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Elon Musk's 'Scientific Method' (rollingstone.com)
From a new wide-ranging interview of Elon Musk: An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it -- even when confronted with facts to the contrary. "It's very unscientific," Musk says. "There's this thing called physics, which is this scientific method that's really quite effective for figuring out the truth." The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here's how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
1. Ask a question.
2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.
3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.
4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability?
5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you're probably right, but you're not certainly right.
>> 5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion.
#5's "refutation" seems to diminish with wealth and power. Ask anyone done in by a chorus of "yes men" afraid to challenge their meal ticket...
People need to get from point A to B.
Lots of people. Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested.
They need to traverse the space between.
Ground level is at a premium.
Above ground is too visible for peopleâ(TM)s tastes.
Air requires a lot of coordination.
So go below ground?
Yeah, that really isn't the scientific method.
"Attempt to disprove the conclusion."
This seems to be running fast and loose with the requirements of experimentation. One really needs to prove a hypothesis otherwise the effort is somewhat incomplete. I can't disprove God exists, but to make the assumption that the entity does exist for this reason is lazy and dishonest.
What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probabilities of truths would lead someone to conclude that anyone was talking about "drilling" tunnels without government permission?
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âEureka!â(TM), but
Get billions of dollars in taxpayer funded subsidies for something that nobody in their right mind would invest their own money in.
Corporations are evil and selfish, except when they sell energy (but only the good kind) and have handsome CEOs. Then they're altruistic and should always be taken at their word and never questioned. Except when they're discriminating against female engineers, during a horrible talent shortage, who they would get away with paying less while receiving the same work if they wanted to hire them (which they don't). Also they're selfish and only motivated by money. Except when they're not.
Did I get everything?
Who, among Slashdot's esteemed editorial board, decided, the publication's audience needs a refresher on what scientific method is?
And who, subsequently, chose the Rolling Stone — whoever it is they are interviewing — as the best fount of this illumination?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
inefficient and congested.
I see railroad tracks all over.rarely see trains, maybe a few per day (~1 every 6 hours). I've read a number of papers and studies addressing just this. Solutions are rather involved and expensive, but not more so than digging underground tunnels,
More like:
1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.
But there is one thing people can try to develop and inculcate, as they rise in the hierarchy. Try to find the subordinates who disagree with you, and try not to punish them for it and try to develop an atmosphere your subordinates feel comfortable in challenging you, seriously, even after they know what you deeply believe. If enough counter arguments flow into your thought process and mind set you are less likely to be led down the garden path by a bunch of yes men, sycophants brown nosing their way up the ladder.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
@orlanz: "People need to get from point A to B."
Goods and services need to get from A to B. Given the cost on the environment, moving people from A to B is something we're going to look on as a a luxury.
You sound just like those feminists who say science is a white male conspiracy to keep oppressed people down.
Congratulations on that impressive stretch; pulling gender & race from all the way in left field.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
This makes no sense whatsoever, your trolling brings dishonor to Mother Russia. Report to the gulag for reeducation, comrade.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Is this nonsense supposed to represent something intelligible? Your trolling is so bad I can't even tell what you're trying to do. Are you trying to troll right wingers, or left wingers, or are you doing one of those trolls where you act like an idiot so people correct you?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
We use "scientific consensus" now.
1. Ask a question.
2. Find a group of people who give the answer you want.
3. Misconstrue their statements to remove nuance and ambiguity
4. Package them all together into a "meta study"
5. Tell everyone "the science is settled".
More like:
1. Decide the answer you want.
2. Ask a leading question.
3. Find a comfortable echo chamber that gives you the answer you want.
4. Don't look at sources. If you do by accident, ignore their validity and nuance.
5. Shout "fake news" if you accidentally see facts that challenge your pre-decided views, especially when unedited and with all relevant context included.
Wrong on both. Scientific consensus is not science. Any scientist will tell you that.
Science proposes hypotheses and then proceeds to test them with experiments, observations, and analyses. A consensus, if any, occurs after such studies produce consistent conclusions. But the consensus is not the science. It is the collective opinion on the current state of knowledge.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
government oversight
I bet you miss the good old days, huh?
Yeah, right.
You forgot 'take massive quantities of hallucinogenic drugs'.
You find it mostly in post modern literary criticism. I'm not dissing feminists though. It just felt like it would hit the stupid anti-science troll harder if his shit was compared to something feminists say. Personally, barring the TERFs I've got nothing against feminists.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Are you trying to troll right wingers, or left wingers
I'm trolling retarded ideologues who can only view politics through Euclidean spacial metaphors. Is it working?
Thanks! Anti science types piss me off. As this was obviously a right wing, climate change denying anti-science type troll, I thought the gender and race bit would add insult to injury. That's the thing with tribalists, they really hate being compared to the other tribe.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Perfect response to the tunnel nonsense thanks.
Would trains not be the 'perfect' place to automate nearly the whole process? Seems like there are pretty well defined paths and controls at every stage of the operation already. Compared to roads, rails seem super defined and 'easy' for robotic expert systems to handle.
I wonder how high we could get the rail utilization if it was all RoboTrains
What bizarre set of questions, axioms and probability of truths would lead someone to conclude that drilling lots of tunnels without governmental oversight under major metropolitan areas is something that will reduce traffic, be good for the environment, etc?.
He's not building a tunnel that will leave his property, I'm nearly 100% sure of this.
This is another "Glomar Explorer" cover story (we are planning to mine the sea floor) for some black project that some three lettered organization realizes cannot be hidden from view. The Glomar Explorer really was built and used to raise a Russian nuclear sub. The tunnel to the airport story is to explain why some big holes are being dug on Space-X property. It's a cover story...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Sucks when you open that door eh?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Non sequitur. The fact that current modes of travel are congested does not prove that people need to get from A to B:
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.
Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
He has rigor, peer review, refutational intent, and falsification or confirmation (i.e. proof of falsehood but never proof of truth). It's better than most people. And he is correct about most people's tendency to not change their thinking. The firmly a belief is held, the more one tends to accept all new information as it fits in with the existing belief... often snowballing one's confidence in a falsehood.
The scientific method will become outdated only when another method is discovered that does a better job of capturing our knowledge of the natural world in a useful way. I'm not holding my breath for that to happen.
While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.
There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I will question the validity of the statement "Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested". Consider these modes that exist today:
/congesting/ and the other modes are affected by said congestion. Get more people out of their cars and Musk's Boring Company disappears in a puff logic.
- Walking, Bicycling (Transportation on demand, short distance, lowest cost)
- Bus, Bus Rapid Transit (Transportation by schedule along fixed routes, short to medium distance, low cost per person)
- Commuter Rail, Passenger Rail (Transportation by schedule along fixed routes, medium to long distance, medium cost per person)
- Carpool, Vanpool (Transportation by negotiated and variable routes and schedules, short to long distance, variable cost based on people per vehicle)
- Driving alone (Transportation on demand, short to long distance, high cost per person)
The only thing that's truly congested are roads/freeways (from personal automobiles) and rail lines (from freight and passenger/commuter rail having to share the same rails). Getting more people on buses for shorter trips would ease congestion on the roads which would make bus trips more convenient. Rail could be expanded to get passenger/commuter services off of freight lines, but as evidenced in California, the second you say you're going to build rail, speculators come buy up land and wait for their paydays.
Thus, current modes are not inefficient and congested. One particular mode (driving alone) is
No, because trains are open-air, i.e., not in a vacuum, which is required to produce the pneumatic tube effect. That leads us back to orlanz's response, where we decide that above-ground pneumatic tubes are undesirable. I would offer that they're undesirable not only because they're unsightly but also because they take up space and will cause other kinds of pollution (light, sound, air, etc). Not to mention logistics of terrorism prevention... it's far better that a bomb on the Hyperloop go off underground than above (not that we want it to go off at all).
I agree with your other points though. Remember that we got here because Edison's electric company replaced Rockefeller's kerosene lamps, and Ford's automobile started to replace Rockefeller's trains. At the time there was a plan to connect all of America via passenger trolleys; you could ride from LA to NY, even though it would take you a couple weeks or so. So Rockefeller got Ford to replace his clean burning ethanol fuel with Rockefeller's own kerosene waste product: gasoline, and the nationwide trolley system was scrapped in favor of a highway system for cars. Now we're coming full circle with an electric powered train that can take passengers from LA to NY, in minutes not days.
The tunnel is hardly nonsense. Apart from passenger trains, it will become an effective way to move shipping containers and other large items quickly. Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way. We could also reduce the number of trucks on the road by shipping their contents via pneumatic tube.
There aren't a lot of trains in action because of several reasons. Not all goods that need to be shipped, or people waiting to receive them, can wait the duration of a cross-country train trip. Trains also need a lot more buffering to manage traffic, as they need more time/space to speed up and slow down. The system simply can't accommodate the level of traffic that an invention like the Hyperloop would fill.
The converse of that is when they apply 'arts' to something that shouldn't. I saw a dental office offering 'Dental Arts'. Really? Who wants somebody to do a Francis Bacon inside of their mouth?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I was just talking to a few union folks (bus drivers and truck drivers) the other day about the fears they have with the driver-less vehicle revolution. In every case, their first reaction was that "the automation must be stopped"! As soon as I argued that there's just no historical case of people successfully putting those genies back into bottles once new technologies emerge, they quieted down and seemed to listen.
The thing is? I don't have any definite solutions for all the disruptive job loss it will create. But I do know that trying to fight the future is a losing strategy.
The worst case scenarios around all of this stuff seem to hinge on a few big corporations owning the entire thing, though. People don't want to live in a future where "Megacorp, Inc" owns every single self-driving car or truck and now collects 100% of all additional profits to be made by eliminating human labor as a cost of doing business.
Perhaps one way to prevent that is by passing legislation that says any business that operates with automation completely replacing human labor as part of the business model MUST be treated as a co-op? If a trucking company uses all driver-less trucks, require it be structured so each business wishing to use its services does so by buying into it with a fraction of ownership.
It may not stop the truck drivers from losing their jobs driving trucks ... but at least it ensures the extra wealth generated by taking human employees out of the equation gets spread around - benefiting dozens, hundreds or even thousands of businesses who use the services. That, in turn, means greater opportunities for a variety of other new jobs to pop up.
"Enough that current modes of transit are inefficient and congested."
You obviously do not live in the LA Metro area or Inland Empire. The Metrolink trains are very under-utilized. Every time I see one pass, I can usually count on one hand the amount of heads I see in 5 train cars total.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Really smart people are much better at rationalizing.
It's partially a problem that they are right a lot. Over 80%- maybe over 90%. When they are wrong- they just can't see it.
It sounds like Musk actively tries to avoid this. Good for him.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Well, I don't know who did it but I suspect they may have applied the pseudo-scientific method the article outlines to decide that it was a good idea.
Well, computer controlled cars promise to pack (platooning) a lot more on existing roads alleviating the need to build new roads and to eliminate stoplights as packets of vehicles can be timed at intersections to miss each other.
Outdated should have been inconvenient. Today's researchers survive by getting funding and they tend to get funding from groups with a preconceived agenda. The scientific method tends to conflict with those agendas frequently. As long as people are involved there will be deception
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
No, I was thinking near downtown seattle next to the costco.
I know you're trying to be clever, but regardless of how he gets there, he seems to make it to Step 6 more often than most of the other assholes who usually just do steps 1-5 and float away on their golden parachute.
Last I heard, it's actually mining the seafloor now, or at least exploring.
Science must fall
What Musk said is a pretty accurate sound bite method.
It takes a lot of words to actually lay out the scientific method. No one would have quoted the text below if Musk had taken the time to say them...
From school for dragons...
Home > How to Train Your Dragon > The Scientific Method > Scientific Method Steps
Scientific Method Steps
The âscientific methodâ(TM) merely refers to a broad framework for studying and learning more about the world around us in a scientific manner. It is not so much a series of absolute, unchangeable steps as a guideline to the method that must be used when trying to reach a scientifically acceptable theory about a subject matter. Therefore, it is not possible to provide a finite number of steps or an exact procedure for following the scientific method. However, the scientific method steps detailed below describe the main steps that scientists commonly take when conducting a scientific inquiry.
Steps of the Scientific Method
Make an Observation
Scientists are naturally curious about the world. While many people may pass by a curious phenomenon without sparing much thought for it, a scientific mind will take note of it as something worth further thought and investigation.
Form a Question
After making an interesting observation, a scientific mind itches to find out more about it. This is in fact a natural phenomenon. If you have ever wondered why or how something occurs, you have been listening to the scientist in you. In the scientific method, a question converts general wonder and interest to a channelled line of thinking and inquiry.
Form a Hypothesis
A hypothesis is an informed guess as to the possible answer of the question. The hypothesis may be formed as soon as the question is posed, or it may require a great deal of background research and inquiry. The purpose of the hypothesis is not to arrive at the perfect answer to the question but to provide a direction to further scientific investigation.
Conduct an Experiment
Once a hypothesis has been formed, it must be tested. This is done by conducting a carefully designed and controlled experiment. The experiment is one of the most important steps in the scientific method, as it is used to prove a hypothesis right or wrong, and to formulate scientific theories. In order to be accepted as scientific proof for a theory, an experiment must meet certain conditions â" it must be controlled, i.e. it must test a single variable by keeping all other variables under control. The experiment must also be reproducible so that it can be tested for errors.
Analyse the Data and Draw a Conclusion
As the experiment is conducted, it is important to note down the results. In any experiment, it is necessary to conduct several trials to ensure that the results are constant. The experimenter then analyses all the data and uses it to draw a conclusion regarding the strength of the hypothesis. If the data proves the hypothesis correct, the original question is answered. On the other hand, if the data disproves the hypothesis, the scientific inquiry continues by doing research to form a new hypothesis and then conducting an experiment to test it. This process goes on until a hypothesis can be proven correct by a scientific experiment.
The whole process is collaborative and is conducted in a clearly documented manner to help other scientists who are doing research in the same field. Throughout history, there are instances where scientists have stopped their research before completing all the steps of the scientific method, only to have the inquiry taken up and solved by another scientist interested in answering the same question.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Even tunnels without the vacuum are expensive. Although real estate in our most congested urban areas is equally expensive. Once you get out into open country subways don't make sense anymore. Doesn't matter what the underlying tech is.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
[citation needed] Did Elon learn anything from his BA in physics? There's this thing already called the scientific method that you're supposed to learn. Now he'll get credited with inventing that, like Al Gore did for inventing the internet. The interwebs are definitely living in a post-fact bubble.
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Bus routes are NEVER convenient. They become LESS convenient the more crowded they become. Have you actually ridden a bus ever in your life? They're all the same. Doesn't matter if it's Moscow, Madrid, or Peoria.
Busses are so bad that you can fight the traffic and still come out ahead.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
thejeffwhite claimed:
Currently, shipping goods to and from Hawaii on those Matson freighters takes a month each way.
You're talking through your hat.
In 1965, I traveled from L.A. to Honolulu on the Matson liner Lurline. It took 5 days.
If you're talking about the amount of time it takes for a given container to be offloaded from a freighter, cleared through customs, loaded onto a semi (or a train), and driven through the gates of the port facility, in addition to travel time from Hawaii to the West Coast, you're still probably wrong. (It depends on a bunch of things, including customs clearance.) If you're talking about strictly domestic goods - pineapples, say, or Kona coffee - you're definitely wrong, because those shipments aren't subject to customs inspection.
Your larger point - the use of "hyperloop" technology as a replacement for trans-oceanic surface shipment being somehow feasible, in addition to its use for transcontinental cargo transportation is also contra-factual. There are these things called "spreading zones" in both the mid-Atlantic and mid-Pacific oceans where crustal plates are separating. The magma from the mantle is quite close to the seafloor in these zones (which stretch north and south for thousands of miles) - far too close to make a hyperloop-style, airtight tunnel either practical or safe. In addition, particularly in the Pacific, there are both strike-slip and thrust faults that will cause the crust to shear catastrophically (which would neatly and disastrously sever an airtight tunnel in the process) and unpredictably, within no more than a few decades. That makes the risk to a hyperloop transportation system uninsurably high.
Such faults exist within continental borders, as well, but they largely can be avoided, with proper planning. It's still going to be problematic, for a variety of reasons, however, including acquistion of rights of passage across vast stretches of privately-owned, and city-, county-, and state-owned property to name only the first of them. (Slant-drilling precedents aside, you've got to know that lawyers are going to line up in brigades to sue over the issue, because profit. To them.)
I'm actually a fan of Elon. Tesla has thus far both proven the car-guy doomsayers wrong and sparked the general conversion of automobile manufacturing to electric vehicles that appears to be inevitable now. That's a Good Thing for everyone except fossil fuel shills. And SpaceX has completely upset the defense-contractor monopoly on launch vehicles, sparked a whole wave of private industry competition in the space launch sector, and breathed incredible new life into the prospect of large-scale space colonization and industrialization in the relatively-near future. For those things alone, future-oriented thinkers already owe him an enormous debt of gratitude - and he's clearly not even close to done, yet.
But what he's dubbed "hyperloop" technology faces geotectical, legal, financing, and insurance barriers (not to mention regulatory ones) of daunting dimensions. In fact, I'm certain that those considerations are why Elon has wisely decided to let someone else tackle actually implementing the conceptual technology he proposed.
Boring tunnels, by contrast, is a task area that's already pretty firmly taped down in all of those respects - and has been for donkey's years. Revisiting the technology involved, however, is still squarely within the wheelhouse of an innovator like Elon, and I applaud his efforts there ...
(Posting as AC so as not to undo existing upmods.)
--
Check out my novel ...
Yes, like a timeshare!
If you don't eat, your job performance will suffer, so yes, eating is pretty much required for most people's jobs.
I see, the only way to get to a store is to drive there.
There was a time long ago before cities started deciding that you can't live next door to a corner store, when you could easily buy a gallon of milk without carrying any form of government ID. But if you tried that today, you could be cited for driving without a license.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
While there is surely a better approach than the scientific method, as it seems to converge on a better answer only by luck, I'm not holding my breath either.
Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...' -- Isaac Asimov
There is a more practical problem that needs to be fixed, though: since no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results form other teams, there are fields where more than half of published results are wrong (sometimes just falsified to keep up a quota, as in biochem). That's not a problem with the scientific method, but it's a real problem in modern science.
I don't think it's fair to say that "no one is focused on trying to replicate or disprove ordinary results". First of all, many studies overlap with others, so some repetition of investigations does occur, and rightly. Second, it would not be wise for a scientist to submit a proposal to a granting agency that calls for an exact repetition of someone else's study. Rather, it would be better to spend money and effort trying to find whether the same conclusions hold if a different approach is taken, or better experimental techniques or instruments are developed and employed. And finally, publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Am I the only one who find's Musk's version of scientism worryingly naive?
Musk says other folks "engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and aren't doing." But then in advocating for his version of the scientific method, he repeats these same errors. He talks about "truth", "probability", "axioms", "correctness", "objectivity", and what's "right," sliding casually between epistemology, naturalism, metaphysics, and ethics, but without pausing to define terms, examine what is given and what has presupposed, or consider the counterarguments those presuppositions have already silenced... surely a case of wishful thinking.
Musk identifies AI as the "biggest threat that humanity faces this century," AI is a product of "the scientific method" he advocates. So how to reconcile the poison and the cure? Shouldn't folks like Musk cogitate on that with a bit more critical depth, before spouting stuff like "It's really helpful for figuring out the tricky things," which sounds like a page from Zuckerberg's playbook, before Russia and Fake News turned up and proved that the world is a lot more complex than that.
Maybe my sense of ire is raised because I've been spending time reading Alfred Whitehead's books (Science and the Modern World, The Concept of Nature, Process and Reality). Whitehead was the co-author with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, so a major figure in logic. His discussion of the narrow-band thinking that takes place under the name of the scientific method is almost 100 years old, but still just as damning. In Whitehead's view, inductive and axiomatic methods are specialist modes of thought, useful in certain parts of science, but easily prone to fallacies and dogmatism in wider discussions. To pull up a random quote:
"In its use of [methods of induction] natural science has shown a curious mixture of rationalism and irrationalism. Its prevalent tone of thought has been ardently rationalistic within its own borders, and dogmatically irrational beyond those borders. In practice such an attitude tends to become a dogmatic denial that there are any factors in the world not fully expressible in terms of its own primary notions devoid of further generalization. Such a denial is the self-denial of thought."
Here's hoping that industry figures like Zuckerberg and Musk find a way to up their game - I don't expect them to be Whitehead readers, but can we at least move away from disappointing and disingenuous dogma?
He's not building a tunnel that will leave his property, I'm nearly 100% sure of this.
Obviously you didn't read the article:
"We're interrupted by Teller, Musk's chief of staff, who informs him that as we were talking, the Hawthorne City Council ended an hours-long debate with a 4-to-1 vote allowing Musk to burrow his tunnel two miles into the city."
With the lag in publishing an article, he probably already has gone past the boundary of his property.
Enigma
Busses are so bad that you can fight the traffic and still come out ahead.
Are you talking about the experience on-board the bus? Or the elapsed time?
Because if the latter, there are several bus routes here in Vancouver, Canada that are faster than driving that same route.
"3. Demand lots of investor money.
4. Demand even more government money.
5. ?????"
Investors are not forced to fund any project.
The government isn't forced to fund any project.
5 ????? == lots of hard work, which who think socialism is a free ride don't understand.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
By coincidence, I just watched this a couple of days ago:
Feynman: 'Greek' versus 'Babylonian' mathematics
This excerpt is possibly from the 1964 Messenger Lecture series at Cornell University, collectively titled The Character of Physical Law.
"The method of starting with the axioms is not efficient."
AKA "axioms are overrated".
If a large vacuum tunnel suddenly ruptured the in rushing air would strike passengers with a force of 15 lbs/sqin. On an average person's chest that would be 6,000 lbs of force, crushing them.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it -- even when confronted with facts to the contrary. "It's very unscientific,"
Or maybe they're just not unbelievable pussies! “You know, I think I’ve come around to your way of seeing things,” the weakling said, reportedly reassessing his viewpoint to accommodate new information like an unbelievable pussy instead of doubling down on his previously held belief like a real man."
I see now. You were meta-trolling. Well done! Had me confused for a while, though.
I always find it ironic when scientists say they don't believe there is a God when there is an overwhelming amount of evidence from physics that there is one.
Yes, regularly, and commuter train as well. With light rail coming soon-ish.
Nice double decker buses and comfortable train carriages for all, however this is subsidised (50%) by local government property rates i.e. taxes.
And with better vehicles, dedicated bus lanes, quicker train schedules more and more people are using public transport.
Then again long term investment in such infrastructure is probably anathema to many readers here and I am just another dirty, filthy pinko thinking that cheap urban transport is a social good.
Not everyone gets a free car park where they work or can afford to run a car.
New Zealanders are well balanced with a chip on each shoulder. One represents Australia, the other the rest of the world
You think?!? +5 insightful right there bud.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah, but those guys were paid by big oil to do that.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Nope, you just sound retarded. Maybe practice at home before trying that stuff out in public. I'm sure you'll get the hang of it eventually.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
"Question Everything." -- Elon Musk
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
That's because LA's mass transit doesn't connect at all well. I have a job that until recently took TWO HOURS to drive to.
Mass transit, via Metrolink, would have gotten me 80% of the way there in only 1 hour.
The other 20%? a 1.5 hour bus ride followed by a ten minute train ride again.
And, as none of these were coordinated, each step needed at least 20 minutes between.
So my entire transit was something like three plus hours
Maybe you're just not there when the trains are? It typically takes a train all of 30 seconds to pass by. Do you really sit and stare at the tracks for 6 hours and keep count?
Maybe the tracks you DO manage to keep a constant eye on are not along major commuter corridors. In order for trains to be useful, they need to have endpoints at or near places people and things need to be. A lot of tracks (especially in urban areas) were build to support specific industries or functions that might no longer exist, or are used far less frequently.
If it's a particularly long length of track, then traffic might be restricted because trains can only run so close together, and two trains can't go in opposite directions on the same track at the same time unless there's room for a side track to let them pass each other.
(I'm sure you'll reply to this with some of these "papers and studies" you mentioned which probably say some very similar things...)
=Smidge=
You don't know the arguments, do you? You call yourself educated? The Enlightenment legacy can be seen all around us: individualism, international commerce and trade, moral cosmopolitanism, freedom of the press and a culture of publicity, technological modernity, the valorization of expertise, and on and on. All of these are bogeymen to the Left and they wish to free our society from their oppression.
The concept of "race" was birthed by the Enlightenment. Before that, there wasn't any racism, just Christians and heathens. But the white man came up with the idea there is "objective truth" and used it to oppress peoples of color. The Enlightenment's ontology, rooted in the new science of the 17th century, created a vision of human beings in nature which provided weapons to a new race-based ideology which would have been impossible without the Enlightenment.
The entire idea behind today's Left-wing thought is that there is no objective truth, only differing points of view, all equally valid. For example, there is no valid genetic basis for human intelligence, there are merely different kinds of intelligence. Native Americans do poorly at intelligence tests designed for whites, but excel at tests designed to measure storytelling intelligence. White supremacy as enabled by the Enlightenment is most commonly conceptualized as a way for lower-class whites to feel socially superior to people from other ethnic backgrounds. More important, though, white supremacy is a tried-and-tested means for upper class whites to grow their wealth and power. This thought is all over the place on the Left and I am astonished that you are not familiar with it.
Truth is a social construction, a function of the power and position - or lack thereof - of persons or groups in society. Not some white male-invented "science".
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
... obvious things now? Just because they are said by poster boys?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
This is some A+ level conspiracy bullshit right here. I mean, it's not original or anything, yes, I've heard it before.
This imaginary left you've invented sounds like a right frightful boogyman. You'll mostly find it in the minds of crazed right wingers rather than in objective reality. I challenge you to prove that this mindset is commonplace in any group of real, existing humans.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Unfortunately, that only works if we completely eliminate human drivers, which is going to be an *extremely* hard sell. For starters, we probably need to be approaching 100% adoption of fully autonomous vehicles before there's even a chance of banning human drivers.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's not imaginary - WTF? It's mainstream. It's everywhere. Reason is Eurocentric and has been used to dominate other people, so we must go away from reason in a more subjective direction.
Criticizing Enlightenment thought has become fashionable across the political spectrum. For the past several decades, more and more academics have called reason into question, especially the sort of rationalist worldview that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
This is especially true among left-leaning, postmodern, and post-structuralist thinkers.
An essay you need to read to be brought up to date: Exiting the Vampire Castle.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Academic philosophers have finally found a line they're willing to hold against the discipline's social justice contingent.
They hadn't reached the line yet when bloggers started brigading against conferences where only male invitees had accepted invitations.
They hadn't reached the line yet when critical theorists derided top programs as "hostile to women" while making excuses for covering up sexual harassment in purportedly more progressive departments.
They hadn't reached the line yet when the American Philosophical Association advised professors at the University of Colorado not to criticize feminist philosophy on campus or at off-campus department events. They hadn't reached the line yet when academic "advocates" cowed prominent philosophers into writing struggle-session apologies or including phrases like "I think I am a good ally" â" in papers about fundamental metaphysics.
But now Hypatia, a journal of feminist philosophy with explicitly activist goals, has seemingly disavowed a paper comparing claims about racial identity to claims about gender identity, and philosophers seem to have had enough.
http://quillette.com/2017/05/09/line-sand-academic-philosophy/
1.We have compelling reasons to accept the identity claims of transgender individuals.
Transracial identification is relevantly similar or analogous to transgender identification.
The reasons commonly given for not accepting transracial identification are either not compelling or not relevant.
From 1, 2, and 3, the balance of reasons compels us to accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.
If the balance of reasons compels us to accept something, we should accept it.
From 4 and 5, we should accept the identity claims of transracial individuals.
Trans-exclusionary positions are actually quite popular among the reigning generation of feminist philosophers, who often hew to Simone de Beauvoir's dictum that "gender is the social meaning of sex." Sally Haslanger, the most notorious feminist metaphysician and a leader of several online mobs in her own right, gives an account of gender that both explicitly analogizes it to race and seems to have trans-exclusionary implications. (Tuvel adapts her theory in one part of the paper.) One wonders why the purported opponents of power would attack a young assistant professor at a small school in Tennessee rather than the most prominent writer in the field and a fixture on the faculty at MIT. Tuvel's article does not just jeopardize someone's career, but entire industries.
The utter reasonableness of race self-identification highlights the insanity of gender self-identity and thus simultaneously destroys both the race industry and the gender industry. This is why the reaction was so strong, and why no argument may be permitted.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A bit as missed out, a very subtle bit. How much effort should be put into converting the question into understanding. For some low risk, non actionable question, consensus is enough, for higher risk actionable question, you should be more effort into generating an understanding. Think of it like, wanting to select the most tasty peanut from a bowl of peanuts, consensus is a particularly appearance will define better taste, logically it is not true, you would have to individually test each peanut in the bowl of peanuts to make the proper scientific choice, so the effort is not worth it. This versus climate change, choosing how to manage industry and environment, in that case the risk is enormous our survival and basing that on conjecture and consensus would be nuts, every possible scientific test imaginable should be carried out to ensure the right choice are made, to prevent more damage and to correct the damage that has already occurred.
Risk assessment is an important element in applying the scientific method because you only have so much time to make decisions and some require far more focus than others. So 1.5 Assess risk (you kind of have to do it early in order to effectively decide how much effort to put into the rest of the steps).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
> If we are trying something new how would we even have a probability of it being correct? Isn't that point of experimentation - to figure it out?
I've never tried knocking this computer off of this table. We can, however, make some reasonable predictions about what would likely happen based on some axioms:
Things knocked off tables tend to fall down
Tile floors are typically hard
Delicate electronics tend to break about 70% of the time.when they hit hard surfaces
Based on what we know, we can predict that there is about a 70% chance that this computer would break if I knocked it off this table.
Using other axioms, we can further say that we'll almost certainly break a computer if we knock 20 randomly chosen computers off of 20 randomly chosen tables.
That's why he said "gather all the evidence you can, develop axioms based on the evidence, then examine if the axioms are likely true, and how likely". That way, when you spend $20 million on an experiment you can use the experiment to test something that will probably work.
Glomar explorer was sold, converted to a Oil Drilling rig, used for about 15 years and scrapped.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There are plenty of "robot trains" already.
Some of the Paris Metro are, I believe in Toulouse all are, and in Bilbao I think they also are all robotic (not sure, a bit to long that I was there).
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes it does matter what the underlying tech is. Tech drives down costs.
Hamburgers aren't the only food available, and there are plenty of trees with food on them, and hunting and personal agriculture. All is one and one is all. The Elric brothers eat the ants on the island.
Are you talking about the experience on-board the bus? Or the elapsed time?
Both.
Because if the latter, there are several bus routes here in Vancouver, Canada that are faster than driving that same route.
They cannot be, since buses by definition must make stops at places other than stop signs and traffic lights. Each stop takes time. A car going the same route does not make those stops. Ergo, a car can go the same route faster than a bus. In terms of math: A +xB > A for all B,x > 0. For the bus to be faster it must make fewer than zero stops or the average stop time must be less than 0. Both are physically impossible. The best the bus can do is break even when there are 0 stops.
But you've forgotten to include the wait time for that bus before you can get on it. If a bus comes just once an hour, then on average you will spend 30 minutes waiting for the bus to come by. My commute to work is 10 minutes by car, going a shorter route and without stopping every block or so to pick up or disgorge passengers. My commute by car will always be faster than taking the bus. Even assuming the same route and zero wait time, I do not stop to pick people up or drop them off, so my commute will still always be faster by car.
In fact, it takes about three minutes to walk to the closest bus stop, and two minutes from the closest stop to work. The bus would have to make the same trip I make in my car in just five minutes instead of the ten it takes me for it to break even. To do that, the bus would have to average 60MPH on city streets, when I manage 30MPH.
"We're interrupted by Teller, Musk's chief of staff, who informs him that as we were talking,
It's a shame he changed jobs. He and Penn were very good together. Did he slip Musk a note or text him? But then, Penn was good by himself, back when he played Spicoli. Dude.
Your mistake is getting into LA and expecting to go anywhere quickly via vehicle.
Ever hear the song "Nobody Walks in L.A." or "Driving in the Metroplex" (John Mammoser parody of "Living in America"?)
If not, perhaps you should. They pretty much highlight why you aren't going anywhere in a vehicle in Los Angeles.
The 4 hour Dearly Departed tour is that long precisely because of traffic and parking restrictions in LA. You can walk the entire route in about an hour and a half.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
In Sydney Australia (population about 4 million) and in most of the major cities we do have bus lanes which predominately follow the major roads however normal drivers are banned from these lanes except in an emergency or turning left (we drive on the left-hand side) otherwise you risk a fine. In addition, some bus lanes have corridors which can bypass more potentially congested roads. So yes a bus can get to a particular destination faster than cars can even though it may have to stop every two to three kilometers to pick up and set down passengers.
We also have what is called transit lanes such as T2 (one or more passengers) and T3 (two or more passengers) which allows cars that meet the appropriate criteria to use at certain times of the day. In addition, we have clearways where no one is allowed to park at certain times of the day. It's not perfect but it does improve the traffic flow.
We also have a train system (underground through the city center) that is not as elaborate as cities like New York, London, Paris, etc but I have found that it is far cheaper, faster and less stress full than taking a car if I wish to travel to any major city centers.
Of course, we also have expressways and toll roads although it is very galling when you have had a toll free expressway for years and then the government decides to upgrade (debatable) it and then slap on a toll. Then they wonder why commuters bypass it by doing what is commonly called "rat running" which is a means of avoiding the toll road by driving through suburban streets.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Check the price tag on the F35 lately?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
And how well does it protect people and what new features does it have?
or vagrancy
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'll no doubt regret agreeing with Spun on anything, but he's right.
Science, and for that matter logic has been condemned as an instrument of the patriarchy for around 30 years now. It's a core tenet of Post-Modernism that logic itself is a tool of oppression to be discarded, and Post-Modernism devoured academic feminism decades ago. I read peer-reviewed papers (in philosophy) to this effect in the early 90s, and it's only become more mainstream in academia.
If you look at history serious science (not pseudo-science) has been at best tolerated and worst condemned usually with loss of life since science has a tendency to find out how things actually work in the real world. This, of course, makes many religions very uncomfortable since the God of the gaps is shrinking.
You only have to look at the Theory of Evolution (not to be confused with Abiogenesis ) and Astronomy which is not to be confused with the so-called psudo science of Astrology.
Even today you have smart (I am being polite here) people who deny the evidence preferring to believe some "old" books that were purportedly written by their deity of choice but strangely all have earthbound writers and publishers.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Yeah, but those guys were paid by big oil to do that.
You forgot about big tobacco and big pharma.
An interesting article on pot taxes has come to light which will upset many of the "holy than though" (sorry I find it pointless alluding to the "left' or "right"). Still, $85 million USD is not to be sneezed at especially when that money can be spent responsibly. Of course, I do think that the "don't drive when under the influence" rule still applies.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
Outdated should have been inconvenient. Today's researchers survive by getting funding and they tend to get funding from groups with a preconceived agenda. The scientific method tends to conflict with those agendas frequently. As long as people are involved there will be deception
Interesting article. Thanks for that.
It's very risky to pull a deception in science since peer review will eventually (if not immediately) pick this up and the people who were involved in the deception will be totally discredited. It is far more honest to put forward a hypothesis and present your findings with an appropriate methodology for peer review knowing that if your hypothesis is proven wrong then to gracefully admit and learn from it.
It is also possible that while a particular hypothesis may be wrong parts of it may have some valid points which can be expanded on or provide different trains of thought and can therefore still be used for valid citing purposes. In the case of the article, the person concerned was totally discredited and while it may have been possible that some of what he said had valid points why would any member of the Scientific and Engineering community believe him?
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
And the government is riddled with morons, especially in the modern day.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.
If it only looks a bit like a duck and swims like a duck, it might well be a young swan. But if it matches all three characteristics *strongly*, it's PROBABLY a duck. (But not certainly).
You did a great job of quoting just part of one of the three definitions Merriam Webster's gives for "axiom".
> If you have to assign a probability of truth to it, then it's not an axiom. You accept it or not, but you don't accept it with some probability.
I see you studied Socratic reasoning; there have been a few advances in the last 2,400 years. Over 99% of all email sent is spam. 99.99% of spam is identified and automatically filtered using reasoning like this:
Emails mentioning V1agra are spam with 98% likelihood .gov servers are spam with 7% likelihood (93% likely not spam)
Emails mentioning "win" or "free" are spam with 92% likelihood
Emails mentioning the name of the product you sell are only 1% likely to be spam
Emails from registered
Emails that make it to this filter in the first place are 30% likely to be spam
From those rules, one can calculate the total probability using something called Bayes formula. It's also called "Bayesian probability". With the formula, you can determine the probability if it includes both the word "free" AND the name of your product. It works rather well. It's used all over the place these days. When you log into a porn site, most sites do that calculation to see if you're likely to be using a stolen shared password or just guessing passwords to see if you get one that works. It's based on each part of your IP address (whether you're on the same IP or same network as the last few times that user logged in) , your browser and installed plugins, and other bits of data the server can detect.
An advanced application of this that is in the headlines lately is self-driving cars. The car doesn't know for sure that what it is seeing is a stop sign. It sees something reddish (might be a stop sign), it seems to be on the side of the road (might be a sign), seems to be about 8 feet tall (might be a sign), is roughly round or perhaps an octagon (could be a stop sign), has some whitish marks on it ...
It figures the thing is probably a stop sign if it has several characteristics strongly similar to stop signs, and few characteristics that are strongly different from stop signs.
Tech drives down costs.
Not when it is completely lacking in practicality.
My favorite part of the article (which also mentions Teller) is this one:
Seriously, that's like the backstory of a supervillain.
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âEureka!â(TM), but
Thought this was pretty funny -- I recently (re-) read "I Think You Must Be Joking", where Feynman described his problem-solving approach:
1. Write down problem
2. Think real hard
3. Write down solution
This is what the scientific method has been for the last couple hundred years. It most certainly doesn't "belong" to someone who's just pointing that out, as any teacher does.
In Sydney Australia (population about 4 million) and in most of the major cities we do have bus lanes
Thus not the same route. A special route for buses alone. Yes, if you don't follow the same route the bus can beat the car. If they go the same route, then the bus cannot beat the car.
Nah, I am not going to pollute my mind with garbage you recommend, After all, look what it's done to you. No thank!
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Jesus Christ you live in a fucked up fantaasy world. It's like you're trapped in the upside-down, where good is bad and left is right. I pity you but I fear nothing can be done, the rot's gone too deep.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Ah, I see you got modded to +5 for saying "scientists are smart". Truly brilliant insight, that.
Only by luck? I think that dismisses the training, creativity, and perseverance of scientists. Luck is helpful, but science would not progress unless a prepared mind can spot when it occurs. I think patience is more important.
A better system wouldn't require so much training, creativity, perseverance, prepared minds, patience, and luck.
Right now an important data point that can't be explained produces a vast array of hypotheses (sometimes a whole "ecosystem" or subfield devoted to such speculation, as is often the case in cosmology), all but one of which are discarded when new data eventually comes. Sure, that works, but a more efficient system certainly seems possible.
publication of bogus results can be a problem (more in some fields than others) but the self-correcting nature of the scientific method exposes and corrects the mistakes eventually.
Eventually is a long time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Well shit. That might not be as dumb as I thought. In fact I agree with the basic premise: identity politics is a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of oppressed people's liberation movements. It sounds a lot like situationist thought about the self-regenerating, all-co-opting nature of The Spectacle.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Tech drives down costs.
Not when it is completely lacking in practicality.
Practicality: assume an infinitely fast city bus. How much faster does it get from one side of the city to the other with a normally full complement of passengers embarking and disembarking?
If a town is 8 hours away driving time, it takes the same amount of time to drive as it does to fly and get door to door (getting thru security and dealing with additional ground transportation.
Hyperloops might be good as replacements for long distance buses and trains, but not inner city stuff, and even then, it's only going to/from one point in a town which requires taxis, busses, etc, and the density could be an issue if the route is popular.
Thus not the same route. A special route for buses alone. Yes, if you don't follow the same route the bus can beat the car. If they go the same route, then the bus cannot beat the car.
The original thesis made no mention of the route:
Busses are so bad that you can fight the traffic and still come out ahead.
Plainly not true in many cities with dedicated bus lanes. You can 'fight traffic' all you want at a snail's pace while the bus merrily zooms by right next to you in the bus / carpool lane.
Obviously with bus and a car sitting in the same gridlock the car is faster
This is highly ironic, given Elon musk's completely baseless claims that humanity is facing an existential risk from the threat of AI superintelligence. Literally all that we are building today, even using deep learning, amounts to nothing more than fancy statistical regression.
And you have the nerve to say blinkered stupidity and refusal to learn are right wing, and here you are doing the exact same thing. I suppose we all learned something today about being prejudiced.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
What? I was agreeing with you. Blinkered and stupid is most of humanity, political leaning has little to do with it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
for stoplights you're right. Some of the benefits of platooning can come gradually, though; as platoon-capable vehicles increase in number and find themselves in a group in the left-most lane, they can go ahead and start clustering, saving a few car lengths of empty space. Of course, until folks get used to it the later cars may get pulled over for tailgating :)