I get the distraction thing, that word processors often are so fiddly that they detract from writing. But there are other excellent tools out there that use full screen views to reduce distraction. As has been mentioned before in these posts, there is Q10, which is a highly minimal word processor. On the other side, there is Scrivener, an OSX piece of writing software that features a full screen view, but that also has features for note taking/cork boards. That said, I suspect that the writing process is highly idiosyncratic; each writer has their own peculiar rituals.
The CBC is union managed and controlled, so focus your ire on the NDP and not the Conservatives.
Ummmm...the conservative government actually has quite a bit of control at the CBC. They appoint the leaders who set the direction of the network. In the last few years, the CBC has taken a subtle but definite shift to the right. One can see it in the way they frame certain news stories. And they have introduced programs with a very right wing slant, such as a Crossfire-like show called The Lang & O'Leary Exchange.
Finally, I'm seeing a lot of ant-Harper spam on Slashdot as of late, seems those poor anarchists and jackboot radicals are still smarting from their bad press after the Toronto G20 summit debacle.
I think that Harper is a dangerous single minded ideologue who has run a minority government as a majority government, and has snubbed his nose at Parliament many times. If this is the way he acts in a minority government, I shudder to think about what he will do with an absolute majority. And I can assure you that I am not an anarchist or a jackbooted radical. If anything, your blanket characterization of those who oppose Harper as extremists is a type of action that is itself in the mould of a jackbooted radical.
Laws like this are going to push people over to TOR, or Freenet or whatever other new piece of software that guarantees anonymity. The internet pandoras box has been opened for the recording industry. All the king's horses and all the king's men won't fix this.
You can bet it. Since when reason had anything to do with ethics or morals?
Logic = philosophy. Go take a philosophy course. Preferably one that includes Deontic Logic (the LOGIC of MORAL discourse!). Read some Kant. Read lots of Kant. Then get back to me.
What are you suggesting, that we revert to a medieval lifestyle?
I have already changed my lifestyle. I live close to where I work, so that I can walk or take the bus, and the trip only takes 15 minutes. I live in a smaller residence. I wear sweaters in the winter and lower the thermostat a bit. And I have reduced (though not eliminated) my meat consumption. I buy local fruit when possible, eating apples during the northern apple season, avoiding New Zealand or Chilean apples at all cost. I consume less overall, and it has not made my life any poorer. When you consume too much you become a slave to your stuff. It builds up. It weighs you down. You buy things, only to find that they don't make you any happier.
I don't think my life is anything close to medieval, and yet I probably produce way less than half the carbon dioxide of the average person. If you want to see what medieval looks like, I suggest you attend a Tea Party rally. Their abandonment of reason, their willful ignorance and self-delusion is an excellent model for Dark Age behavior.
what's unreasonable or ilogical about looking for somebody's own pocket?
It is the height of irrationality to pursue short term profits by risking the future health of your own society. It is the height of irrationality to act as if you are isolated from the society around you. We are all utterly dependent on each other. In some ways, the wealthy are more dependent on others than the rest of us, because of their huge need to consume.
I suspect your definition of reason is devoid of any real sense of ethics or morals.
And yet here we are debating the issue. We the readers of this article have varying degrees and types of education, and we can understand the consequences of antibiotic resistance. And still nothing is done.
Is this really an issue of human stupidity? Or is it that those who rule us have sacrificed Reason and Logic on the Altar of the Mighty Dollar?
People believe it was faked because they don't want to believe we were capable of something 40 years ago that we are not capable of today. They want to have hope for the future, but the moon landing is an obvious sign of decline (or rather, the fact that it happened so long and we can't do it today is an obvious sign of decline).
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Understandable...yes. Excusable...no. In fact I might argue that our tendency to discard objective facts for fanciful opinions lies somewhere near the root of why we no longer have the ability to travel to the moon. We are, I believe running our society based on fanciful ideologies that are not good models for reality, be they economic ideologies or social ideologies. We ascribe certainty to dubious systems of ideas, while exaggerating the inherent inductive uncertainty of the scientific process.
I believe our current tendency of shrugging off our negative characteristics as unavoidable consequences of our nature reduces our ability to improve ourselves and our lives. After all, it was also human nature to burn witches centuries ago. Do we do this today?
Am I the only one who sees the growth of mad conspiracy theories such as the "faked moon landing" as a sign post on the road the the decline of our civilization?
I was at a party a while ago in which I met a seemingly intelligent professional who seemed to honestly believe that humans never landed on the moon. I suspect that though some of the posts calling the landing fake are trolls, I believe that many who believe the landing is fake are sincere. I do not believe this is a harmless trend.
Voltaire had an quote that I believe is germane here: "Those who can make people believe absurdities can make them commit atrocities".
In other words, how dare someone create cognitive dissonance in "tax lowering drones" like yourself? Here is an alternate view to your own. Consider instead that taxing the extremely wealthy may have created the American Middle Class. Consider that extremely rich people are notoriously inefficient spenders of money. They either don't spend it, or they use it to consume wasteful luxury goods, like lavish mansions and high end sports cars. Middle class consumers are more likely to spend more efficiently, on modest houses and cars, on food to feed their families, and on education to increase the earning potential of their progeny. Consider that the creation of the Middle Class was the real cause of America's post-war economic boom.
One of the key turn-arounds in the progressive income tax regime occurred when governments agreed to allow money to freely across international borders. This allowed the wealthy to remove their money from countries with higher taxes. Thus, countries with higher taxes now face economic decline as wealthy residents remove their money from the country. This is the real cause of the association of high taxes with low economic activity. It is not that government necessarily spends poorly, but simply that capital flight drives taxes to the lowest common denominator.
Under this hypothesis, low tax rates would be associated with Middle Class decline. Any honest analysis will admit that the current Middle Class decline in the US is at least tightly correlated with tax rates in the wealthy. The current Middle Class decline began in earnest after Reagan began his tax cut regime.
The parent's link is an interesting article. There is an excellent graph of income inequality. I would draw to your attention the apparent correlation with income tax rates on the wealthy with the health of the middle class. I am not convinced this is a coincidence.
The top American marginal income rates from 1944 to 1963 were 92%. Yes, 92% of income made over the top amount, went to taxation. In 1944, if you made over $200,000, 92% went to the government. In 1963, it was $400,000. And yet, this was a period of profound economic expansion and middle class comfort. Kind of makes you want to question the "conventional wisdom" that all taxes are bad.
I have always thought that when schools compete for students in a free market, the market will supply what the consumer demands: high grades for the least amount of effort.
I know it is more complicated than this, and I know that university prestige is an important characteristic in its "value", but the more I look at the school system today, the more I am convinced that education is being increasingly seen as an economic good, something that has value only in its potential to increase future income. The value of an education to intellectually and spiritually enrich a person's life, and by connection the lives of all citizens is I believe being neglected. I believe that our education is increasingly being plagued by something called "credentialism", where the credential, the piece of paper is valued more than the knowledge and wisdom it is supposed to represent. I believe that this will result in the hollowing out of our educational system resulting eventually in social and economic decay.
The association of the moniker "most secure city in the world" with "Mexico City" is enough for me to judge the wisdom and intellectual capacity of the subjects of this article.
I think the problem goes deeper than notation. From what I can see, students are too reliant on blind procedure to get the "answer". They often lack logical skill at the most basic level, missing concepts such as argument, truth, and falsity.
Consider a contradictory system of linear equations, say,
x + y = 5
x + y = 2
Of course, many students will fall back to the graphical approach with this, which is fine, except that I'm not sure they understand what graphs actually mean (e.g. the set of points which make an equation true). They will say there is no intersection, and they have equated the intersection of lines with "the answer", so there is no "answer". But do they understand that each line is the set of all points (x,y) that make each equation true, and that the lack of an intersection means that there is no single point that makes both equations true? Often they don't.
And if they follow the subtraction procedure, where they subtract the second equation from the first equation, then they will get the contradictory equation
0 = 3
Many of them will be flummoxed by the meaning of this. They may make up non-sensical answers, or they may actually get the answer "no solution". But even when they get the answer right, I am not convinced that many actually understand the logical justification for what they say. I suspect many of them do not understand that the above statement is a contradiction.
I think that one way to improve this is to instil in students the habit of logic at an earlier age. I think that teaching some basic logic at the ages of 12 or 13 would improve this. We need to teach these children that there is such as thing as truth and falsity, and that they need to back up what they say with some reasoning. We need to get them into the habit of giving their logical reasoning. I think this could help break the cycle where students learn that the only point of doing a question is to get "an answer" in order to get marks, as opposed to actually understanding a concept.
Well in that case, let's blow 100 trillion dollars RIGHT NOW. If we're going for broke, let's chase it to infinity. Debt be damned, fuck it!
Assuming that you actually make a logical assertion, which I am not sure that you do, let's see how many logical fallacies are implicit or explicit in your comment:
Definitely the straw man fallacy. I didn't say that government debt was always a good thing. And I certainly didn't say that we should spend 100 trillion dollars, or an unlimited amount of money. I simply said that government spending was what brought us out of the Great Depression, in the form of spending on World War II.
Perhaps also the appeal to emotion fallacy, given the last sentence.
I think the black and white fallacy is implicit in your comment, since you seem to divide the world into two groups: those who support unlimited government spending, and those who want to minimize government spending.
Perhaps also your statement implicitly shows the beside the point or red herring fallacy, seeing as that your implicit assertion that I would like to spend an unlimited amount of government money is not relevant to my assertion that government spending brought America out of WWII.
Wow, that's four logical fallacies in one line, plus you didn't seem to make a well formed argument in the first place.
If I owe Jim $10,000 but I can kill him and nobody will ever know, the 'rational' thing to do is kill him. Struggling to pay my debt is just a bunch of sentimentality. Only a psychopath can be purely rational.
The mafia is an excellent model for what happens when the free market is allowed to operate outside the public interest.
FDRs policies did not get us out of the Great Depression (which was only called that in the US). What got us out of the Great Depression was getting into a war. Pulling millions of men out of the labor market had the obvious effect of lowering unemployment.
My god, is the intellectual level of our society so low that posters can blatantly contradict themselves and not even realize it?!!
The above poster claims that FDR's programs (I am assuming he means public works expenditures) did not get us out of the Great Depression. It was the war that pulled America out instead. But what is a war, except a huge public works program, a massive series of government expenditures used to build weapons and to pay soldiers. It is indistinguishable economically from say building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam, except that the products of war are more destructive. The real thing to notice is that war expenditures seem to be the only type of public works program that America will accept in any great amount.
Actually I think that you are displaying the fallacy of ambiguity. Specifically, you are changing the specific meaning of the word "rational" and "irrational" (or perhaps neither of us is being explicit enough in our arguments). In this case, I have being referring to the "efficient market hypothesis" and its implication that prices of goods reflects all available information. Rationality is then a concept of price setting. It is not referring to the inherent irrationality of many of our actual market decisions, which I acknowledge; who knows why people spend hundreds of dollars on designer jeans that cost very little to manufacture when they can buy jeans at Costco for $20.
Let us imagine a person wants to buy an apple. There are two neighboring fruit stands. They are identical in every way, and they are selling identical apples. According to the customer, there are no differences at all between the two fruit stands, and between the fruit they sell. However, stand A sells apples for 25 cents each, while stand B sells identical apples for $5 each. Under the efficient market hypothesis, the customer would always buy apples from stand A; this would be the rational decision. If the customer pays $5 for the apple from stand B, this would be considered irrational under the EMH. Thus, the EMH would imply that stand B would sell no apples at all, if there is an unlimited supply, and that stand B would have to lower its price to compete.
The above seems quite reasonable and obvious. But under much of modern economics, the EMH is taken as an axiom, and is applied to all free market behavior. What I am arguing is that, as you assert, free markets are not rational. I am arguing that since much of modern economic study takes the EMH and builds on it as an axiom, that the theories derived from the EMH are not axiomatic, as has been asserted by economists such as Milton Friedman. The EMH implies a certain type of rationality that I believe is not always displayed in free markets.
If you do not believe me that the EMH implies rationality or that it is the fundamental basis for much of economics, I suggest you do some reading first before responding. To start with, watch the Nova documentary "Mind Over Money". Read the works of different economists, such as Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman. I suggest you read more about the basis of the Chicago School of Economics, and about the basis for Behavioral Economics.
Economists like Milton Friedman and his ilk would put it that in a perfect free market economy there is no such thing as a stock market bubble. There is no such thing as a housing bubble. They would say that any bubble like behavior is due to "distortions" in the market place that cause their perfect system to malfunction. They base these assertions on their assumption that the market always places the best price on a good or service based on all available information. Thus a bubble is impossible. They assume that people buy houses to satisfy their own need for accommodation and to maximize their future net worth. What they miss is that, in seeking to maximize their net worth, individual market actors, and the market itself will buy houses because the prices are going up. They will be afraid that they will be priced out of the market. They will be exuberant because they seem to be making lots of money on rising real estate prices, and they will borrow obscene amounts of money to jump into the rising market, forcing prices up even further. The prices will keep rising for a while, reinforcing the irrational belief that the inflated market is based on real supply and demand factors. Eventually, the prices crash. Since people were buying because the prices were rising, when the prices stop rising, demand dries up, causing the prices to crash.
The situation above has played out in the American real estate market. And it has played out in the stock market many times. Such behavior is inherently irrational. If the market itself, and not just the individual actors displays irrational behavior, then I would argue that the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" is falsified.
Rationality" is based on personal, usually unknowable, factors. It's impossible to prove or disprove the rationality of an economic decision since there's no way that you can take psychological factors, wants and needs into account, some of which may not even be fully known to the subject.
No. We are talking about the rationality of the market itself, and not necessarily about just the individual actors. The assumption is that the market will always set the best price based on supply and demand. The assumption is that the market price is always the most rational price based on all available information. Bubbles are irrational phenomenon. The price is going up because the price is going up. If we have built into our brains inherent irrationality, and if all actors in the market display this to some degree or another, then the market is going to act irrationally, since market behavior is just the overall behavior of all individuals.
I would argue that the intellectual basis of neo-conservative economics comes mainly from the "Rational Market Hypothesis", and is thus largely based on the assumption of rationality. From the assumption of market rationality, there have been derived mathematical models that would make many mathematicians quiver. If you arranged a group of all the people in the world who actually understand these models, I suspect you could fit all of their names on a single sheet of paper (perhaps with a small font). The ideologues take the results or predictions of these models, as derived by Nobel Prize winning economists, and fit them into their ideologies. Then politicians like Reagan listen to their ideological advisors and implement their plans and models. I doubt Reagan himself had any formal understanding of economics beyond first year econ. courses.
Many of the economic theories that our governments have been adhering to over the past few decades have as a core premise that overall, markets behave rationally. Specifically, the "Efficient Market Hypothesis", in which it is proposed that the price for a good or service ALWAYS reflects ALL available information, implicitly assumes that market actors are acting rationally. And the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" is at the core of most of the mind-blowing mathematical economic models that many of our society's decision makers use to make economic decisions. The question is: If humans naturally make irrational decisions because we are biologically predisposed to do so, then how can markets be assumed to behave rationally? There have been striking experiments done on seemingly rational MBA students in which they make staggeringly irrational economic decisions. The monkey experiments seem to reinforce our predisposition to act irrationally.
In other words, the above research points towards falsifying the primary economic ideology that has been used to govern America since Reagan. This is no small matter. It affects all of our lives. And yet, if you listen to Republicans lately, they are still calling for policies derived from these economic models, policies such as tax cuts for the rich, working towards a reduction in governmental economic power, so as to let the power of the private sector and the magical invisible hand of the market place work their economic miracles. Myself, I am more of a Keynsian. I think the market is useful, but it can run amok if not attended to by a government powerful enough to guide it towards the public good.
Here is an excellent episode of the TV series Nova called "Mind over Money", which lays out many of my arguments clearly. The video only streams to the US.
The creationists that I have met or conversed with seem to have a marked lack of logical skill. They don't seem to understand what an argument is, what logic is. They are infuriating to argue with, because their arguments usually degenerate into base contradiction, not unlike Monty Python's argument sketch. They don't usually give premises to support a conclusion in their arguments. Or if they do, their premises don't logically support their conclusion. And if you push them outside the talking points they have been given in their indoctrination at church, pushing them to actually think, they get hostile and turtle up; they won't talk to you again for a while after. They inhabit a world where truth is whatever they decide it to be. Of course, they believe that they are absolutely right, that what they read from the bible and their interpretations of the bible are absolutely true, and that others who differ in their views are absolutely false. However, if we extend this to others and make the decision that all of us may decide what is true based on whatever factors we want, then there is no truth. In such a world, nothing can be absolutely true, and nothing can be absolutely false. In that world, there are no facts, only opinions.
If too many in our society form their views of reality not from rational observation of the physical world, but instead based on vague interpretations of a book written centuries ago and translated numerous times, then truth becomes a commodity, a tool of power. Truth becomes something that can be bought and sold. Those who base their "truth" almost exclusively on bible interpretations will inevitably fall under the sway of preachers, reverends, and other charismatic figures. What those opinion makers say will often be taken for truth without question. Trusted opinion makers will be able to make bold pronouncements of truth, and will often not be questioned. Thus they will have a great deal of power over those who trust them. I would argue that powerful groups or individuals in society will be unable to resist corrupting these trusted opinion makers into changing the truth into something more amenable to their own self-interest. Thus, truth can become a commodity, to be bought and sold for profit and power.
Many who argue that the above isn't a negative development cite freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of thought as justifications. But I would call it "freedom from thought", the freedom not to think, freedom from reason and logic. In a democracy we are free to think whatever we want, and if we want to we are free to turn off our brains and to exist in a blissful bubble of ignorance. However, a vibrant democracy depends on a vigilant and well informed citizenry. If too many of us abandon logic and reason, then democracy itself will be in peril. Those who toss aside reason are shirking their duties as citizens. They should be ashamed.
Here is a posting on Science Magazine's ScienceNow, and here is the original journal article originally published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society. I think it is always better, when possible to refer to original sources when talking about scientific issues. Scientific discussions can become muddled when translated by journalists.
...Make it a habit to take a daily noon sighting and record your distance logger.
Noon sights are easy to understand, but they do not give a very precise fix. Recording the highest angle of the sun (local noon) gives you your latitude. The time at which it occurs gives you longitude, since local noon occurs at a different time at every different longitude. For a more reliable position line, you should probably shoot the sun when the angle is around 50 degrees or so above the horizon. This involves using some fancy calculations using spherical geometry (or looking the results of those calculations up in a sight reduction table. The basic idea isn't that difficult. Imagine you measure the angle of the sun to be 50 degrees and 30 minutes above the horizon at a particular time (GMT). At that time, the sun is directly overhead of a specific location on the Earth. Now draw a line upwards from that point. Trace a cone centered at that point whose edges are 50 degrees 30 minutes above the horizon. This traces a circle on the globe, centered at the location of the sun. You are somewhere on that circle.
The above circle might seem so large as to be useless, but here is the trick. Guess your location. It should be a fairly accurate guess, your best guess (assume no GPS). Now you have a guessed longitude and latitude. It is possible to plug that guessed longitude and latitude, along with the time of the sighting into some spherical geometry formulae. These formulae will give you both the direction of the sun's location from your guessed location, AND the angle that the sun would make to the horizon IF you were at your guessed location. Say the direction of the sun is 225 degrees (SW). Draw a line from your guessed position towards the sun, in the direction 225 degrees (SW). If you drew a line perpendicular to that line towards the sun and through your guessed position, that would be the portion of the circle talked about in the previous paragraph, IF you were at your guessed position. Say the calculations told you that at your guessed position, the angle of the sun to the horizon is not 50 degrees 30 minutes, but instead 50 degrees 32 minutes. You measured the altitude to be 50 degrees 30 min, but at your guessed position it would be 50 degrees 32 minutes. This means that the circle you are actually located on is FARTHER AWAY FROM THE CENTER OF THE CIRCLE than the one for your guessed position since your solar angle is 2 minutes SMALLER (remember, picture the cones that make the circle around the sun's position...as you go farther away from the center, the angle of the sun decreases...if you were at the location of the sun on the Earth, the angle would be 90 degrees). And since 2 minutes of latitude equals 2 nautical miles, all you need to do on your map is to draw another line perpendicular to the line you drew towards the sun, but 2 nautical miles farther from the sun. You are somewhere on that line (remember, that perpendicular line represents a small part of the circle traced out by the cone around the sun's location).
If you want a proper fix, you can read the sun and moon together if they are both visible. Or you can shoot the sun in the morning and the afternoon. Either way, you will get two position lines which will cross near to your actual location. Or you can shoot stars, if you can see the horizon. The tricky part for most people is the calculation of the sun's angle to the horizon at the guessed position, and the calculation of the direction of the sun from your guessed location. There are tables, called sight reduction tables that give you these angles, or you can program the formulae into a calculator, or you can use a navigational calculator. It is possible to use a sextant to find your position within 1 nautical mile, but in real conditions, most people would have trouble getting within 3 to 4 nm. That however is enough in the open ocean for proper navigation.
I personally enjoy using a sextant. There is something deeply satisfying in using a simple device like a sextant to locate oneself. And these methods will work even if your boat is struck by lightning, and all of your onboard electronics are fried.
Slashdot Mirror
I get the distraction thing, that word processors often are so fiddly that they detract from writing. But there are other excellent tools out there that use full screen views to reduce distraction. As has been mentioned before in these posts, there is Q10, which is a highly minimal word processor. On the other side, there is Scrivener, an OSX piece of writing software that features a full screen view, but that also has features for note taking/cork boards. That said, I suspect that the writing process is highly idiosyncratic; each writer has their own peculiar rituals.
The CBC is union managed and controlled, so focus your ire on the NDP and not the Conservatives.
Ummmm...the conservative government actually has quite a bit of control at the CBC. They appoint the leaders who set the direction of the network. In the last few years, the CBC has taken a subtle but definite shift to the right. One can see it in the way they frame certain news stories. And they have introduced programs with a very right wing slant, such as a Crossfire-like show called The Lang & O'Leary Exchange.
Finally, I'm seeing a lot of ant-Harper spam on Slashdot as of late, seems those poor anarchists and jackboot radicals are still smarting from their bad press after the Toronto G20 summit debacle.
I think that Harper is a dangerous single minded ideologue who has run a minority government as a majority government, and has snubbed his nose at Parliament many times. If this is the way he acts in a minority government, I shudder to think about what he will do with an absolute majority. And I can assure you that I am not an anarchist or a jackbooted radical. If anything, your blanket characterization of those who oppose Harper as extremists is a type of action that is itself in the mould of a jackbooted radical.
Laws like this are going to push people over to TOR, or Freenet or whatever other new piece of software that guarantees anonymity. The internet pandoras box has been opened for the recording industry. All the king's horses and all the king's men won't fix this.
You can bet it. Since when reason had anything to do with ethics or morals?
Logic = philosophy. Go take a philosophy course. Preferably one that includes Deontic Logic (the LOGIC of MORAL discourse!). Read some Kant. Read lots of Kant. Then get back to me.
What are you suggesting, that we revert to a medieval lifestyle?
I have already changed my lifestyle. I live close to where I work, so that I can walk or take the bus, and the trip only takes 15 minutes. I live in a smaller residence. I wear sweaters in the winter and lower the thermostat a bit. And I have reduced (though not eliminated) my meat consumption. I buy local fruit when possible, eating apples during the northern apple season, avoiding New Zealand or Chilean apples at all cost. I consume less overall, and it has not made my life any poorer. When you consume too much you become a slave to your stuff. It builds up. It weighs you down. You buy things, only to find that they don't make you any happier.
I don't think my life is anything close to medieval, and yet I probably produce way less than half the carbon dioxide of the average person. If you want to see what medieval looks like, I suggest you attend a Tea Party rally. Their abandonment of reason, their willful ignorance and self-delusion is an excellent model for Dark Age behavior.
what's unreasonable or ilogical about looking for somebody's own pocket?
It is the height of irrationality to pursue short term profits by risking the future health of your own society. It is the height of irrationality to act as if you are isolated from the society around you. We are all utterly dependent on each other. In some ways, the wealthy are more dependent on others than the rest of us, because of their huge need to consume.
I suspect your definition of reason is devoid of any real sense of ethics or morals.
It's also a perfect example of stupidity.
And yet here we are debating the issue. We the readers of this article have varying degrees and types of education, and we can understand the consequences of antibiotic resistance. And still nothing is done.
Is this really an issue of human stupidity? Or is it that those who rule us have sacrificed Reason and Logic on the Altar of the Mighty Dollar?
People believe it was faked because they don't want to believe we were capable of something 40 years ago that we are not capable of today. They want to have hope for the future, but the moon landing is an obvious sign of decline (or rather, the fact that it happened so long and we can't do it today is an obvious sign of decline).
]
Understandable...yes. Excusable...no. In fact I might argue that our tendency to discard objective facts for fanciful opinions lies somewhere near the root of why we no longer have the ability to travel to the moon. We are, I believe running our society based on fanciful ideologies that are not good models for reality, be they economic ideologies or social ideologies. We ascribe certainty to dubious systems of ideas, while exaggerating the inherent inductive uncertainty of the scientific process.
I believe our current tendency of shrugging off our negative characteristics as unavoidable consequences of our nature reduces our ability to improve ourselves and our lives. After all, it was also human nature to burn witches centuries ago. Do we do this today?
Am I the only one who sees the growth of mad conspiracy theories such as the "faked moon landing" as a sign post on the road the the decline of our civilization?
I was at a party a while ago in which I met a seemingly intelligent professional who seemed to honestly believe that humans never landed on the moon. I suspect that though some of the posts calling the landing fake are trolls, I believe that many who believe the landing is fake are sincere. I do not believe this is a harmless trend.
Voltaire had an quote that I believe is germane here: "Those who can make people believe absurdities can make them commit atrocities".
How was the parent post rated +5??
In other words, how dare someone create cognitive dissonance in "tax lowering drones" like yourself? Here is an alternate view to your own. Consider instead that taxing the extremely wealthy may have created the American Middle Class. Consider that extremely rich people are notoriously inefficient spenders of money. They either don't spend it, or they use it to consume wasteful luxury goods, like lavish mansions and high end sports cars. Middle class consumers are more likely to spend more efficiently, on modest houses and cars, on food to feed their families, and on education to increase the earning potential of their progeny. Consider that the creation of the Middle Class was the real cause of America's post-war economic boom.
One of the key turn-arounds in the progressive income tax regime occurred when governments agreed to allow money to freely across international borders. This allowed the wealthy to remove their money from countries with higher taxes. Thus, countries with higher taxes now face economic decline as wealthy residents remove their money from the country. This is the real cause of the association of high taxes with low economic activity. It is not that government necessarily spends poorly, but simply that capital flight drives taxes to the lowest common denominator.
Under this hypothesis, low tax rates would be associated with Middle Class decline. Any honest analysis will admit that the current Middle Class decline in the US is at least tightly correlated with tax rates in the wealthy. The current Middle Class decline began in earnest after Reagan began his tax cut regime.
The parent's link is an interesting article. There is an excellent graph of income inequality. I would draw to your attention the apparent correlation with income tax rates on the wealthy with the health of the middle class. I am not convinced this is a coincidence.
The top American marginal income rates from 1944 to 1963 were 92%. Yes, 92% of income made over the top amount, went to taxation. In 1944, if you made over $200,000, 92% went to the government. In 1963, it was $400,000. And yet, this was a period of profound economic expansion and middle class comfort. Kind of makes you want to question the "conventional wisdom" that all taxes are bad.
This is a list of American historical tax rates: http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/fed_individual_rate_history-june2010.pdf
I have always thought that when schools compete for students in a free market, the market will supply what the consumer demands: high grades for the least amount of effort.
I know it is more complicated than this, and I know that university prestige is an important characteristic in its "value", but the more I look at the school system today, the more I am convinced that education is being increasingly seen as an economic good, something that has value only in its potential to increase future income. The value of an education to intellectually and spiritually enrich a person's life, and by connection the lives of all citizens is I believe being neglected. I believe that our education is increasingly being plagued by something called "credentialism", where the credential, the piece of paper is valued more than the knowledge and wisdom it is supposed to represent. I believe that this will result in the hollowing out of our educational system resulting eventually in social and economic decay.
The association of the moniker "most secure city in the world" with "Mexico City" is enough for me to judge the wisdom and intellectual capacity of the subjects of this article.
I think the problem goes deeper than notation. From what I can see, students are too reliant on blind procedure to get the "answer". They often lack logical skill at the most basic level, missing concepts such as argument, truth, and falsity.
Consider a contradictory system of linear equations, say,
x + y = 5
x + y = 2
Of course, many students will fall back to the graphical approach with this, which is fine, except that I'm not sure they understand what graphs actually mean (e.g. the set of points which make an equation true). They will say there is no intersection, and they have equated the intersection of lines with "the answer", so there is no "answer". But do they understand that each line is the set of all points (x,y) that make each equation true, and that the lack of an intersection means that there is no single point that makes both equations true? Often they don't.
And if they follow the subtraction procedure, where they subtract the second equation from the first equation, then they will get the contradictory equation
0 = 3
Many of them will be flummoxed by the meaning of this. They may make up non-sensical answers, or they may actually get the answer "no solution". But even when they get the answer right, I am not convinced that many actually understand the logical justification for what they say. I suspect many of them do not understand that the above statement is a contradiction.
I think that one way to improve this is to instil in students the habit of logic at an earlier age. I think that teaching some basic logic at the ages of 12 or 13 would improve this. We need to teach these children that there is such as thing as truth and falsity, and that they need to back up what they say with some reasoning. We need to get them into the habit of giving their logical reasoning. I think this could help break the cycle where students learn that the only point of doing a question is to get "an answer" in order to get marks, as opposed to actually understanding a concept.
Well in that case, let's blow 100 trillion dollars RIGHT NOW. If we're going for broke, let's chase it to infinity. Debt be damned, fuck it!
Assuming that you actually make a logical assertion, which I am not sure that you do, let's see how many logical fallacies are implicit or explicit in your comment:
Definitely the straw man fallacy. I didn't say that government debt was always a good thing. And I certainly didn't say that we should spend 100 trillion dollars, or an unlimited amount of money. I simply said that government spending was what brought us out of the Great Depression, in the form of spending on World War II.
Perhaps also the appeal to emotion fallacy, given the last sentence.
I think the black and white fallacy is implicit in your comment, since you seem to divide the world into two groups: those who support unlimited government spending, and those who want to minimize government spending.
Perhaps also your statement implicitly shows the beside the point or red herring fallacy, seeing as that your implicit assertion that I would like to spend an unlimited amount of government money is not relevant to my assertion that government spending brought America out of WWII.
Wow, that's four logical fallacies in one line, plus you didn't seem to make a well formed argument in the first place.
If I owe Jim $10,000 but I can kill him and nobody will ever know, the 'rational' thing to do is kill him. Struggling to pay my debt is just a bunch of sentimentality. Only a psychopath can be purely rational.
The mafia is an excellent model for what happens when the free market is allowed to operate outside the public interest.
FDRs policies did not get us out of the Great Depression (which was only called that in the US). What got us out of the Great Depression was getting into a war. Pulling millions of men out of the labor market had the obvious effect of lowering unemployment.
My god, is the intellectual level of our society so low that posters can blatantly contradict themselves and not even realize it?!!
The above poster claims that FDR's programs (I am assuming he means public works expenditures) did not get us out of the Great Depression. It was the war that pulled America out instead. But what is a war, except a huge public works program, a massive series of government expenditures used to build weapons and to pay soldiers. It is indistinguishable economically from say building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam, except that the products of war are more destructive. The real thing to notice is that war expenditures seem to be the only type of public works program that America will accept in any great amount.
Actually I think that you are displaying the fallacy of ambiguity. Specifically, you are changing the specific meaning of the word "rational" and "irrational" (or perhaps neither of us is being explicit enough in our arguments). In this case, I have being referring to the "efficient market hypothesis" and its implication that prices of goods reflects all available information. Rationality is then a concept of price setting. It is not referring to the inherent irrationality of many of our actual market decisions, which I acknowledge; who knows why people spend hundreds of dollars on designer jeans that cost very little to manufacture when they can buy jeans at Costco for $20.
Let us imagine a person wants to buy an apple. There are two neighboring fruit stands. They are identical in every way, and they are selling identical apples. According to the customer, there are no differences at all between the two fruit stands, and between the fruit they sell. However, stand A sells apples for 25 cents each, while stand B sells identical apples for $5 each. Under the efficient market hypothesis, the customer would always buy apples from stand A; this would be the rational decision. If the customer pays $5 for the apple from stand B, this would be considered irrational under the EMH. Thus, the EMH would imply that stand B would sell no apples at all, if there is an unlimited supply, and that stand B would have to lower its price to compete.
The above seems quite reasonable and obvious. But under much of modern economics, the EMH is taken as an axiom, and is applied to all free market behavior. What I am arguing is that, as you assert, free markets are not rational. I am arguing that since much of modern economic study takes the EMH and builds on it as an axiom, that the theories derived from the EMH are not axiomatic, as has been asserted by economists such as Milton Friedman. The EMH implies a certain type of rationality that I believe is not always displayed in free markets.
If you do not believe me that the EMH implies rationality or that it is the fundamental basis for much of economics, I suggest you do some reading first before responding. To start with, watch the Nova documentary "Mind Over Money". Read the works of different economists, such as Milton Friedman and Paul Krugman. I suggest you read more about the basis of the Chicago School of Economics, and about the basis for Behavioral Economics.
Economists like Milton Friedman and his ilk would put it that in a perfect free market economy there is no such thing as a stock market bubble. There is no such thing as a housing bubble. They would say that any bubble like behavior is due to "distortions" in the market place that cause their perfect system to malfunction. They base these assertions on their assumption that the market always places the best price on a good or service based on all available information. Thus a bubble is impossible. They assume that people buy houses to satisfy their own need for accommodation and to maximize their future net worth. What they miss is that, in seeking to maximize their net worth, individual market actors, and the market itself will buy houses because the prices are going up. They will be afraid that they will be priced out of the market. They will be exuberant because they seem to be making lots of money on rising real estate prices, and they will borrow obscene amounts of money to jump into the rising market, forcing prices up even further. The prices will keep rising for a while, reinforcing the irrational belief that the inflated market is based on real supply and demand factors. Eventually, the prices crash. Since people were buying because the prices were rising, when the prices stop rising, demand dries up, causing the prices to crash.
The situation above has played out in the American real estate market. And it has played out in the stock market many times. Such behavior is inherently irrational. If the market itself, and not just the individual actors displays irrational behavior, then I would argue that the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" is falsified.
Rationality" is based on personal, usually unknowable, factors. It's impossible to prove or disprove the rationality of an economic decision since there's no way that you can take psychological factors, wants and needs into account, some of which may not even be fully known to the subject.
No. We are talking about the rationality of the market itself, and not necessarily about just the individual actors. The assumption is that the market will always set the best price based on supply and demand. The assumption is that the market price is always the most rational price based on all available information. Bubbles are irrational phenomenon. The price is going up because the price is going up. If we have built into our brains inherent irrationality, and if all actors in the market display this to some degree or another, then the market is going to act irrationally, since market behavior is just the overall behavior of all individuals.
I would argue that the intellectual basis of neo-conservative economics comes mainly from the "Rational Market Hypothesis", and is thus largely based on the assumption of rationality. From the assumption of market rationality, there have been derived mathematical models that would make many mathematicians quiver. If you arranged a group of all the people in the world who actually understand these models, I suspect you could fit all of their names on a single sheet of paper (perhaps with a small font). The ideologues take the results or predictions of these models, as derived by Nobel Prize winning economists, and fit them into their ideologies. Then politicians like Reagan listen to their ideological advisors and implement their plans and models. I doubt Reagan himself had any formal understanding of economics beyond first year econ. courses.
Many of the economic theories that our governments have been adhering to over the past few decades have as a core premise that overall, markets behave rationally. Specifically, the "Efficient Market Hypothesis", in which it is proposed that the price for a good or service ALWAYS reflects ALL available information, implicitly assumes that market actors are acting rationally. And the "Efficient Market Hypothesis" is at the core of most of the mind-blowing mathematical economic models that many of our society's decision makers use to make economic decisions. The question is: If humans naturally make irrational decisions because we are biologically predisposed to do so, then how can markets be assumed to behave rationally? There have been striking experiments done on seemingly rational MBA students in which they make staggeringly irrational economic decisions. The monkey experiments seem to reinforce our predisposition to act irrationally.
In other words, the above research points towards falsifying the primary economic ideology that has been used to govern America since Reagan. This is no small matter. It affects all of our lives. And yet, if you listen to Republicans lately, they are still calling for policies derived from these economic models, policies such as tax cuts for the rich, working towards a reduction in governmental economic power, so as to let the power of the private sector and the magical invisible hand of the market place work their economic miracles. Myself, I am more of a Keynsian. I think the market is useful, but it can run amok if not attended to by a government powerful enough to guide it towards the public good.
Here is an excellent episode of the TV series Nova called "Mind over Money", which lays out many of my arguments clearly. The video only streams to the US.
The creationists that I have met or conversed with seem to have a marked lack of logical skill. They don't seem to understand what an argument is, what logic is. They are infuriating to argue with, because their arguments usually degenerate into base contradiction, not unlike Monty Python's argument sketch. They don't usually give premises to support a conclusion in their arguments. Or if they do, their premises don't logically support their conclusion. And if you push them outside the talking points they have been given in their indoctrination at church, pushing them to actually think, they get hostile and turtle up; they won't talk to you again for a while after. They inhabit a world where truth is whatever they decide it to be. Of course, they believe that they are absolutely right, that what they read from the bible and their interpretations of the bible are absolutely true, and that others who differ in their views are absolutely false. However, if we extend this to others and make the decision that all of us may decide what is true based on whatever factors we want, then there is no truth. In such a world, nothing can be absolutely true, and nothing can be absolutely false. In that world, there are no facts, only opinions.
If too many in our society form their views of reality not from rational observation of the physical world, but instead based on vague interpretations of a book written centuries ago and translated numerous times, then truth becomes a commodity, a tool of power. Truth becomes something that can be bought and sold. Those who base their "truth" almost exclusively on bible interpretations will inevitably fall under the sway of preachers, reverends, and other charismatic figures. What those opinion makers say will often be taken for truth without question. Trusted opinion makers will be able to make bold pronouncements of truth, and will often not be questioned. Thus they will have a great deal of power over those who trust them. I would argue that powerful groups or individuals in society will be unable to resist corrupting these trusted opinion makers into changing the truth into something more amenable to their own self-interest. Thus, truth can become a commodity, to be bought and sold for profit and power.
Many who argue that the above isn't a negative development cite freedom of expression, freedom of religion, freedom of thought as justifications. But I would call it "freedom from thought", the freedom not to think, freedom from reason and logic. In a democracy we are free to think whatever we want, and if we want to we are free to turn off our brains and to exist in a blissful bubble of ignorance. However, a vibrant democracy depends on a vigilant and well informed citizenry. If too many of us abandon logic and reason, then democracy itself will be in peril. Those who toss aside reason are shirking their duties as citizens. They should be ashamed.
Here is a posting on Science Magazine's ScienceNow, and here is the original journal article originally published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomy Society. I think it is always better, when possible to refer to original sources when talking about scientific issues. Scientific discussions can become muddled when translated by journalists.
...Make it a habit to take a daily noon sighting and record your distance logger.
Noon sights are easy to understand, but they do not give a very precise fix. Recording the highest angle of the sun (local noon) gives you your latitude. The time at which it occurs gives you longitude, since local noon occurs at a different time at every different longitude. For a more reliable position line, you should probably shoot the sun when the angle is around 50 degrees or so above the horizon. This involves using some fancy calculations using spherical geometry (or looking the results of those calculations up in a sight reduction table. The basic idea isn't that difficult. Imagine you measure the angle of the sun to be 50 degrees and 30 minutes above the horizon at a particular time (GMT). At that time, the sun is directly overhead of a specific location on the Earth. Now draw a line upwards from that point. Trace a cone centered at that point whose edges are 50 degrees 30 minutes above the horizon. This traces a circle on the globe, centered at the location of the sun. You are somewhere on that circle.
The above circle might seem so large as to be useless, but here is the trick. Guess your location. It should be a fairly accurate guess, your best guess (assume no GPS). Now you have a guessed longitude and latitude. It is possible to plug that guessed longitude and latitude, along with the time of the sighting into some spherical geometry formulae. These formulae will give you both the direction of the sun's location from your guessed location, AND the angle that the sun would make to the horizon IF you were at your guessed location. Say the direction of the sun is 225 degrees (SW). Draw a line from your guessed position towards the sun, in the direction 225 degrees (SW). If you drew a line perpendicular to that line towards the sun and through your guessed position, that would be the portion of the circle talked about in the previous paragraph, IF you were at your guessed position. Say the calculations told you that at your guessed position, the angle of the sun to the horizon is not 50 degrees 30 minutes, but instead 50 degrees 32 minutes. You measured the altitude to be 50 degrees 30 min, but at your guessed position it would be 50 degrees 32 minutes. This means that the circle you are actually located on is FARTHER AWAY FROM THE CENTER OF THE CIRCLE than the one for your guessed position since your solar angle is 2 minutes SMALLER (remember, picture the cones that make the circle around the sun's position...as you go farther away from the center, the angle of the sun decreases...if you were at the location of the sun on the Earth, the angle would be 90 degrees). And since 2 minutes of latitude equals 2 nautical miles, all you need to do on your map is to draw another line perpendicular to the line you drew towards the sun, but 2 nautical miles farther from the sun. You are somewhere on that line (remember, that perpendicular line represents a small part of the circle traced out by the cone around the sun's location).
If you want a proper fix, you can read the sun and moon together if they are both visible. Or you can shoot the sun in the morning and the afternoon. Either way, you will get two position lines which will cross near to your actual location. Or you can shoot stars, if you can see the horizon. The tricky part for most people is the calculation of the sun's angle to the horizon at the guessed position, and the calculation of the direction of the sun from your guessed location. There are tables, called sight reduction tables that give you these angles, or you can program the formulae into a calculator, or you can use a navigational calculator. It is possible to use a sextant to find your position within 1 nautical mile, but in real conditions, most people would have trouble getting within 3 to 4 nm. That however is enough in the open ocean for proper navigation.
I personally enjoy using a sextant. There is something deeply satisfying in using a simple device like a sextant to locate oneself. And these methods will work even if your boat is struck by lightning, and all of your onboard electronics are fried.