I haven't RTFA, but the instant question is: So what?
As long as a device solves a problem to the user, that's what the device should restrain itself to do.. General use PCs have proven to become virus/worms/problem infested in the hands of "normal" users..
There will always be general use pc's for those who are willing and have to skills to handle them responsibly..
I for one welcome this new era when tech support nightmares get reduced to a minimum..
What happens if an extremist pseudo-totalitarian government comes to power in America? What happens if all computer platforms become walled gardens by law, and that those walls are actually secure? If you were using an iPad right now, and certain things were actually illegal to say, would you trust the device?
I'm not saying this is immenant, but a survey of history, from Thucidides and the trials of the first democracy in Greece to the history of the last century should make us realize that we always have to fight to retain our liberties. Maintaining open and transparent computing is an important bulwark against those who would try to remove our freedoms.
So after eating, I need to scrape the veggie part of my plate into one bin and the meat side into another. You underestimate the sheer force of lazy in the general population. If it takes even the very tiniest amount of effort, and doesn't lead to a direct benefit for them personally, they won't do it. It's hard enough just getting people to turn off the lights downstairs before they go to bed.
Well, after eating you might not bother separating them if they are too mixed...you would just chuck them both. However, most of my vegetable scraps are produced before I eat. When I peal onions, the skins go in the compost bucket. When I peal bananas, the peals go in the bucket. When I skin a sweet potato, when I peal an orange, when I finish with coffee grounds, when vegetables go bad in the fridge, it all goes in the bucket. The immediate benefit to me is that my garbage doesn't stink as much. My garbage bags don't drip. And because my compost bin and my garbage bin are next to each other under the sink, the difference in labor is negligible.
Welcome to the world we live in. The common good, altruism and generally being the "good guys" are ideologies of generations before the ones currently - at least for the most part. Welcome to the world of no direct consequences, it's like living in the internet, but in real life.
Truth, beauty, and goodness are not mere ideologies.
I have a plastic bin in the garden into which I threw the remains of a dead bush years ago. It's still there, undecomposed. From this I conclude that there is actually some effort involved in composting and therefore most people (like myself) will be too lazy to do it properly. They'll just chuck it all in a big heap and wonder why it isn't magically transforming into fertiliser.
A bush...ummmmmm...no. If you want to compost wood, it needs to be sent to a larger facility, where it will be ground down into chips, and hot composted in a very large pile...our city does this. Eventually it will become part of nice soil, which can then be sold. The things I put in my composter are kitchen scraps (no meat, cheese, or fat), and dried leaves/shredded paper. Once it gets going. the food scraps are unrecognizable after a couple of weeks.
No, I'm not joking. In my neck of the woods the rat population swelled when bakcyard composting became popular.
It is a fair question. My composter is plastic and securely closed. There are no chew holes anywhere on the device, and I seriously doubt any rats are gaining direct nourishment from it. The only significant problem with animal life I experienced occurred when someone in my house put meat scraps into the composter, which you should NOT do. Some animal (possibly a coyote or raccoon) managed to pry the lid off to get inside. Other than that, I have not had an animal problem in seven years of composting.
The city sells the type of composter I use for a very reasonable price, and the use of these particular composters is strongly encouraged. I think this minimizes the rodent issues.
Come on, most american can't even dispose of their trash properly, asking them to compost would make their nose bleed.
That's what they said in my city. Then the city implemented an easy system, and most people, and I really mean most of them, now recycle habitually. Don't underestimate people. They might surprise you.
Absolutely, make it mandatory. Then when millions of compost heaps go neglected (because, by the way, composting correctly is a process and a lot of work), we'll be buried under rat-infested garbage heaps, spreading disease, stink and illness throughout the nation.
But, really, go ahead and make it mandatory. It'll give the toxic cleanup industry just the shot in the arm it needs.
Neglected compost becomes soil eventually. If proper compost bins are used, rats are not an issue. This article is referring to curb side food scraps collection, where the city collects the scraps and brings them to a large facility. I can promise you that such facilities will turn those scraps into compost quite quickly. They won't be "toxic".
I have been backyard composting for a while now. I put vegetable scraps in a small stainless steel bucket under my sink. When the bucket is full, I take it out (every four days or so) and dump it in the compost bin. My area also has curb side food scraps collection, which would be easy enough to use, but I prefer to compost myself, so that I can feed my garden each spring. Besides getting a nice garden, one of the main benefits has been that my garbage is much cleaner. In fact, besides a few bones, most of my garbage consists of unrecycleable plastic bags and containers. When I take my garbage out, it is a plastic bag full of plastic bags.
The main work consists of turning the compost outside every once in a while (which wouldn't be necessary for curb side collection), and in cleaning the compost bucket under the sink, which is easy since it is stainless steel. The garbage bin is less stinky, which is nice, and I don't get the drippy bags of garbage that I used to get when I put food scraps in the regular garbage. In other words, I have found composting to be relatively easy, and I suspect most people would have a similar experience once they got started.
The purpose of the group is to think through scientific solutions to existential problems that might be used to save humanity from such risks as asteroids hitting the earth or some other diabolical disaster.
...or perhaps Global Warming?
And the fact that I wonder whether or not this will be modded as flame bait or troll should be disturbing to all of us.
It's not that I think that I don't think that many of the light weight college degrees being handed out aren't a joke, because many of them are. I believe education should be rigorous, and to put it mildly, standards have dropped. However, I think it is a deep mistake to try to make all education the equivalent of job training. There is far more to life than making money. If we abolish, or significantly reduce the importance of the humanities in education, our entire society will become poorer in ways that are difficult to measure. I'm a physics guy, but I have found reading Homer, Gibbon, Plato and Aristotle immensely enriching. I don't read these things to make money. I read them because they are part of the shared history and culture of our society. They give me perspective on my own life and about our civilization. They inspire my curiously about the world. They help supply the "why" in regards to "what" I study.
If the republicans are this uncompromising and extreme in opposition, I shudder to imagine what they will do with real power. The extremism just seems to keep on ramping up in pitch.
New technology will not revolutionize the market - not unless it can be mass-produced at reasonable price.
There are countless energy technologies that are 'better' than what we have. But they meaning nothing to the economy and to consumers unless they come with a plan to manufacture them cheaply.
Yeah, or the patent could be bought by Exxon-Mobile or some other status quo company so they can sit on it or stifle its development. It has already done.
But why would being poorer at mental calculation be a bad thing now that we do have calculators? As long as all that brain power gets used usefully, that is, allocated to a higher level function, I say it is all good.
I'm not sure you read the rest of my post, especially pertaining to the study of physics. I don't think you realize the nature of quantitative fields such as physics. In my direct experience, lacking a certain level of mental math would be a profound roadblock to comprehension and application of physics principles.
The article was about technology and its impact on the mind. I think it is useful to look back in history to other developments that fundamentally changed our ways of thinking. I have heard it argued that in a way, the Jesuit religious order was responsible for the Enlightenment. The Jesuits ran schools where they inculcated in children the habit of being logical. They trained their students from an early age in debate, argument, and logic. This was for a religious purpose, but there were unintended consequences of this training. Some students who received his training in logic went on to question religion itself. Rene Descartes for example came to believe that everything should be questioned, including the church. He is one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, and his writings have influenced all of us, whether or not we are conscious of them.
I am quite sure that the logical training the Jesuits did had a significant impact on the brain development of the children who were trained. Similarly, I suspect that our technology is also having an impact on the way we think, on our brain development. The reason I feel it is useful to look at this comparison is that it shows that childhood training can have a profound impact on society. If we train our children to be logical, those habits of mind will follow them throughout their lives. What type of training are children getting when they spend most of their lives plugged into the web?
Not really, you wouldn't be anywhere near as adept at parsing out or expressing the problems as formulas, but there's no reason to believe that you'd be any less capable of comprehending them.
Physics formulae are fundamentally quantitative. They are precise logical assertions. I would argue that without a good sense of numbers, of quantity, you will miss important implications of the formulae. Try to play around with Schroedinger's equation without a solid algebraic skill set. You won't get very far.
"Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
I think this article raises valid concerns. These ideas are preliminary, but they ring true with my experience and intuition. I think a good specific topic around which to discuss the impact of technology is the use of calculators by school age children. I have heard it argued that since calculators are so common, that children and adults won't need to perform numeric calculations, so they shouldn't need to learn how to do mental math. My own experience in physics leads me to think that I would not have been able to learn the principles I have learned if my mental math was poor. Mental math allows me to parse mathematical equations and derive meaning from them. I think that if a person lacks the ability to do for example times tables, this would be a serious barrier to comprehending basic algebra.
A funny story from a friend, who is a teacher: He once had a 15 year old student come up to him and say "the square root button on my calculator isn't working. My friend took the calculator and tried it. Square root of nine...three. Square root of twenty five...five. "Well it seems to work for me" he said. Then the teenager took back the calculator and typed in "one" on the calculator and then pressed square root. "See sir, I keep pressing the square root button and nothing changes."
Last spotting hanging with Elvis and Bigfoot at Shangri-La
In truth, it is those who believe that humanity can continue to consume its resources without limit, who believe the scarcity of those resources should be the only arbiter of whether they are consumed, who are truly irrational. If we allow "the market" to decide the limits of consumption, the result will be a world where the quality of life for all of us will be reduced. Sustainability is the only long term option, if we care about the lives of our children.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way because it will mean literal death for large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods
Your argument displays at least two logical fallacies. Firstly you imply that reductions in carbon emissions must necessarily involve an abandonment of fossil fuel use in agriculture. Emissions can be substantially reduced by living closer to where we work, by using more efficient transportation, and by designing our buildings more efficiently. This is an example of an all or nothing fallacy. Secondly, you implicitly misrepresent the views of more reasonable environmentalists, which is the strawman fallacy.
I remember in the 1980s seeing a show (NOVA perhaps?) where the talked about how all the big climate models tended to fall into a "white earth" scenario if left to run for a while.
Well, for one thing, the accuracy of these models is partly dependent on the resolution of the simulation, which is in turn dependent on computing power. As I recall, computing power has increased slightly since the 1980's.
I'm sure they're better now than then, but I'm also sure some of the parameters in the models have been tweaked to fit existing data (which is normal, I'm not complaining) but it doesn't mean it's a totally valid model that we should make global policy decisions on.
I suspect there is a name for the above fallacy, but I don't know it offhand. The fallacy is this, that the arguer argues that any uncertainty in a scientific finding is evidence that the finding is dubious and not to be trusted. It ignores the fact that all scientific findings have uncertainty. Modern scientific philosophy, as articulated for example by Bertrand Russell, would state that science is inductive, and thus only probable. It is not even certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only assume it will because it always has (read about "Bertrand Russell's chicken"). However, even if science is never certain, these very same philosophers argued that science our best way of understanding the physical world. We must learn to accept that all of our knowledge is merely probably true, and that we are honor bound to accept the most probable explanation as our truest understanding of the world.
I'm trying to imagine what Carly was thinking when she sold the heart and soul of HP as Agilent:
The historical HP has a problem. We pay excellent engineers huge amounts of money to design products that are to be sold to a relatively small specialist market. We design emergency room monitors, radio frequency analyzers, and countless other devices whose purpose I can barely fathom. We even invented the modern calculator. We put huge resources into developing low volume products, whose profit margin is not acceptably high. Because of this, the growth potential of HP is permanently capped. We will never be able to double or quadruple our revenue if we keep employing these expensive engineers. So I propose that we jettison them as the extra weight baggage they are. HP should concentrate on selling personal computers to the mass market. And printers and other peripherals. The profit margins on these devices are huge, and the market is nearly unlimited. We should farm out the technical know-how to other companies, and concentrate on marketing. HP above all should be a brand name, something that people trust. Brand names cost nearly nothing to maintain, and carry enormous value. By reducing the costs at HP through eliminating our engineers, by farming out our technical know-how to outside organizations who specialize in such things, by concentrating on marketing to the mass market, HP will be able to both take in more revenue and spend less on internal costs at the same time. The growth potential is nearly unlimited. By becoming a shell marketing company, HP will maximize shareholder value.
Well Carly, we all know how that turned out. HP is floundering, and Agilent is still doing well. Good job Carly. You've done your MBA brethren proud.
I am addressing my reply not to the poster, but to others who may happen upon this "discussion". The parent to this comment is a textbook example of the methods used by deniers. It is a reply to a post where I my central thesis was that most deniers are not actually interested in finding truth, but are instead interested in being the perceived winner of what might be better described as discussion "contests" rather than proper debates or arguments. The parent post demonstrates my thesis perfectly. It is interesting that the parent commenter mentions sophists, saying "And that makes no difference. If you can't win an argument against a sophist, then you wouldn't have won anyway." The Oxford Dictionary defines a sophist as follows:
a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning.
a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments.
The parent post demonstrates many of the qualities of sophistry very clearly. And the methods of the climate denial movement are very similar.
1) Intimidating Tone
The parent post is nothing if not intimidating in tone. "Oh look, you have failed logic.", "...but still whine about it". Classic examples. Basically the idea is to sound so sure of yourself that a naive reader will, at the very least subconsciously assume that the poster knows what he is talking about. This is a common feature of propaganda throughout history, where an idea, a regime, an ideology is presented in a light where doubt is absurd; no argument is really necessary and often one is not given. Watch Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for an excellent example. This film is a template for modern propaganda and advertising. The key is the combination of certainty, combined with the lack of any evidence or argument, the lack of any need for evidence and argument.
2) Logical Fallacies
Deniers often use logical fallacies. The parent poster demonstrates this, with a straw man argument (where the arguer mischaracterizes his opponent's views in order to discredit him). "People aren't advocating burning fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. After all, if they did, then they could do so by setting the materials on fire in situ." If one reads my original post, one will see that I actually wrote "...someone can argue that we should burn as much coal and oil as is possible without concern for the consequences in changing the climate." I did not say "quickly". Nothing in my statement indicated that I think my opponents want to quickly burn all fossil fuels. I was referring to people who argue that we should extract all fossil fuels that are economically possible to remove without concern for the consequences.
3) Scientific Misconceptions
The parent poster writes "Coal mine fires and oil well fires are far more efficient at burning fossil fuels than how we actually do burn them." Not that it really matters to the argument, but the arguer clearly does not understand the concept of "efficiency". In physics, efficiency is defined as he ratio of useful work to the total work done by a device or process. The word "useful" is subjective. If we define the purpose of an incandescent light bulb to heat and light the Earth, then it is 100% efficient. Talking about the efficiency of a coal mine fire is meaningless.
4) False Equivalence
Remember the elementary school playground taunt "I know you are but what am I!" It worked then, and it works for deniers. When you call them on being irrational, they shout it back at you. When you accuse them of lying, they accuse you back. The purpose doesn't have much to do with you, their opponent. It has to do with the casual reader who may be watching your exchange. Most readers haven't been trained in logic or science. They are often not in the position to differentiate between a true assertion and a false assertion. By repeating yo
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA.
Really is it logical that a computer companies top person isn't an EE?
Is it logical that a software companies top person isn't a programmer?
Is it logical that a car companies top person isn't a automotive engineer?
At some point we have let the clerical staff take over the nation.
Amen. I've been thinking this for years. John Ralson Saul helped guide my thinking in his book "Voltaire's Bastards", and I've been digesting and developing these ideas ever since. Amongst my anecdotal stories buttressing my ideas is that of an MBA with no food processing experience being appointed to run a food processing facility. He sat in his office for hours staring at charts, and he had little real conception about how his plant functioned. He managed to change a formerly profitable facility into a money losing albatross.
Other classic examples: Carly Florina at HP and John Sculley at Apple. And I am sure their are countless other untold stories. To paraphrase John Ralston Saul, MBAs keep messing up, and yet they continue to hire clones of themselves.
Christ you deniers freak me out. It's simple mathematics. The stuff is finite, we've been tapping it for years, it's beginning to reduce in discoveries and production, in the very least - less is being found. It doesn't 'magically grow back' - logically we should be preparing for the possibility that we simply have none.
I've been watching the denial movement for quite a while, and I am coming to the conclusion that it is rooted in deep irrationality. You say that "logically we should be preparing for the possibility that we simply have none." Well, what if those deniers don't care about logic. Or more specifically, what if they do not believe in searching for truth through logic. What if they pay lip service to logic, but don't actually want use it to discover what is true, but instead only see it as a way of winning power and prestige.
We who are trained in science habitually take the sincerity of those we debate with for granted. In the words of Erwin Schrödinger “The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.” It is easy to forget that there are many out there who do not impose truth and sincerity on themselves, who argue only for the sake of appearing to win a contest rather than to advance understanding towards something true.
This is the only way I can explain how someone can argue that there is no limit to growth. It is the only way I can understand how someone can argue that we should burn as much coal and oil as is possible without concern for the consequences in changing the climate. It is the only way I can understand how someone can deny the vast swath of evidence that humans are warming the Earth through our carbon dioxide emissions.
I understand that humans tend to be irrational, that it is in our nature. That irrational nature is the most important reason why we must all strive to be rational, for otherwise we will be slaves to our lower nature. The survival of civilization itself depends on our ability to be rational. If we are not rational, if we are not interested in seeking what is true, we will make decisions based on false ideas. Those who insist on discarding reason, on sabotaging it in others are endangering civilization itself.
Slashdot Mirror
I meant to say "imminent"
I haven't RTFA, but the instant question is: So what?
As long as a device solves a problem to the user, that's what the device should restrain itself to do.. General use PCs have proven to become virus/worms/problem infested in the hands of "normal" users..
There will always be general use pc's for those who are willing and have to skills to handle them responsibly..
I for one welcome this new era when tech support nightmares get reduced to a minimum..
What happens if an extremist pseudo-totalitarian government comes to power in America? What happens if all computer platforms become walled gardens by law, and that those walls are actually secure? If you were using an iPad right now, and certain things were actually illegal to say, would you trust the device?
I'm not saying this is immenant, but a survey of history, from Thucidides and the trials of the first democracy in Greece to the history of the last century should make us realize that we always have to fight to retain our liberties. Maintaining open and transparent computing is an important bulwark against those who would try to remove our freedoms.
So after eating, I need to scrape the veggie part of my plate into one bin and the meat side into another. You underestimate the sheer force of lazy in the general population. If it takes even the very tiniest amount of effort, and doesn't lead to a direct benefit for them personally, they won't do it. It's hard enough just getting people to turn off the lights downstairs before they go to bed.
Well, after eating you might not bother separating them if they are too mixed...you would just chuck them both. However, most of my vegetable scraps are produced before I eat. When I peal onions, the skins go in the compost bucket. When I peal bananas, the peals go in the bucket. When I skin a sweet potato, when I peal an orange, when I finish with coffee grounds, when vegetables go bad in the fridge, it all goes in the bucket. The immediate benefit to me is that my garbage doesn't stink as much. My garbage bags don't drip. And because my compost bin and my garbage bin are next to each other under the sink, the difference in labor is negligible.
Welcome to the world we live in. The common good, altruism and generally being the "good guys" are ideologies of generations before the ones currently - at least for the most part. Welcome to the world of no direct consequences, it's like living in the internet, but in real life.
Truth, beauty, and goodness are not mere ideologies.
I have a plastic bin in the garden into which I threw the remains of a dead bush years ago. It's still there, undecomposed. From this I conclude that there is actually some effort involved in composting and therefore most people (like myself) will be too lazy to do it properly. They'll just chuck it all in a big heap and wonder why it isn't magically transforming into fertiliser.
A bush...ummmmmm...no. If you want to compost wood, it needs to be sent to a larger facility, where it will be ground down into chips, and hot composted in a very large pile...our city does this. Eventually it will become part of nice soil, which can then be sold. The things I put in my composter are kitchen scraps (no meat, cheese, or fat), and dried leaves/shredded paper. Once it gets going. the food scraps are unrecognizable after a couple of weeks.
How's the rat count in your neighbourhood?
No, I'm not joking. In my neck of the woods the rat population swelled when bakcyard composting became popular.
It is a fair question. My composter is plastic and securely closed. There are no chew holes anywhere on the device, and I seriously doubt any rats are gaining direct nourishment from it. The only significant problem with animal life I experienced occurred when someone in my house put meat scraps into the composter, which you should NOT do. Some animal (possibly a coyote or raccoon) managed to pry the lid off to get inside. Other than that, I have not had an animal problem in seven years of composting.
The city sells the type of composter I use for a very reasonable price, and the use of these particular composters is strongly encouraged. I think this minimizes the rodent issues.
Come on, most american can't even dispose of their trash properly, asking them to compost would make their nose bleed.
That's what they said in my city. Then the city implemented an easy system, and most people, and I really mean most of them, now recycle habitually. Don't underestimate people. They might surprise you.
Absolutely, make it mandatory. Then when millions of compost heaps go neglected (because, by the way, composting correctly is a process and a lot of work), we'll be buried under rat-infested garbage heaps, spreading disease, stink and illness throughout the nation.
But, really, go ahead and make it mandatory. It'll give the toxic cleanup industry just the shot in the arm it needs.
Neglected compost becomes soil eventually. If proper compost bins are used, rats are not an issue. This article is referring to curb side food scraps collection, where the city collects the scraps and brings them to a large facility. I can promise you that such facilities will turn those scraps into compost quite quickly. They won't be "toxic".
I have been backyard composting for a while now. I put vegetable scraps in a small stainless steel bucket under my sink. When the bucket is full, I take it out (every four days or so) and dump it in the compost bin. My area also has curb side food scraps collection, which would be easy enough to use, but I prefer to compost myself, so that I can feed my garden each spring. Besides getting a nice garden, one of the main benefits has been that my garbage is much cleaner. In fact, besides a few bones, most of my garbage consists of unrecycleable plastic bags and containers. When I take my garbage out, it is a plastic bag full of plastic bags.
The main work consists of turning the compost outside every once in a while (which wouldn't be necessary for curb side collection), and in cleaning the compost bucket under the sink, which is easy since it is stainless steel. The garbage bin is less stinky, which is nice, and I don't get the drippy bags of garbage that I used to get when I put food scraps in the regular garbage. In other words, I have found composting to be relatively easy, and I suspect most people would have a similar experience once they got started.
The purpose of the group is to think through scientific solutions to existential problems that might be used to save humanity from such risks as asteroids hitting the earth or some other diabolical disaster.
...or perhaps Global Warming?
And the fact that I wonder whether or not this will be modded as flame bait or troll should be disturbing to all of us.
It's not that I think that I don't think that many of the light weight college degrees being handed out aren't a joke, because many of them are. I believe education should be rigorous, and to put it mildly, standards have dropped. However, I think it is a deep mistake to try to make all education the equivalent of job training. There is far more to life than making money. If we abolish, or significantly reduce the importance of the humanities in education, our entire society will become poorer in ways that are difficult to measure. I'm a physics guy, but I have found reading Homer, Gibbon, Plato and Aristotle immensely enriching. I don't read these things to make money. I read them because they are part of the shared history and culture of our society. They give me perspective on my own life and about our civilization. They inspire my curiously about the world. They help supply the "why" in regards to "what" I study.
They are not uncompromising, just realistic.
Saying something doesn't make it so.
If the republicans are this uncompromising and extreme in opposition, I shudder to imagine what they will do with real power. The extremism just seems to keep on ramping up in pitch.
New technology will not revolutionize the market - not unless it can be mass-produced at reasonable price.
There are countless energy technologies that are 'better' than what we have. But they meaning nothing to the economy and to consumers unless they come with a plan to manufacture them cheaply.
Yeah, or the patent could be bought by Exxon-Mobile or some other status quo company so they can sit on it or stifle its development. It has already done.
But why would being poorer at mental calculation be a bad thing now that we do have calculators? As long as all that brain power gets used usefully, that is, allocated to a higher level function, I say it is all good.
I'm not sure you read the rest of my post, especially pertaining to the study of physics. I don't think you realize the nature of quantitative fields such as physics. In my direct experience, lacking a certain level of mental math would be a profound roadblock to comprehension and application of physics principles.
The article was about technology and its impact on the mind. I think it is useful to look back in history to other developments that fundamentally changed our ways of thinking. I have heard it argued that in a way, the Jesuit religious order was responsible for the Enlightenment. The Jesuits ran schools where they inculcated in children the habit of being logical. They trained their students from an early age in debate, argument, and logic. This was for a religious purpose, but there were unintended consequences of this training. Some students who received his training in logic went on to question religion itself. Rene Descartes for example came to believe that everything should be questioned, including the church. He is one of the most important figures of the Enlightenment, and his writings have influenced all of us, whether or not we are conscious of them.
I am quite sure that the logical training the Jesuits did had a significant impact on the brain development of the children who were trained. Similarly, I suspect that our technology is also having an impact on the way we think, on our brain development. The reason I feel it is useful to look at this comparison is that it shows that childhood training can have a profound impact on society. If we train our children to be logical, those habits of mind will follow them throughout their lives. What type of training are children getting when they spend most of their lives plugged into the web?
Not really, you wouldn't be anywhere near as adept at parsing out or expressing the problems as formulas, but there's no reason to believe that you'd be any less capable of comprehending them.
Physics formulae are fundamentally quantitative. They are precise logical assertions. I would argue that without a good sense of numbers, of quantity, you will miss important implications of the formulae. Try to play around with Schroedinger's equation without a solid algebraic skill set. You won't get very far.
From TFA:
"Media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he wrote. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
I think this article raises valid concerns. These ideas are preliminary, but they ring true with my experience and intuition. I think a good specific topic around which to discuss the impact of technology is the use of calculators by school age children. I have heard it argued that since calculators are so common, that children and adults won't need to perform numeric calculations, so they shouldn't need to learn how to do mental math. My own experience in physics leads me to think that I would not have been able to learn the principles I have learned if my mental math was poor. Mental math allows me to parse mathematical equations and derive meaning from them. I think that if a person lacks the ability to do for example times tables, this would be a serious barrier to comprehending basic algebra.
A funny story from a friend, who is a teacher: He once had a 15 year old student come up to him and say "the square root button on my calculator isn't working. My friend took the calculator and tried it. Square root of nine...three. Square root of twenty five...five. "Well it seems to work for me" he said. Then the teenager took back the calculator and typed in "one" on the calculator and then pressed square root. "See sir, I keep pressing the square root button and nothing changes."
reasonable environmentalists
Last spotting hanging with Elvis and Bigfoot at Shangri-La
In truth, it is those who believe that humanity can continue to consume its resources without limit, who believe the scarcity of those resources should be the only arbiter of whether they are consumed, who are truly irrational. If we allow "the market" to decide the limits of consumption, the result will be a world where the quality of life for all of us will be reduced. Sustainability is the only long term option, if we care about the lives of our children.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way because it will mean literal death for large numbers of people unable to be supported by non-oil-based agricultural methods
Your argument displays at least two logical fallacies. Firstly you imply that reductions in carbon emissions must necessarily involve an abandonment of fossil fuel use in agriculture. Emissions can be substantially reduced by living closer to where we work, by using more efficient transportation, and by designing our buildings more efficiently. This is an example of an all or nothing fallacy. Secondly, you implicitly misrepresent the views of more reasonable environmentalists, which is the strawman fallacy.
I remember in the 1980s seeing a show (NOVA perhaps?) where the talked about how all the big climate models tended to fall into a "white earth" scenario if left to run for a while.
Well, for one thing, the accuracy of these models is partly dependent on the resolution of the simulation, which is in turn dependent on computing power. As I recall, computing power has increased slightly since the 1980's.
I'm sure they're better now than then, but I'm also sure some of the parameters in the models have been tweaked to fit existing data (which is normal, I'm not complaining) but it doesn't mean it's a totally valid model that we should make global policy decisions on.
I suspect there is a name for the above fallacy, but I don't know it offhand. The fallacy is this, that the arguer argues that any uncertainty in a scientific finding is evidence that the finding is dubious and not to be trusted. It ignores the fact that all scientific findings have uncertainty. Modern scientific philosophy, as articulated for example by Bertrand Russell, would state that science is inductive, and thus only probable. It is not even certain that the sun will rise again tomorrow; we only assume it will because it always has (read about "Bertrand Russell's chicken"). However, even if science is never certain, these very same philosophers argued that science our best way of understanding the physical world. We must learn to accept that all of our knowledge is merely probably true, and that we are honor bound to accept the most probable explanation as our truest understanding of the world.
I'm trying to imagine what Carly was thinking when she sold the heart and soul of HP as Agilent:
The historical HP has a problem. We pay excellent engineers huge amounts of money to design products that are to be sold to a relatively small specialist market. We design emergency room monitors, radio frequency analyzers, and countless other devices whose purpose I can barely fathom. We even invented the modern calculator. We put huge resources into developing low volume products, whose profit margin is not acceptably high. Because of this, the growth potential of HP is permanently capped. We will never be able to double or quadruple our revenue if we keep employing these expensive engineers. So I propose that we jettison them as the extra weight baggage they are. HP should concentrate on selling personal computers to the mass market. And printers and other peripherals. The profit margins on these devices are huge, and the market is nearly unlimited. We should farm out the technical know-how to other companies, and concentrate on marketing. HP above all should be a brand name, something that people trust. Brand names cost nearly nothing to maintain, and carry enormous value. By reducing the costs at HP through eliminating our engineers, by farming out our technical know-how to outside organizations who specialize in such things, by concentrating on marketing to the mass market, HP will be able to both take in more revenue and spend less on internal costs at the same time. The growth potential is nearly unlimited. By becoming a shell marketing company, HP will maximize shareholder value.
Well Carly, we all know how that turned out. HP is floundering, and Agilent is still doing well. Good job Carly. You've done your MBA brethren proud.
I am addressing my reply not to the poster, but to others who may happen upon this "discussion". The parent to this comment is a textbook example of the methods used by deniers. It is a reply to a post where I my central thesis was that most deniers are not actually interested in finding truth, but are instead interested in being the perceived winner of what might be better described as discussion "contests" rather than proper debates or arguments. The parent post demonstrates my thesis perfectly. It is interesting that the parent commenter mentions sophists, saying "And that makes no difference. If you can't win an argument against a sophist, then you wouldn't have won anyway." The Oxford Dictionary defines a sophist as follows:
a paid teacher of philosophy and rhetoric in ancient Greece, associated in popular thought with moral skepticism and specious reasoning.
a person who reasons with clever but fallacious arguments.
The parent post demonstrates many of the qualities of sophistry very clearly. And the methods of the climate denial movement are very similar.
1) Intimidating Tone
The parent post is nothing if not intimidating in tone. "Oh look, you have failed logic.", "...but still whine about it". Classic examples. Basically the idea is to sound so sure of yourself that a naive reader will, at the very least subconsciously assume that the poster knows what he is talking about. This is a common feature of propaganda throughout history, where an idea, a regime, an ideology is presented in a light where doubt is absurd; no argument is really necessary and often one is not given. Watch Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" for an excellent example. This film is a template for modern propaganda and advertising. The key is the combination of certainty, combined with the lack of any evidence or argument, the lack of any need for evidence and argument.
2) Logical Fallacies
Deniers often use logical fallacies. The parent poster demonstrates this, with a straw man argument (where the arguer mischaracterizes his opponent's views in order to discredit him). "People aren't advocating burning fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. After all, if they did, then they could do so by setting the materials on fire in situ." If one reads my original post, one will see that I actually wrote "...someone can argue that we should burn as much coal and oil as is possible without concern for the consequences in changing the climate." I did not say "quickly". Nothing in my statement indicated that I think my opponents want to quickly burn all fossil fuels. I was referring to people who argue that we should extract all fossil fuels that are economically possible to remove without concern for the consequences.
3) Scientific Misconceptions
The parent poster writes "Coal mine fires and oil well fires are far more efficient at burning fossil fuels than how we actually do burn them." Not that it really matters to the argument, but the arguer clearly does not understand the concept of "efficiency". In physics, efficiency is defined as he ratio of useful work to the total work done by a device or process. The word "useful" is subjective. If we define the purpose of an incandescent light bulb to heat and light the Earth, then it is 100% efficient. Talking about the efficiency of a coal mine fire is meaningless.
4) False Equivalence
Remember the elementary school playground taunt "I know you are but what am I!" It worked then, and it works for deniers. When you call them on being irrational, they shout it back at you. When you accuse them of lying, they accuse you back. The purpose doesn't have much to do with you, their opponent. It has to do with the casual reader who may be watching your exchange. Most readers haven't been trained in logic or science. They are often not in the position to differentiate between a true assertion and a false assertion. By repeating yo
Someone should write a paper or a book about the destruction of American business by the MBA. Really is it logical that a computer companies top person isn't an EE? Is it logical that a software companies top person isn't a programmer? Is it logical that a car companies top person isn't a automotive engineer?
At some point we have let the clerical staff take over the nation.
Amen. I've been thinking this for years. John Ralson Saul helped guide my thinking in his book "Voltaire's Bastards", and I've been digesting and developing these ideas ever since. Amongst my anecdotal stories buttressing my ideas is that of an MBA with no food processing experience being appointed to run a food processing facility. He sat in his office for hours staring at charts, and he had little real conception about how his plant functioned. He managed to change a formerly profitable facility into a money losing albatross.
Other classic examples: Carly Florina at HP and John Sculley at Apple. And I am sure their are countless other untold stories. To paraphrase John Ralston Saul, MBAs keep messing up, and yet they continue to hire clones of themselves.
Christ you deniers freak me out. It's simple mathematics. The stuff is finite, we've been tapping it for years, it's beginning to reduce in discoveries and production, in the very least - less is being found. It doesn't 'magically grow back' - logically we should be preparing for the possibility that we simply have none.
I've been watching the denial movement for quite a while, and I am coming to the conclusion that it is rooted in deep irrationality. You say that "logically we should be preparing for the possibility that we simply have none." Well, what if those deniers don't care about logic. Or more specifically, what if they do not believe in searching for truth through logic. What if they pay lip service to logic, but don't actually want use it to discover what is true, but instead only see it as a way of winning power and prestige.
We who are trained in science habitually take the sincerity of those we debate with for granted. In the words of Erwin Schrödinger “The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.” It is easy to forget that there are many out there who do not impose truth and sincerity on themselves, who argue only for the sake of appearing to win a contest rather than to advance understanding towards something true.
This is the only way I can explain how someone can argue that there is no limit to growth. It is the only way I can understand how someone can argue that we should burn as much coal and oil as is possible without concern for the consequences in changing the climate. It is the only way I can understand how someone can deny the vast swath of evidence that humans are warming the Earth through our carbon dioxide emissions.
I understand that humans tend to be irrational, that it is in our nature. That irrational nature is the most important reason why we must all strive to be rational, for otherwise we will be slaves to our lower nature. The survival of civilization itself depends on our ability to be rational. If we are not rational, if we are not interested in seeking what is true, we will make decisions based on false ideas. Those who insist on discarding reason, on sabotaging it in others are endangering civilization itself.