best' government. As with the 'best' anything, you can't really answer without specifying 'best at what'. A statement about value is never objective. It needs to be related to some purposes/ends if it's to make sense, and even then you can debate about whether or not something is really the best.
You can reasonably debate whether democracy is the best for so-and-so, but you can't debate whether its simply the best. That's just rhetoric.
Yeah, but this leads to information pollution. There are so many different spins on the "facts," that the facts themselves are obscured. Consider the evidence presented by the government in the lead-up to the Iraq war. While other papers were debunking this evidence (whatever else you might think of the Guardian, they nailed that), ours were toeing the Presidential line. It wasn't until Joseph Wilson published his response in the NY Times that we started even talking about the validity of the evidence.
And even that was misdirected with the Valerie Plame incident, which effectively drew attention away from what Joe Wilson was talking about: the fact that at least some of the evidence was outright forged.
This whole mess is insane. How can we, as citizens, make valid choices, when we can't even get basic facts? The news stopped focussing on presenting facts, and started focussing on interpreting those facts, to the point where the facts are lost, and the interpretation is all that remains.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Geez... Repeat after me: AXIOM IS NOT DOGMA!!!
Where did you learn science?
All we have to do is set up a list of approved study donors, so that we can reject the "facts" produced by the corrupt donors and accept the "true facts" from the good people. So, who funded this study, and can we suspect the study because of who funded it?
By the taping of my glasses, something geeky this way passes
Look at Vista as an example, and I'm the last person I'd expect to back MS. The belief here is that its the biggest pile of c%^p out there. Having used it its not as bad as people make out. For the average user its usable, if the hardware can handle it.
Another belief is that Apple hardware is expensive compared to Wintel hardware. If you compare the entry price for each you can make an argument for this. If you start to compare systems with equivalent specifications from well known manufacturers the picture is less clear and has been for a while.
Would the world be better if belief systems were ignored and only the bare facts used to make judgments? I'm not so sure about that.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
Popular culture has driven cognitive dissonance to be the leading engine of commerce for the twenty-first century. Reactionary Luddites are being dealt with in Arabia and elsewhere.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Your statement here is dishonest, depending on the sensitivity and nature of an experiment then Newtonian Mechanics is completely and utterly bogus. In order to apply Newton's Laws you MUST have an inertial reference frame. Since inertial reference frames do not exist in reality, Newton's Laws are ALWAYS an approximation. So, depending on how poor that approximation is then your answer using Newton's Laws will be more wrong. This problem is not just in "fringe" cases of physics, every day phenomena do not follow Newton's laws. A simple example of this problem is the Coriolis Effect (the deflection of objects due to a rotating reference frame), which causes projectiles fired from gunships to be deflected and miss their intended target (unless the gunner compensates for this effect).
You are misusing the term "dogma", dogma applies to a belief in the purest sense (without proof). Unfortunately, in English we do not have a separate word for "belief with proof" so instead we normally say that we "know this to be true with a high degree of certainty." If we were German we would use the word "kennen", which has the appropriate meaning but is normally translated to English simply as "to know."
Go take some philosophy classes, especially those that concentrate on ethics. Ethical systems derived from scientific principles are VERY different from ethical systems derived from dogmatic beliefs.
...My goal wasn't to proove that there is a god just that there exists logacal reasons to do....
There is no way to PROVE anything. All we can do is to look at whatever evidence we have and then decide whether to BELIEVE that evidence or not.
There was a family of mice who lived all their lives in a piano, just as we live in our fragments of the universe. And to them in the piano-world came the music of the instrument filling all the dark places with sound and harmony. At first the mice were very much impressed by it. They drew comfort and wonder from the thought that there was Someone who made the music -- though invisible to them-- above, yet close to them. And they loved to think of the Great Player whom they could not see.
Then one day a daring mouse climbed up part of the piano and returned very thoughtful. He had discovered how the music was made. Wires were the secret; tightly stretched wires of graduated lengths which trembled and vibrated. They must revise all their old beliefs: none but the most conservative could any longer believe in the Unseen Player.
Later, another explorer carried the explanation further. Hammers were the secret; dozens of hammers dancing and leaping on the wires. This was a more complicated theory, but it all went to show that they lived in a purely mechanical and mathematical world.
The Unseen Player came to be thought of as a myth. But the Pianist continued to play the piano.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
Go out of the light polluted city and look into the starry night sky and hear the Creator of the Universe play the Music of His Majesty, as He has since the beginning of time.
All theory is gray
The representative part thoroughly quashes the notion that my vote counts for something. I live in the state of Indiana. My vote (for President) only matters if I vote the same way the majority of voters within my state vote.
This is quashed by voting method, IMHO. There are voting methods that count every vote, no matter what the result is, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range_voting
It is my personal favorite, because no information from any voter gets discarded and plays a role in the result.
Of course, in the end, you have to choose someone, or decide something, so from that point of view some votes are always discarded. However, the range voting also discourages any tactical voting, and because opinions change, the voice of (larger) minority can easily be voice of majority next time.
Look at Vista as an example, and I'm the last person I'd expect to back MS. The belief here is that its the biggest pile of c%^p out there. Having used it its not as bad as people make out. For the average user its usable, if the hardware can handle it.
The belief here is that Vista is not as good as XP, not that it is "the biggest pile of crap out there". That's completely in line with "it's usable, if the hardware can handle it". And, you know, "it's usable, if the hardware can handle it" is hardly a ringing endorsement for using Vista instead of XP.
Physics drastically changes all the time. It does not assume it gets closer and closer. In fact, there are entire models of physics that are mutually exclusive from each other and share very little in common, each having completely different foundations. The only reason your argument SOUNDS like it makes sense is that you give that false assumption that science believes its ever continuously refining itself. It *does* do that, but at the same time, it will completely throw out other theories because they were just plain wrong. Science has no issues with completely starting from scratch if they need to. The rest of the "laws" you point out all involve statistics. They're as much a law as a sister-in-law is the law in that they both use the word "law." They're not laws. They're observations that when used correctly have a pretty good chance at predicting an outcome. Also, Nash didn't say "treat your neighbor, etc, etc" he said to look out for the group as a whole, even at times it seems less beneficial to the individual. Even then, thats been shown to be an unstable system as its not in equilibrium.
Your argument is poorly presented as it is based on false pretenses. The foundation is broken and therefore the conclusions are just arbitrary statements that you just want to say out loud.
After being a part of the American political process for the last 8 years I've seen how ideology has, time and again, trumped reason.
Then perhaps you should modify Churchill's quote as follows:
"Democracy was the least worst form of government, except for American-style democracy".
After all, there are many other democratic nations in the world that aren't nearly so screwed up as the US (in fact, I live in one).
Hmm... that's not right at all. Make that:
"Democracy, with the exception of American-style democracy, was the least worst form of government."
Stupid English and lack of proof reading... :)
...and Man creates God by Intelligent Design.
Squirrel!
but i would reply to you, and that post, by saying: yes, 100% true
but if in reaction to that post you are filled with a dread and a burning urge to "do something about it", you don't get it
that post describes an unchanging reality of the human condition, and your job is to simply accept it and make peace with the observation. because any "cure" you could EVER dream up is worse than the problem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Reality is fact: Gravity, Inertia, those are facts.
I would say those are physical laws that govern (at the very least) our world, not facts.
Whatever is in your head are NOT facts
Hm. Is that in your head?
2 + 2 = 4 is in my head. That must mean it's not a fact...
There is nothing dogmatic about PI, you're allowed to doubt it's value all you want, all you need is take a ruler and measure the circumference and radius of a circle and you can make your own value of PI which should end up being the same number everyone else uses +- some inaccuracy in your measurement.
I don't see how anything you can go out there and test yourself can be dogmatic.
Of course, my conclusion is worded a little different: People are stupid.
I am not a lawyer. This post does not constitute any form of legal advice.
> So? Does being "raised a Muslim" violate any legal or ethical principles?
No. Lying about the whole thing raises some pretty big ones though.
> Even if he had been raised as a practicing Muslim, would that say anything about his character today?
Even if? You still doubt that he was a practicing Muslim? Considering the evidence, including his own damned autobiography, being unwilling to believe it shows you perfectly fit into today's topic.
Just to be clear, the fact that he WAS a practicing Muslim isn't in doubt. That by itself should not be a disqualification for POTUS, although votors are free to take it into account, especially the fact he feels he has to lie about it. There is equally no doubt that he isn't a practicing Muslim anymore.
Because Marxists can't be Muslims anymore than they can be Christians. His stepfather was unquestionably a Muslim and enrolled him for proper Islamic teaching. However, Mr. Obama's father was a Marxist, by his own words. His mother was almost certainly a Communist. His grandparents, at least on his mother's side... the typical white people who did most of his upbringing, were at least socialists and probably communists. His childhood mentor was a card carrying Communist Party USA member. By Obama's own words we know he sought out the company of Marxists and communists in college to be 'authentic', that socializing or being taught be anyone else would have made him a 'sellout.' His words. He chooses a church that was more socialist and revolutionary than religious, apparently one that was part of an unholy trinity between Wright's TUCC, Phalager[sp]'s mutant Catholic black revolution theology and Farrakahn's mutant Black Revolutionary Islam. The common thread between these otherwise incompatible religions being Marxism. Then throw in Ayers, an admitted "small c communist.' who apparently 'made' Mr. Obama by putting in charge of $150M to build a political empire with money intended to improve education.
Now somebody prove this thread's idea right by sticking yer fingers in your ears and yelling McCarthy at me. Every one of the absolute facts cited here, admittedly cited in such a way to make Mr. Obama look very bad, is a real fact you can look up for yourself. Many have video evidence on YouTube right now.
Democrat delenda est
There are more walking wounded than ever and the most obvious evidence for this cognitive disonance is laid bare for all-
-they say oil is bad, and support policy and promote agenda to end its dominance but yet suffer when it all comes to fruition and blame those who have the solution which is a supply side centered solution and no different than where we currently purchase the oil, from hostile countries who rpeach our destruction, that drill!
-they saw the planes and have come to know the tragedy in all its complexity except for the simple to understand ideologicla hate of the enemy but yet support leaders and pundits, policy, ideology that puts blame on all but the perps themselves, promote useless and baseless conspiracies and are about to elect a candidate with no proven experience, questionable ties, policies, beliefs and motives that endanger the nation and ultimately their person
In addition,
They drink at the trough of sensationalism, hype, bias and lies while disregarding contradictory evidence and truth that was apparent or made evident over time, as it usually occurs in reasonable societies
They suspend belief to a degree that is in parity with those they castigate for having a set of beliefs contradictory to their own and in many examples, practice a zealotry that surpasses
Who would they be, liberals
They pioneered the widespread use of Cognitive Dissonance and it has now become the matter of fact format of conversations regarding a world that is more complex and precariously perched in the face of the nuclear age than ever.
We will not destroy ourselves, our enemies enablers will do it for us
Terry Eagleton wrote that ideology is like halitosis... it's everyone else's problem.
More specifically, he defined it (loosely) as the particular pattern of beliefs that allow one to participate in one's own oppression.
This is so that one can make it a useful distinction from the other common uses of the word "ideology", which muddle it up with concepts like "worldview" or "prejudice"--- since when we're talking about vile political thought permeating everyday life, we fall back on "ideology" and the pickle that ideological thought relies on 'blind spots' in order to suppress the dissonance brought out by self-oppression.
As an example, I'd suggest the sad situation that Americans are completely unaware of having over 700 military bases on foreign soil, and an extensive geopolitical campaign involving economic foul play and trade strongarming, two overt foreign wars and multiple covert ops, all the while proclaiming patriotically the banner of democracy, and denying vehemently any accusations of empire.
Damn those pesky terrorists
But gravity and inertia are also in your head. They are ideas, mental constructions, descriptions of patterns of observations.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Actually, my own impression is that you're the rule rather than the exception. Most atheists do mind their own business, and so do most theists for that matter. The majority of the population is really in between those two sides of the coin.
But, anyway, if you don't go around trying to save perfect strangers from their ignorance, you're not what I'd call a "christian-baiting troll." I'm rather talking about those who act like the atheist version of Jehova's Witnesses. They're not just content with having had the big revelation, they have to save your soul too.
But generally the phenomenon of bullshit mental models reforming the other way around, is more general than religion. As a rule of thumb, look out for phrases like, "and then I was enlightened", or "then I realized I had been living a lie", and other such expressions to that same effect: that "Eureka!" moment. That sudden lightning flash where everything became clear, the path ahead was suddenly visible, and you only need to teach The Truth to everyone else.
Or, much as I'm not going to gain many friends by picking on a guy who's dead and was smart and funny, a perfect illustration would be George Carlin's, "I was a catholic until I reached the age of reason." He repeated it in several shows. Well, he probably just said it because it was funny, so I'm not really picking on him. But it serves well as a quote to illustrate the point. There are people who genuinely have that kind of an experience. A moment where it's suddenly clear that all you've done or believed in, was dumb and stupid, and you're now teh enlightened guy for realizing the exact opposite.
It's also known by the less flattering name of "brainwashing".
That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. And that's the moment when a crashed mental model was hastily replaced with an even more bullshit one, only the other way around. The stress and discomfort of a broken model were suddenly lifted, hence that wonderful sensation of having suddenly discovered The Truth. And it has to be The Truth, because everything seems to make perfect sense now. (Having been padded with enough bullshit redefinitions of reality, until it does internally make sense.)
Again, it's not just about religion. It could just as well be the guy who was a rabid Linux zealot, and suddenly was enlightened that Linux is sellout crap for idots and BSD is The One True Way. (I've actually known someone like that.) It could be the nerdy gal who believed all her life that people are fundamentally good and you have to do The Right Thing, then suddenly was enlightened that only stupid people do good, and you have to care only about yourself. (Ditto.) It could be, like in somebody else's example, the moment when someone switches from actively campaigning for smokers' rights, to campaigning against smoking. Etc.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Scissors sharp! Fire hot!
One thing I find rarely done is the realization that maybe they can never be truly objective...
In most North American mainstream media news, for the past 20 years, the idea of "objective" or "unbiased" reporting has been replaced by the proclamation of "balance" --- precisely because of the kind of criticism that you're levelling.
So what rock have you been hiding under? Objectivity hasn't been part of the ruse for a long time --- implicitly, perhaps, but not explicitly.
The current trick is to provide "balance" by reducing an issue to two opposing sides (when there are usually 8 or 19 sides etc.) and to cherrypick those viewpoints so as to narrow the debate in the desired direction. An example would be pitting the tree-sitting dreadlocked enviro against the nearly-laid-off logger, so as to make the loggers a victim and support the companies' viewpoints, when in fact there are a number of solutions and options on the table that go unreported.
Propaganda in North America doesn't tell you what to think, but it does tell you what to think about.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I try to be aware of this tendency within myself, but it can be hard to overcome. Even when you want to be objective, fact based, it's hard to avoid looking for things which confirm your beliefs. We like to be confirmed, and it doesn't matter if you're a rational atheist or wackjob fundamentalist, the wiring is going to be there in all of us. How many of you get a smug feeling watching Palin get taken apart, but get an uncomfortable feeling when Obama's flaws are pointed out? (Or, if you're a wackjob fundamentalist, try reversing the players ;) It's human nature, and even self awareness can't overcome it fully.
I think you are missing the point. While the laws endorsed by science may appear dogmatic they are not. Take Newton's model for example. It was dogmatic if you didn't bother to understand it. Then came Einstein. And now relativity is the dogmatic law. Until a better theory comes along. Basically science seems dogmatic because a) it has very good reasons and b) because you don't bother to understand those reasons. Believe me! or rather go find it yourself!
People emphasize facts they like.
People discount facts they dislike.
If you can convince them emotionally, they will fit the facts to their emotional desire most of the time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You might want to check the accuracy of that statement. It has most certainly not been proved to be wrong. It has been proven to be extremely slightly inaccurate in a few cases.
Besides, the law that replaced it is VERY similar to newton's law of gravity. It just contains extra terms that correct for a very, VERY insignificant inaccuracy. Note that this factor is always simplified to "1" for any calculation that applies to anything relating to humans.
So what has really happened to newton's law of gravity ? It's been proven that for certain required accuracy, in certain extreme conditions, there's a better - but equally dogmatic (in fact more dogmatic) and non-negotiable - alternative. Which still contains newton's law in it's entirety, but corrects it by a tiny, tiny factor. (you might say that the old dogma is a 99,99999999999999% correct simplification of the new dogma)
You are more than welcome to makeup something to replace Relativity, especially GR. All you have to do is supply the math and the evidence backing it up.
Since this is only dogma it shouldn't be that hard.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
Here's an axiom of science (dogma is the wrong term) I can think of: empiricism works. Without that, the scientific method isn't a meaningful way of learning anything.
I live in Brazil and have studied to be a teacher. Almost every teacher around here sees himself as contributing to democracy by his teachings. Most of them can give you a two hour speech about the value of education for the forming of critical thinking. The problem is... what they call critical thinking is plain ideology. Most teacher think they're saving the kids minds when they teach about the evils of liberalism. But don't you dare ask'em what are the liberal arguments. They just know they're wrong. And every kid must know that too, or else they'll be controlled by the liberals. In the end, critical thinking is the same as leftist prejudice. No wonder the whole Latin America is going to the left.
"5, INTERESTING"
you people are exactly the problem and fox news is as republican biased as it should be since ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, NYTIMES, BBC, AL JAZEERA ETC ETC is bias to the left
to the extent you would think its the BHO Network Barack Hussein Obama Lovefest
Slashdot Moderation is the perfect example and are tilted so far left, any presumption of objectivity is an absolute joke
So heres to you /tards, keep up the good work, your making George Orwell more relevant as time goes by
From the Objectivistically Challenged Slashdot Moderation with their brilliant FOX=Bad political formula for dummies -
Fox News (Score:5, Interesting)
by Macka (9388) on Thursday September 25, @06:20AM (#25148913)
I'm from the UK and recently took a holiday in San Diego to visit some relatives. Great place, but unfortunately they had a limited Sat TV package that only gave a choice of a few news channels, and Fox News was the one that got turned on most.
Now I've never seen Fox News before, and coming from a country there the TV news has a mandate to be unbiased, Fox News was quite a shock to the system. I've never seen anything like it. It's completely one sided (towards Republicans) crammed with emotional rhetoric deliberately aimed at misinforming the viewer. It so over exaggerates the current level of the "terrorist threat" to America, that an outsider viewing this crap would think you're on the cusp of being invaded.
Watching it reminded me of the kind of news propaganda that the Nazi's used in WW2 to convince their population that their cause was just and righteous, and demoralize their enemies.
I know that sounds a bit strong, but I was just so shocked at the level of dishonest manipulation Fox News are involved in. And horrified that there are people in the USA who actually watch this trash and BELIEVE that it's real news!
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Besides the obvious problem that no such person exists, you would also need to take competency into account. Simply put, people have enough trouble running their own lives, and understanding their own preferences and motivations. There isn't a single human being alive capable of running someone else's life -- just one other's, much less a whole country! -- such that the other individual could be guaranteed to consider the result an unqualified improvement.
The first problem is information; each individual knowns his or her own preferences and priorities best. These are not directly observable, cannot be effectively communicated except through uncoerced action, and change over time.
The second problem is that freedom of choice, a.k.a. self-determination, is itself one of the things most people greatly desire. No ruler, no matter how benevolent, can ever provide this good, as it fundamentally conflicts with the ruler's own existence. For this reason alone no centrally-controlled society can ever approach the individual or collective wealth* possible in a free, decentralised society.
I'm sure there are other issue, but these two are the main ones. Furthermore, if they apply to even an idealized benevolent dictatorship then they must apply to any attempt to rule over others, regardless of the form of government or the manner in which the rulers are chosen.
(*) "Wealth" has a particular meaning in this (economic) context: the absence of discomfort. "Discomfort" includes uncertainty about the future, present unhappiness, lack of self-esteem, physical unease (e.g. hunger), etc. Wealth is more than just an accumulation of material goods.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
But gravity and inertia are also in your head. They are ideas, mental constructions, descriptions of patterns of observations.
Its only in our head because we observe the fact, and create constructs to model it. Our constructs have no affect on reality, but reality had better affect our constructs.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
The sound you just heard was his point going over your head. His point was that there are an awful lot of scientists that are choosing to flip your number 1 and your number 2 and call it a day. To put it bluntly there are way too many Darwin is "TRUTH" scientists out there that have never bothered to actually *read* The Origin of Species. It *has* become a religion for many with all the hallmarks of one. One of the dumbest things being done these days is allowing science as a whole to get into this position.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
"As an example, I'd suggest the sad situation that Americans are completely unaware of having over 700 military bases on foreign soil, and an extensive geopolitical campaign involving economic foul play and trade strongarming, two overt foreign wars and multiple covert ops, all the while proclaiming patriotically the banner of democracy, and denying vehemently any accusations of empire."
plenty of americans are completely aware of all of that, and see no dissonance at all with the notion of democracy or not being an empire. they would assert you need to militaristically extend democracy, and all of what you observe is done with the enthusaistic approval of the foreign powers where the military is based. which is not empire, but cooperation, they would say
these people are called neocons
of course there are examples where the usa has snuffed out democracy in the name of fighting the ussr they would say. short term necessary strategic set back they would say
these are the true believers. every ideology has true believers. and these are the people you need to defeat, not the propagandized or the blind, whom you seem to be describing. entirely different set of people, for whom ideology means something entirely different
ideology is partisan kneejerk reaction for some, yes. but it also religious zealous fervor for another
for example, there are kids who have suicide bombed for osama bin laden that if you took them aside, were to somehow able to win their trust, and explain where bin laden has lied about the world they live in, they would reject the man and his ideology, and not suicide bomb
but then there is osama bin laden himself, whom if you explained the same things you explained to his follower, would not shudder in shock and ask for forgiveness and become a secular humanist. no, he would simply smile, and have an answer right back for you, explaining it all away, already aware of that which you think they are not aware of
that's not a blind spot. that's a true believer
i will assume you don't think democracy can be extended militaristically. am i to say that this ideology of yours is due to a blind spot? no, you have a rationale for that
plenty of americans will acknowledge every single criticism and factual historical item and present day status quo that you can fling at them, and they will still completely and utterly support the american behavior you despise, because these people are not blind or propagandized, but they are true believers who have already been exposed to those facts, and have already rationalized and incorporated them into their world view
defeating ideology you dislike lies not in a litany of facts or revealing of myserious blind spots. no, you defeat the ideology you dislike in the world by meeting their beliefs head on, and directly disputing their take on the world and the way it should be
for defeating true believers, its not about where we are, its about what we are moving to. dismantle their dream for the world: pandemocracy through empire. or islamic caliphate through jihad. don't throw lists of facts at them. true believers wil be completely unimpressed. they alrerady know what you think they don't
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
College brats are too lethargic to be that apathetic.
"But this one goes to 11!"
Have you ever believed an opinion? Have you taken that belief to a debate including the opposite of that opinion? Were you more inclined to disagree with the debater or to take his points into account? Most people, sadly, do belong to the former group. What's worse is that trait is being exploited by other leaders.
Case in point, people being told how to vote on some bills, or for or against some candidates, because they feel it right to advise on 'moral' bills and those who are for or against them. It takes advantage of an already mostly-aligned belief to create a position on controversy. My wife got one such call just this month. fortunately she's free-thinker enough from her religion that the call didn't carry much weight. This from a religion that up until recently was of the opinion that it doesn't do this to its followers. Thankfully it's not my headache.
They will gladly point you to a posting on CoastToCoastAM.com or WhatReallyHappened.org as proof.
Or point to their holy book of choice. "It's written in the Bible" counts as "proof" to a disturbingly large number of people, particularly in the USA.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
Yes, _we_ all have our cognitive dissonances, and bullshit ways to resolve them. But the funny thing is that none of us is aware of our _own_.
If anyone can think "well, actually I like the agenda of Party X more, but I'm still pissed off at their candidate in the last elections, so I'll vote against them anyway", that's _not_ the result of a cognitive dissonance. And if I'm aware that I'm doing something awfully wrong, or have done something awfully wrong, then I haven't bullshitted myself yet. Etc.
The mental model is basically the sum of all the things each of us "knows" to be right. Whether we're even consciously aware of them or not. Every think that we take for granted, every thing that is "common sense", everything that we instinctively apply, and everything thing that just is so. Like that the Sun rises in the east, moss grows on the north side of trees, and I'm the Nicest Guy In The World And By All Rights Women Should Queue Up To Have My Baby (popular piece of model with us nerds;)
If I can think "well, that's actually false, but I'll use it anyway because I like that thought more, and lets me apply a couple of choice fallacies to support some other of my preconceived notions", then it's not really a piece of my model. I already know it to be false and not the way the world works.
The ones that are in the model are the things that I know to be true. Even if for everyone else they're so much bullshit that you could fertilize a good sized farm with them.
Those guys in the classic experiment who've shafted someone for a dollar? They too didn't think they're bending reality to support that. If you asked them before, if they'd bullshit someone for a dollar, they'd have said "no." And if you asked them afterwards, they had already bullshitted themselves that it wasn't really a lie, it was a great job, and they actually did the sucker a big favour by convincing him to take it. So they'd still have answered "no" in all honesty. They too weren't aware that they actually have a flaw in their model.
In that aspect, we're all like the ugly guy in a world without mirrors. We don't see our own problems.
So, yes, it's easy to think that everyone else is broken. Their BS doesn't match my model. Mine does, so it must be the truth. I don't see the many times I must have done something bad, and bent reality to still think I'm a Nice Guy. All I remember is me doing the right thing, thus I really am a Nice Guy. And that sucker in university? I did him a favour by convincing him to take that job, if you really must know ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It realy doesen't matter if its a leader or a democratic government.
The notion of "objective reality" - that things exist outside of our observations - is a construct. A useful construct, to be sure, but a construct all the same.
Our constructs affect the observations we choose to make, and even bias the observations themselve observations (like how Millikan's results for the charge of the election biased subsequent research). By biasing our observations, our constructs affect reality-as-we-know-it. (This is how the Law of Fives works.)
And reality-as-we-know-it is the only "reality" we can meaningfully talk about: "That's the very model of what a true scientific law must always be: a statement about how the human mind relates to the cosmos. We can never make a statement about the cosmos itself -- but only about how our senses (or our instruments) detect it, and about how our codes and languages symbolize it." - Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
In contrast to the MSM, Barack or Liberal Democrat Automatons, here is a prime example why "Ideology trumps facts" because in these remaining days to the election, HERE ON /DOT AND THE MSM IT WILL BE THE REPUBLICANS FAULT FOR THIS FINANCIAL DISASTER WHEN THE TRUTH IS PLAIN FOR ALL TO SEE-
On MSNBC this week, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter tried to connect John McCain to the current financial disaster, saying: "If you remember the Keating Five scandal that (McCain) was a part of. ... He's really getting a free ride on the fact that he was in the middle of the last great financial scandal in our country."
McCain was "in the middle of" the Keating Five case in the sense that he was "exonerated." The lawyer for the Senate Ethics Committee wanted McCain removed from the investigation altogether, but, as The New York Times reported: "Sen. McCain was the only Republican embroiled in the affair, and Democrats on the panel would not release him."
So John McCain has been held hostage by both the Viet Cong and the Democrats
Alter couldn't be expected to know that: As usual, he was lifting material directly from Kausfiles. What is unusual was that he was stealing a random thought sent in by Kausfiles' mother, who, the day before, had e-mailed: "It's time to bring up the Keating Five. Let McCain explain that scandal away."
The Senate Ethics Committee lawyer who investigated McCain already had explained that scandal away -- repeatedly. It was celebrated lawyer Robert Bennett, most famous for defending a certain horny hick president a few years ago.
In February this year, on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," Bennett said, for the eight billionth time:
"First, I should tell your listeners I'm a registered Democrat, so I'm not on (McCain's) side of a lot of issues. But I investigated John McCain for a year and a half, at least, when I was special counsel to the Senate Ethics Committee in the Keating Five. ... And if there is one thing I am absolutely confident of, it is John McCain is an honest man. I recommended to the Senate Ethics Committee that he be cut out of the case, that there was no evidence against him."
It's bad enough for Alter to be constantly ripping off Kausfiles. Now he's so devoid of his own ideas, he's ripping off the idle musings of Kausfiles' mother.
Even if McCain had been implicated in the Keating Five scandal -- and he wasn't -- that would still have absolutely nothing to do with the subprime mortgage crisis currently roiling the financial markets. This crisis was caused by political correctness being forced on the mortgage lending industry in the Clinton era.
Before the Democrats' affirmative action lending policies became an embarrassment, the Los Angeles Times reported that, starting in 1992, a majority-Democratic Congress "mandated that Fannie and Freddie increase their purchases of mortgages for low-income and medium-income borrowers. Operating under that requirement, Fannie Mae, in particular, has been aggressive and creative in stimulating minority gains."
Under Clinton, the entire federal government put massive pressure on banks to grant more mortgages to the poor and minorities. Clinton's secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Andrew Cuomo, investigated Fannie Mae for racial discrimination and proposed that 50 percent of Fannie Mae's and Freddie Mac's portfolio be made up of loans to low- to moderate-income borrowers by the year 2001.
Instead of looking at "outdated criteria," such as the mortgage applicant's credit history and ability to make a down payment, banks were encouraged to consider nontraditional measures of credit-worthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named "Caylee."
Threatening lawsuits, Clinton's Federal Reserve demanded that banks treat welfare payments and unemployment benefits as valid income sources to qualify for a mortgage. That isn't a joke -- it's a fact.
When Democrats controlled both the executive and legislative bra
I agree with what you have said and I enjoyed reading your posts. There is no shame in saying "I don't know".
Unfortunately, we don't really like not knowing so it doesn't come to us easily.
Due to the grave nature of my crime, and since I feel that my posting is of an inadequate nature in such an august forum, I shall commit seppuku immediately.
The new movie by Bill Maher, which my son and I saw at a sneak preview last night, covers this - in fact it's one of the movie's main themes.
However, the corollary, that skepticism is itself an ideology, is mostly ignored by the movie.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Actually, according to my college phsycology teacher, that only works if the celebrity is a celebrity in the field that they are trying to advertize for. So, Tiger Woods advertising for Nike? Excellent effect. Tiger Woods advertising for McDonalds? Not so much.
Perhaps that is why our politicians are basically celebrities in the field of politics. Both sides of the isle try to leverage any celebrity status that their candidates may have. In this election, I think this gives Obama an inside edge. While McCain was already famous for several things (War hero, POW, 'maverick' senator) Obama has been able to build his fame as a part of his campaign. Basically, Obama is famous for having run for president without much of the baggage that many other candidates have. His fame is very closely linked to the presidential race, whereas McCain's is not.
Nice poetry, but that's all it is. You could just as well substitute the FSM and his noodly appendages playing the great harp strings of the cosmos and it would be just as valid and make just as much sense. So when do we start teaching FSMism in science class?
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
I don't know how many of you view the TED podcasts, but just last week they posted Jonathan Haidt's presentation of his research on this. It's a pretty good explanation.
I refuse to believe this. I believe that most people when presented with facts will change their minds.
A Benevolent Dictatorship? That never works in any organization larger than the Python Development Community.
What about Jordan?
Oh, wait, that's a monarchy.
I've often suspected that someone 6000 years ago thought much the same thing, and invented the Jeudo-Christian God as an attempt to do exactly what you suggest.
Unfortunately, look how that turned out. :/
The last time the United States Congress formally declared war was June 5, 1942 during World War II.
The "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002" was not a formal declaration of war. Military action was authorized, but your claim that a war was authorized by the congress is false.
It is unfortunate that in modern times we seem to have abandoned the Constitutional requirement for the Congress to declare war in favor of 'military actions' and undeclared 'war'.
The word war seems to be used for many nonsensical things these days, from a 'war on drugs' to 'war on terrorism'. How can you declare war on a tactic? Did the ancient Persians declare war on the phalanx?
Assumption: the 'product' of a news channel is the education of their viewers.
Schools are given scores based on how they educate students.
Seems a similar grading scheme could be applied to news organizations based on surveys of their 'regular' viewers (students).
It would be valuable for [news channel] to be able to say "our viewers are smarter, and better informed than the other guys when it comes to facts."
Leading to the slogan: don't be dumb, watch [our channel]. Our viewers scored 75% smarter than the other guys.
Seriously - we should be able to grade news channels based on the job they do, or rather *should* do.
This grading could even be segmented further into topics revolving science, elections, politics, religion, etc. Hopefully this would lead to less time being spent on analysis, or at least more fact checking on pundits and their outrageous claims.
On a personal note: I'm normally a CNN viewer. I agreed to watch Fox for a day because my parents told me "how much better it was".
The first story of the day was about the LHC and it was titled "Doomsday machine starts tomorrow" after that I turned off the TV. I booted up world of warcraft and ignored the news for the rest of the day! it was fun.. I should do that more often.
The true claim is that she tried to ban books, but ran into political opposition and gave up. It's false to say that she actually banned them. As for the political opposition, she said it was a "rhetorical" question when she asked how to go about banning books. Exactly how is that rhetorical? A rhetorical question provides its own answer; it doesn't ask for a how-to. Her response to that, that she asked everyone for resignation letters as a "loyalty test" doesn't improve things. It just means that she wanted to be able to fire people for anything off-the-record by having them available ahead of time.
So a false charge (that she actually banned books) is providing cover for the true charge (that she TRIED to ban books, but failed).
But what should we expect? I've seen you in past threads. I'm going to conclude that this information will only reinforce your already-held beliefs, which are 110% pro-McCain, facts be damned.
What we need is one lone ruler who tells us what to do who has no ulterior motives and hidden agendas beyond making this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible.
Sounds like a reasonable beginning of a spec.
Now making sure we get one of those is the tough part. Since the 'making sure' involves, most probably, human action, the whole idea is bound to fail, naturally.
How tough can it be?
It'll pretty much write itself after that. Did I miss anything?
That's a perfect example of super-over-simplification and I have no idea what exactly you're trying to say.
When it comes down to it:
Is the USA lying? Yes.
Are the Arabs lying? I dont speak Arabic. I have no idea, other than US translations.
Other questions on my mind.
McVeigh (the one who blew up the FBI office in OK) was sent for a spedy execution. There were rumors that a olive skinned, big bearded Arabic was there. This is before '01. Something seems very fishy: Who was pulling the strings, and why did McVeigh get sent to execution so quick?
What about the Third Tower? 2 planes hit the 2 main towers, and a third building fell just the same. Conspiracy aside (I SAW the 3rd tower ashambles), what happenhed?
During Clinton's time, an attack was made against the USS Cole. It was said in recent times that Osama's men were behind this. Aside the "who did that", why was nothing done against who did this considering it was an attack against US soil (where our military is IS US soil)?
Concerning the Arabic terrorists, what are their motives? What do they want from us? Every terrorist/Freedom fighter wants something they consider fair and related to freedom. What are we doing or not doing that makes them think we're the enemy?
There's nothing 'benevolent' about someone determined to make "this world the most livable and efficient for as large a fraction of the population as possible." Doing so ends up degrading, enslaving or slaughtering significant numbers outside of that large fraction. Benevolence tends to focus more on keeping everything tolerable for everyone. Different goal entirely.
mmmm....
indent-tured servitude
Uhm....
Good point.
Can I mention Bernie Sanders (a socialist) and redeem myself?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Crabtree's Bludgeon, anyone? Seriously.
Never attribute to Hanlon that which can be adequately attributed to Heinlein.
A good example is that the Republican party is generally identified as the party of small government. In recent history under Republicans the government has grown larger, and under Democrats it has grown smaller. But this doesn't change the fundamental fact that Republicans believe a smaller government is more efficient. Just because Republicans are unable to actually achieve their goals of smaller government, doesn't mean this isn't what the party members actually believe or are striving to attain.
So if you believe in a small government you can still vote Republican because they share your belief in small government. They just suck at execution. There's no ideological disconnect there, even if Democrats (and I am one) would often like to call it "lying" or "dishonest".
And I'm just using the Republicans as an example here because I find it easier to see the speck in my neighbors eye...
Direct democracy is the *ideal*, but I wouldn't say it works better in any presently possible modern practice. You need to meet a certain high threshold of education and commitment among the voting population for it to work. If you don't have that, you find that direct democracy isn't very fault tolerant at all. (What if, like today, >30% won't vote, but you need an absolute percentage of the population's yea/nay? What if, like today, a large percentage of the population can't grasp the complexity of a given issue and thus just do whatever some charismatic person of their faction tells them to do? You get some combination of inaction, extremely poor decisions, and de facto rule by small but influential groups. Far far from the ideal.) The decentralization, from tiers of government and representatives, is what makes the american system as functional as it is, given the imperfect human conditions we have to work with.
We're at a high enough technological level to enable lots of rapid voting, but we're not yet at a social level (cheating would ruin it), educational level (a significant chunk of the population can't - or won't - put in the time to gather enough info to make informed decisions), or economic level (it'd take a lot of time to do all the research and voting required for a direct democracy of 300 million, and we just plain don't have that much free time, not when we're all full time workers or full time students).
We'll know we're getting close when individual towns in the US go to direct voting for all decisions. And since the US overall has a tiered government (federal, state, city/county/town), it's possible for it to start at the bottom, existing as a hybrid system, and gradually propagating upwards as conditions allow.
here is a pretty good version of this argument.
That sounds like the sort of thing that someone would really want to believe, and then said person would warp his reality in order to find evidence for this assertion.
I accept the possibility that existence is meaningless. I wouldn't even mind if this was the case -- I happen to enjoy meaninglessness.
You are misusing the term "dogma", dogma applies to a belief in the purest sense (without proof). Unfortunately, in English we do not have a separate word for "belief with proof" so instead we normally say that we "know this to be true with a high degree of certainty." If we were German we would use the word "kennen [wiktionary.org]", which has the appropriate meaning but is normally translated to English simply as "to know."
Tell me, which proof do you have for gravity ? And I don't mean proof that "stuff falls down". I want YOUR proof for relativistic gravity holding true.
Furthermore, knowing full well that relativity is also an approximation (it is VERY wrong at "quantum scales" for example, but it also breaks down at the big bang, and it introduces singularities into 4d space. And, despite what star-trek scripts say, there aren't any singularities in our 4d space. They violate every last law of nature, including relativity), it is also "wrong" by your absurd standard. Everything we know is wrong. After all, as logicians realized now more than a century ago, we don't have proof of anything.
Go take some philosophy classes, especially those that concentrate on ethics. Ethical systems derived from scientific principles are VERY different from ethical systems derived from dogmatic beliefs.
Indeed, absolutely. Ethics system that do not adhere to dogmatic beliefs are inconsistent. They allow anything whatsoever. You'd think that much would be obvious to a person that has seen the 21st century, but then looking around at the world is not something philosophers are particularly known for.
Every last one non-dogmatic ethic belief system is the same : it simply allows anything, due to inconsistencies.
So you're right : "non-dogmatic" ethics are very different from dogmatic ethical theories. Very different indeed. Only ... not in a good way. At least a dogmatic system CAN be reasonable.
Btw, you don't know me. I've taken quite a few philosophy classes (several years) thank you very much. Always got into arguments with the teachers.
Essentially, each are a broken clock set to a different time.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I suspect you're giving us too much credit for this to ever happen.
That the choice of picking door A inhibits the signal for door B, is one thing. But humans often then feel anxious or depressed about the former choice to pick door A, and work backwards towards some bullshit reason why. And then that fairy tale they just invented, is stored in that network as a fact. Essentially it's controlled schizophrenia: an imaginary thing we just invented, gets fed back into the thing as an actual input or rather as a memory of an actual input.
We might invent things like that Door A was the morally right / elite / whatever choice and only evil people / idiots / whatever pick Door B. (Wth? It's just a door.) We might invent that there was something bad or foreboding about Door B. We might even retroactively redefine it as it not having been Door A at all. I chose Door B and everyone saying otherwise is a liar, dammit.
It doesn't stop at "ok, door A worked for me before, I'll keep picking door A." We go and build a better scaffolding than that all the time, and often it's just fiction.
Whole edifices of fiction can be invented in the blink of an eye, and get described as some moment of enlightenment or revelation. Though it probably will only go into long term memory in the next REM sleep cycle. We essentially just stuffed a whole bunch of fiction in our input buffer, stamped with a retroactive date.
I'm not even sure how I'd code a neural network to work like that, even if I explicitly wanted to.
That said, about pathways, well real biological neurons do tend to organize themselves into pathways and lobes. There are, basically, subnets which don't just happen to contain the paths for the same memory, but really organize themselves to have one function only. Or just take over a function if the previous group got destroyed and that didn't kill you. E.g., when you go into anxiety or fight-or-flight mode, that's very well delimited groups of neurons which, essentially, organized themselves to be the ones who decide if you should be affraid and if you need an adrenalin shot. You can see them firing on an MRI scan. I wouldn't know if the memory / reason parts do that too, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise either. It _could_ be that there's a certain group which starts that simulation job at night and/or compares the results. Or maybe not. We're not that far with understanding the brain.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
First of all your ancedotal testimony from your 19yo cousin is worthless in the face of this argument, its 2nd hand info and we have not heard form your cousin himself, so that point is dead
EVERYTHING is anecdotal testimony. --Everything except what you experience directly for yourself. EVERYTHING you see on the web, on TV, in books, in newspapers, EVERYTHING is somebody else telling you or showing you something which you didn't see or hear directly for yourself. You have to listen to the claims and judge for yourself what you will allow into your mind to be labeled as 'knowledge'. So saying that the poster's story about his cousin is 'dead' simply because it is anecdotal, is silly. In reality, it's just another piece of information which we each have to measure personally and decide what to do with. I happen to know several people who went through the military process, and I've seen exactly the reaction described by this anecdote. I've also seen the complete opposite reaction; people who went in with false beliefs kindled by propaganda, and who came out again huge cynics of everything government. From that perspective, I find the poster's anecdote believable but all I can do is add it to the "Fool" pile. I'll tabulate later which pile is higher.
Mr Barrack Obama who incidentally is a Muslim
'Muslim' is a belief system. Not a genetic trait. That means you get to pick.
--I was taken to a Christian church in my childhood and my parents are both Christians. Does that make me a Christian? Heck no. I get to believe whatever I want. So do you really truly believe that Obama is a Muslim who follows the teachings of the Koran with the same idiot fervor that makes Christians following their doctrines into Christians? Are you saying that Obama was like, an undercover Muslim secret agent in his Christian church for twenty years?
Obama scares me because he's religious and calls himself a Christian; ALL religious people, no matter which stripe they claim, are retarded on some level. I distrust Christians as much as I distrust Muslims. They're equally capable of putting their brains on hold to do extremely dangerous things en mass. But the claim that Obama is a Muslim is just plain silly, and it comes from people who fear Obama for one reason or another and who are trying to justify that fear by trying to come up with as many irrational 'facts' as they possibly can. That's just lame, dude.
I also read through the anti-Chomsky stuff and even put some stock in it for a while, but that didn't stop me from continuing to read and think and collect knowledge, and eventually I realized that the anti-Chomsky stuff was deliberate garbage designed by the kind of people who have something to lose from his candor. How many prominent Jews speak out against the Israeli government and the crimes taking place in Palestine? Sheesh. --Chomsky certainly doesn't know everything, but he's certainly a wiser and better educated man than you or me. And he's a man of positive intent who opposes fear and selfishness. That counts for a lot. So if you have problems with him, my guess is that they are either based on false info, or that you are an asshole with something to lose.
And finally. . . Your claim that WMD's were found in Iraq is not supported at all by the article you linked to, and that's a right-wing blog site no less! A more complete version of the story on that yellow cake can be found here. The UN knew about that yellow cake before the current war and knew it dated back to when Saddam was trying to build a nuclear facility. That facility was bombed by the Israelis and the remaining yellow cake had been sitting in storage doing nothing since then. The UN weapons sanctions against Iraq were upheld and that yellow cake was not being used to make WMD's.
Yellow cake, it should be pointed out, is just dirt with Uranium oxide in it. You can't even make a dirty bomb with the stuff. It needs full refin
I suspect what you meant to say is that your money is on self-delusional behaviors, such as religion, groupthink, dogmatism, fanaticism, etc. Cognitive dissonance is what then happens when reality comes knocking at the door of this fantasy world. Unfortunately, all too often the doorbell goes unanswered or ignored. That's pretty much to what these studies refer: people choosing to maintain a self-delusion rather than answer the door and be faced with uncertainties.
My understanding of cognitive dissonance and the mental process of seeking cognitive harmony is that it is mostly a subliminal process - we are not aware we are doing it. If we had to consciously reconcile every cognitive dissonance I think you'd get mentally overwhelmed constantly. To get past it you need to be aware you are doing it, it be willing to examine why you think what you think, and then be able and willing to examine and change your bias. That is a lot of work and self examination.
Or maybe it's because white labcoats are cheaper than celebrities. People know that getting someone in a labcoat with a clipboard (and even glasses) or someone who graduated from Harvard to endorse your product or promote your legislation is easy. Wearing a labcoat or graduating from Harvard doesn't make a person smarter or better than anyone else. But Harrison Ford and Britney Spears have at least accomplished something, even if it's unrelated to the topic at hand. And being celebrities, they have less incentive to lie to you and damage their name. That doesn't explain the foolish behavior, beliefs, and endorsements by celebrities from Charlie Sheen to Charlton Heston. The simple explantion for that is that celebrities are mostly morons.
And most of the time it's okay to understand something well enough for all practical purposes, rather than perfectly. We may not perfectly understand gravity, but apples still reliably fall from trees.
An old story that illustrates this, uh, well enough for all practical purposes ;)
===========
All the boys and girls in a high school are arranged on opposite sides of a gym. This question is posed to a mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer:
If the boys and the girls decrease the distance between them by 1/2 every 20 seconds, how long will it be until they meet?
The mathematician recognizes the rule of halves and says, "They will meet in an infinite amount of time."
The physicist says, "There's no such thing as infinite time... they will never meet."
The engineer says, "Well, in about 5 minutes they'll be close enough for all practical purposes."
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
- In this hypothetical debate, I obviously did not change this democratic-socialist's mind. Due to cognitive dissonance he simply chose to not hear what I was saying to him.
Or, perhaps confronted with a person who wasn't distinguishing taxation from theft, or private vehicles from public goods, he simply backed away slowly and left.
Or, perhaps noticing he seemed to be constructed from straw (free car for everybody?), he realized he was a foil in a hypothetical argument and also decided to exit.
Tweet, tweet.
We've been doing it for generations, and it doesn't appear to be improving. Attempts to reason and produce facts are dismissed as "one more attempt" by the vast [LEFT|RIGHT] wing conspiracy to cover up what's "really" going on. Sometimes plain old stupidity is just plain old stupidity, but we tend to paint stupidity as some proof of the malicious conspiratorial behavior we like to see around every corner. In short - the comfort of opinion, without the discomfort of thought.
Well, there are studies about your arguments, and they show that:
1. Direct democracy leads to better decisions; it has been statistically proven on budget spending both in U.S. and Switzerland. So it works better even in the US, which has (especially on local and state level) one of the best democratic systems in the world (maybe you are American, so it sounds strange to you, but from (my) foreigner's perspective it's very much true).
2. It also has been shown that the commitment and political education of population is the consequence of political system, not the other way around. To wait until these conditions are satisfied is just silly. Also, modern concepts of direct democracy are being used in practice for almost 100 years in both U.S. and Switzerland, and I highly doubt that people in 1908 had better education or more free time than we have now.
If you want references for these studies, read the book at http://democracy-international.org/book-direct-democracy.html
so what do you call an eternal, unexplained and uncomprehensible and unchangeable truth ?
Just a question.
Ah so you're a construcivist ? Any mathematical concept that you can't construct doesn't exist. And therefore any negative proof must provide an example where the theory to be disproven falls down.
There is one problem with the constructivist approach : you can't construct real numbers. Oops ... So you'd never get anywhere near a physical theory with a constructivist approach, never mind a theory with singularities.
If you're not a constructivist then one can simply point out wikipedia's ZFC page, which clearly spells out the problems : any theory that includes numbers is either wrong, or unproveable.
Therefore for the theory of relativity (and all physical theories, and all chemistry theories, and all ...) one of the following is true :
-> the theory is inconsistent (and therefore wrong)
-> the theory is unproveable
So belief in science, necessarily is "on faith", nothing more.
You forget that the same goes for religions. They survived 2000 years (well, islam was resurected after wwI from nothingness, after having been defeated by a gay turk, but most religions actually survived by themselves for a huge time).
That means that a lot of them didn't survive. A lot of those ideologies died (including the democracies of Rome and Athens btw). A lot of branches of them didn't survive, a lot of experiments in ideology failed. What remains is hardly random.
Therefore these survivors are, to say the least, special cases. That means that their structure is nowhere near random.
And therefore for those religions the same is true. Every Christian, buddhist, hindu, ... dogma
a) has very good reasons (for clearly it had a hand in preventing extermination of the ideology)
b) you don't bother to understand those reasons (we both know that's true for you)
The dogma's of religion are as much a product of natural selection as anything walking the earth, and are far from random.
Take Newton's model for example. It was dogmatic if you didn't bother to understand it. Then came Einstein. And now relativity is the dogmatic law. Until a better theory comes along.
You forget that einstein's gravity equations are a refinement of Newton's. I mean, just put the 2 equations next to eachother. Are you seriously going to claim they're really different ? There is ONE factor added, which is a VERY small departure from newton indeed.
Think of it what you will, if you believe in "rationality above all" then you are necessarily wrong.
If you "just accept it", you might be right. You can argue about the chances till the cows come home, and they're probably not good at all, but at least they're not 0. We're also very unlikely to find out what these chances are.
I actually thought critically about it. Tell me, what do you call an eternal, non-negotiable and absolute truth that cannot be explained in any way ?
Let's call it "bwerwasdwlh", so it doesn't sound like "dogma". Soviets called it "ideology" I believe. Mao called it the "green book". What's your fancy ?
If existence is meaningless why do you eat?
Yes, in the grand scheme of things, the 80 years you're here don't mean a damn thing... but we don't live in the grand scheme, we live in our bodies. So we will continue to do what it takes to get by in our own corner of reality.
There's nothing wrong with that, and there's nothing 'deep and mysterious' with the whole "It's all meaningless" nonsense. I understand it, but as a person who enjoys airconditioning, internet, and food, my meaning is to keep the world going.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
I love that... hope you don't mind if I use that to shut up some idiots in philosophy.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
What was once simple in 2k is now a bitch of a setup in Vista. Everything just changed. Usability wasnt increased, as it was just a "change cause I can do it".
Oh yes, XP started that but Vista has taken it to a whole new level.
The same kind of thing happens in KDE and Gnome and Mac OSX but not to anything like the same degree. Not that excuses "cange cause I can do it" elsewhere, of course. :p
Wonderfully put!
I think George Bernard Shaw said it best with his he quip -- "Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." For better or worse... everyone (in the US, anyway) has the right be stupid if they so choose.
Help yourself... I first heard it from my college Physics professor, in 1972 :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Of Course it's true, just look at the comments on Slashdot whenever the name "Bush" is mentioned.
Pavlov's dogs got nothing on the Slashdot crowd.
I had no idea that I was being so generic! (Nor did I intend to be.) Thanks for pointing it out.
Anyone with even the slightest life experience knows that when "fact" faces off against "treasured belief" the loser is virtually always "fact"... I suppose it would be useful to have this quantified in some way but it's hardly news. Be forced to spend an extended period of time in decision making with a heterogeneous group and it's not just obvious it's bloody torture.
For instance participate in a condo association and you get this over and over again: "You say you want A, but it has been proven that doing B will cause C and C will prevent/destroy/whatever A so you shouldn't vote to do B if you want A. Followed by them voting to do B and then later being surprised when they don't also get A."
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
That's why the Ruler of the Universe lives in a small shack on a remote planet with his cat. And the president of the galaxy is just a distraction.
1000 years of Millennial peace ruled by Jesus Christ - it's what Christians have been looking forward to for as long as Christians have been around. Unfortunately, it pretty much takes a God to have the self-control necessary to not be corrupted by that much power and the wisdom and knowledge to actually apply it well.
Government is hard, that's why we open source it. All of us have our failings, but if enough well-intentioned people get involved we usually come up with a decent result.
However put someone in a white coat (unless they're famous, of course) up as your representative and you get an immediate turn-off. ..unless it's one of those people who despises celebrities, yet will believe anything anyone in a white lab coat says without question. Or who will believe a conspiract theorist web site instantly without question. Etc. It's not just one set of beliefs--this type of person (aka a sheep) pervades society. The only thing they have in common is they are all enemies of freedom, willingly or unwillingly.
Maybe a bit offtopic, but am I high or is this one of the most intelligent and insightful comment discussions I've ever seen on Slashdot? OK i'm high but i'm serious. We endlessly bitch about what crap slashdot has become, then slashdot readers comment to this article... and totally redeem yourselves!!1
beer is on me
PS no i'm not new here. (ohh! burned!!!)
.. it was simply a QRS Player System making the piano play.....
Well so far at least, we human mice are still very much inside the universe, the piano. Even if the piano were a "player piano", someone still composed the music and cut the roll. Someone also built the piano.
Even if you do not accept the Bible as truth, or as God's message to mankind, you certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book. Actually it is a collection of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of at least 1500 years. Yet it has a very unified central authorship and message concerning the dealings of God with mankind. Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place. Some of this history, written in advance, is taking place right before our very eyes in our time. We can read the content of tomorrow's newspaper headlines in some of the passages of the Bible.
For thousands of years, all human writing had to be laboriously copied by hand. When the art of printing was finally invented in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed? Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects, by far, than any other? Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other? There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
In the King James Version of the Old Testament, the phrase "saith the LORD" occurs 802 times, according to my computer search program. Did God really say those things or are these 802 lies? In Genesis alone, the phrase "God said" occurs 28 times.
Why would a book so full of lies engender such huge human effort, generation after generation, over centuries of time? On the other hand, if God REALLY did communicate HIS truth in these writings, it would behoove us dinky little, arrogant human creatures to pay attention to what the Creator of the Universe is telling us.
All theory is gray
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well so far at least, we human mice are still very much inside the universe, the piano. Even if the piano were a "player piano", someone still composed the music and cut the roll. Someone also built the piano.
Now you're just abusing the analogy into the realm of silly. The Universe isn't a piano. You can say it looks designed all you want, but that doesn't make it so, nor does it look obviously designed to everyone. In fact, quite the opposite to quite a lot of people. Even if it was designed, unless you can somehow infer anything about the designer specifically from those designs, it's extreme arrogance to think that you got it right with YOUR god, as opposed to everyone else who got it wrong with their god(s).
Even if you do not accept the Bible as truth, or as God's message to mankind, you certainly should be able to consider that it is a very unusual book.
You got that right, it certainly is unusual. Tales of God-inspired genocide and rape, yet people look to it as a moral guide. Very unusual indeed.
Actually it is a collection of 66 books penned by 40 different writers over a time span of at least 1500 years. Yet it has a very unified central authorship and message concerning the dealings of God with mankind.
A book written by a bunch of people who all believe they have an imaginary friend that talks to them, yet no one else can hear or see this person and verify what was said, yet somehow it all manages to make sense together? Shocking I tell you! Also, did God get tired of inspiring people to write books? Who's writing the newest book of the Bible today? What about the Mormons? Why stop all the inspiration all of a sudden? Maybe the newest book of the Bible is titled "Timecube"...
Much of it depicts human history written down before it ever took place. Some of this history, written in advance, is taking place right before our very eyes in our time. We can read the content of tomorrow's newspaper headlines in some of the passages of the Bible.
Ok then, show me where in the Bible it says what's going to happen tomorrow? No? Then don't use silly exaggerations. Any prediction can be made to fit something, somewhere if it's vague enough. Then there's the phenomenon of always finding what you're looking for. Not to mention self-fulfilling prophecies.
For thousands of years, all human writing had to be laboriously copied by hand. When the art of printing was finally invented in 1439 by Johannes Gutenberg, guess which human writing was first printed?
The Bible was the first printed book? Guess that must make it all true! Or that the church controlled most of the world and quite a bit of money and printing Bibles as well as other church documents such as indulgences was quite lucrative.
Guess which human writing is distributed more widely than any other and translated into more languages and dialects, by far, than any other?
Guess that makes the Bible true! Or that the nature of the religion is to spread itself as far as possible, and has been one of the main controlling forces of civilization for quite a few centuries since the alternative was quite often death.
Guess which book its enemies have endeavored to destroy more than any other? There are many religious writings, but none of them come even remotely close to the content and distribution of this remarkable book.
Some people don't buy the bullshit, and may even want to actively fight back against what they see as quite an oppressive regime and ideology? No way! Also, I believe that the Muslims and quite a few other religious groups would differ in their opinions of your book.
In the King James Version of the Old Testament, the phrase "saith the LORD" occurs 802 times, according to my computer search program. Did God really say those things or are these 802 lies? In
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
Anyone that reads /. with any regularity knows /exactly/ how that works... Or rather.. they SHOULD. :)
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
...You can say it looks designed all you want, but that doesn't make it so...
If it looks like it is designed and acts as if it is ordered and controlled by immutable laws and complex information, it must be designed. You know if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck.....
(...Ok then, show me where in the Bible it says what's going to happen tomorrow? No?...)
How about Global Warming? I mean REAL nasty global warming!
Isa 30:26 And the moonlight shall be like the light of the sun. And the sun's light shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day of binding up, Jehovah binding the break of His people, and healing the wound of His blow.
Rev 16:8 And the fourth angel poured out his bowl onto the sun. And it was given to him to burn men with fire.
Rev 16:9 And men were burned with great heat. And they blasphemed the name of God, the One having authority over these plagues and they did not repent to give Him glory.
There are very specific prophecies, not at all vague, that the nation of Israeli would be re-born as a sovereign nation after there was none since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70AD and scattered the inhabitants all over the empire. Jesus predicted this destruction 38 years before it happened. In 1948, this is EXACTLY what happened and there is now a state of Israel. Also, as predicted, Jerusalem would once more be under sovereign Israeli control. That also happened, but only later, in 1967. The Jews never had sovereignty since before Jesus time. Furthermore, it was predicted that Jerusalem would be stumbling stone and rock of offense of all nations. What other city do you know of, where a zoning change threatens world peace? These are NOT self-fulfilling prophecies.
(..Why would the Mayans build huge temples for their gods if they weren't real? Or the Egyptians build enormous pyramids? ..)
These are all relics of the past, but the Bible is being translated and distributed actively today, more than *any* other writing.
(..caring about who we are and being proud of what we as humans have accomplished..)
Accomplished the building of destructive power such as the world has never seen before? Jesus predicts that this destruction ability of mankind would lead to extinction of all life, if God did not personally intervene at the last moment. Accomplished the destruction of marriage and the home? The trampling of women underfoot by Muslims and some of the organized church is something to be proud of? Can we be proud as a race that the whole planet is being polluted and poisoned by our selfish greed? We did not make this world. It is NOT ours. One of these days the Landlord is going to come back to His property and He will NOT be happy.
Is it not instructive to you that advanced beings from other parts of the universe have been careful NOT to make contact with us humans? Is that why all our SETI efforts have been in vain?
Even in our very imaginative and fun to watch science fiction, we export our warlike and greedy nature to galaxies far far away. Death and destruction is still very much a part of what we imagine the far future to be. Is it not instructive to you that the ONE advanced being, Jesus Christ, sent from God was hated and murdered by man? Do you really think that eternal advanced intelligences would share technology with us that is so superior to what we even can imagine, we call it supernatural? How did Jesus control the weather or conquer death?
Right now, we humans are in such a sad shape that death is actually a blessing. If death would not remove evil despots and governments, would our planet not already be more of a hell than it already is?
How about telling me what we have to be so proud of?
Here is a very much contrasting vision of the far distant future you may read about in the last part of the Bible.
(Rev 21:3) And I heard a great voice out of Heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they will be His peopl
All theory is gray
I've seen Harvard play football, I'm not to worried about them fielding an Army...
One more thing.
The community DOES have a right to determine what is right for their children, by refusing to allow them to take it home.
What they DONT have a right to do is determine what is right for someone else's children within that community.
You are NOT my kid's parents, I AM, and how dare you try to remove a book from the shelves which I might find valuable.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
It is obvious that frequently ideology trumps facts. Critical case in point: The Iraq War. Obama, McClatchy News and myself thought the reasons for the Iraq War were bogus from he start.NOne of use are genius but used simple math (1+1=2) to come to our conclusions. The Media and most of the electorate had not recovered from 9/11 and this emotional component was used to boldly manipulate the "facts" during the run up to the war but the Bush White House. Ideology trumped facts. Big Time. Now the emotion of the economy is going to be the factor in this election. Who would have guessed that even 6 months ago the economy would take center stage and out shine even this historic election. Right now as we write the Congress is locked in battle. The Bush Republicans, like always, want to rush off and fix things with little process or negotiation. They are either too fast (Iraq) or too slow (Katrina) on fixing things. It needs to be done right and who cares if John McCain (attempting to act like a leader) doesn't go to the Debates tonight? Anyone?
You're missing the point of Definition. Definitions don't have to be proved, they are a starting point to create the rules with are used to define things.
No theory is provable. We can only show that a theory is incomplete: GR and QM, which makes doesn't necessarily make it wrong, but limits the scope of the theory. We can show that a theory doesn't work at all: Autodynamics and Electric Universe. by simple measurements.
Of course in your world, measurements don't count because they can't be made objectively, and real numbers don't exist, because they're a faith based construct.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
When you have two contradictory ideas in your model, one has to give. With humans, though, if one idea is too important to let go, something else has to give.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
While I think "cognitive dissonance" is the answer, I think the conflict is between social status and individual knowledge, and that social status must always trump because it's the language we have to speak to survive in a civilization. Therefore, cognitive dissonance is people creating their own worlds to compensate for what hasn't happened in real life, and they pick a political platform to justify their failure.
While I am not a conservative, I am anti-liberal, and to my mind the greatest stronghold of cognitive dissonance is liberalism, or "revenge against nature" as Nietzsche called it.
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.