History is littered with the remains of societies that tried to use extreme measures to wipe out human characteristics that are inherent in our nature. The simple fact is that there will always be crime. Period. Criminal behavior is wired into our genome and is amplified depending on what type of society we live in. We can act to create a society that minimizes criminal behavior, implementing penalties while at the same time addressing inequities that increase criminal behavior. However, no measure can ever truly eliminate crime. We could become a totalitarian society, where big brother watches our every move, and still we would have crime. Less crime, possibly. But would the reduction in crime be worth the loss of freedom?
To me, taking a DNA sample for each citizen would be a step towards America becoming a totalitarian society, and a significant one at that. The potential for abuse would be huge, and we would still be unable to wipe out criminal behavior. This law student obviously doesn't have a good sense of history and of the abuses that are possible when citizens give up their rights in a Quixotic quest to wipe out traits inherent in human nature.
I hate to be semantic here, but the iPhone uses a unix based kernel, and at its heart already does multitasking. Beneath the user facing side, many processes run simultaneously already. What most of the posters here, and TFA are referring to is the ability to run multiple user-facing apps at the same time. This feature has been disabled to simplify the user interface and to reduce battery depletion. While we can debate the merits of that decision, the assertion that the iPhone is like a mid 1980's computer because of a lack of pre-emptive multitasking is fallacious.
Really? You actually believe that shit? Next you'll tell me there is a large breasted Goddess who makes it all so.
The above post is an example of the profound decay in the intellectual level of the public. It is devoid of logic and reason. It is an irrational appeal to emotion and prejudice. If this post is an indicator of the intellectual life of "educated" members of the public, then God help us.
In watching this spectacle, this faux debacle unfold, I am struck that most of what is being said is devoid of any real rational scientific argument. A statement was written that made an unsubstantiated claim. SO BLOODY WHAT! It is freely admitted that the evidence for all of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 doesn't exist. So the scientific process works then, it admits what it doesn't know. But most if not all of the attacks I am reading do not make actual scientific arguments. They instead attack the public's trust in the institutions of science. And the public's trust in scientists is completely irrelevant to the truth of their arguments. Most of what I read from the attack posts here amounts to irrational ad-hominem attacks on honorable and truth seeking scientists. Nothing more. You denialists. You faux-skeptics. By relying on irrational ad-hominem attacks you are chipping away at the rational foundations of our society, eroding the foundations of logic and reason which have enabled our civlization to rise above humanity's savage and irrational nature. Your attacks on the noble scientific institutions that have given us unprecedented prosperity have the potential to eventually devastate our social and economic well being. Shame on you.
A premise of the social sciences is that human social behavior can be studied from outside, as if the person observing the social behavior is not part of society, an impartial alien observer. I think that there is an important consequence of thinking like a social scientist that is often overlooked. I believe that this type of thinking, where one observes society from the outside encourages passivity in the observer. Specifically, in the case of TFA, it is found that people filter their scientific views through a political spectrum, that they don't use logic, reason, and observation to form their opinions, that in fact many of the participants in the study are quite irrational. A person who views society from the outside, through the lens of social science might shrug their shoulders and think "hmmm....that's interesting. I guess people aren't as rational as we believe them to be.". And if enough of us think this way, a sense of profound apathy and passivity about our civilization becomes widespread.
I however have a problem with this passive outside view. In my opinion, if the participants in the study were behaving irrationally when forming opinions, then they should be ashamed of themselves!. Our civilization, our democracy depends on rational and logical decision making on the part of the public. If too many of us abandon logic and reason, then our democracy will begin to make increasingly bad and irrational decisions. If too many of us start to believe that there are no facts, only opinions, then democratic dialog between citizens will become increasingly difficult. Instead of debating based on a common set of facts, we will "debate" by shouting opinions back and forth at each other, with little reason and logic.
I do believe that the social sciences have their place, and that some useful insights can be gained from them. But I also believe that the ascendancy of the social sciences to the top of our academic pyramid has had damaging consequences, which if left unchecked could result in societal decay, intellectually, socially, and economically. We must remember that we are all part of this civilization, and that the willful ignorance of our fellow citizens can and will affect us. Though we are all free to think and believe whatever we want, there are some beliefs and ways of thinking that are worthy of shame.
I suspect my beliefs on this are closer to yours than you think. Although I believe that it is a good and noble thing to pursue the Truth through rational enquiry, I am not under any illusions that we as puny and flawed humans will find that Truth. I suspect that many of the horrible tragedies you ascribe to a "sterile system of thought" occur when humans arrogantly assume that they have found this Truth. The more I have pursued my education, the more I have pursued "Truth" in my life, the more I realize how puny we are, and how little we ever know. That humility is one of the great rewards of a real education. In the words of Voltaire, "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".
...The desire to delegate important human choices to a sterile system of thought is at the center of the worst tragedies in human history.
Our inadequacy to answer those questions is what should drive us to greater inquiry. In the face of an arbitrary decision that affects countless lives, the concerns and values of those other lives suddenly take on a profound relevance. That which you deride is at the very heart of the spirit of both inquiry and human decency. Your thesis about the nature of human progress is highly dubious.
And yet the very logical structure of your argument belies a Greek origin. The scholarly inquiry you speak of will be performed at institutions that are explicitly inspired by the Greeks. You are no doubt a member of the middle class, whose creation was inspired by the Polis of Greek society. You own property I assume, and are thus also a beneficiary of Greek wisdom, as private property was originally a Greek idea. You live in a country governed according to a constitution, that is ultimately accountable to the public...that is a Greek idea too.
It seems to me that you weren't comfortable with making that judgment, so you decided revert to a more comfortable zone, appealing to ancient authority. Boo.
I am not appealing to truth as expounded by the Greeks. I am referring to a Greek ethic in which the pursuit of Truth is a noble thing. It is that ethic that has been one of the primary reasons for the rise of our civilization.
I wouldn't doubt that the decline in the quality of education about our civilization's historical roots (Greek, Roman, history of religion, etc..) has played a part in the decline of civic discourse in the country.
However, those previously classically trained leaders have always been a small minority. Manipulation of those leaders, regardless of their integrity or education level, is the easiest means to completely subvert the country as a whole.
It wasn't too long ago that to graduate with a PhD at any reputable university you had to have studied some Greek and/or Latin. The classics were also central to primary and secondary education in the general public. If I am not mistaken, a large proportion of high school students would have read some Homer and/or Plato. That type of education permeates throughout society, and would influence people in subtle and important ways.
I think that I would argue that classical education at the primary and secondary level could have even more impact on society than including it at the university level. If you can instil in children a solid sense of ethics in grade 7, those habits of mind will echo throughout their lives.
Also, when I write about classical education at the university level, I don't just refer to students majoring in classics (though classics majors are a dying breed, and the field itself is rotting from the inside). I am in the midst of reading Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World", and Sagan recollects studying the Greeks during his PhD. I would argue that not only are universities not mentioning the Greek origins of our intellectual traditions, they are in fact abandoning those traditions by moving away from the idea that Truth should be pursued for Truth's sake.
Classical education should be more than simply learning authors, dates, and places. It should be about learning how the Greeks thought, how they acted. Students should be explicitly taught logic and rhetoric. Those skills should be applied in debating important current issues. They should read and critically analyze Socratic dialogues, Homeric myths and Sophoclean tragedies. Such an education has the power to change lives, altering and broadening one's outlook on life. Take an honest look at the Greek worldview and you will realize how empty, how vacuous our modern consumer culture is. It is no wonder people are turning to fanatical religion.
So in the end, I would argue that if classical education was more widespread, our society would be less likely to tolerate the kind of rampant corruption that is currently creeping through our halls of power. We would demand better news, more intelligent debate in our media. Instead, we are left with hermetically isolated consumers interested almost entirely in their own short to medium term ability to consume. Such people are drones who have lost much of their ability to participate actively in a democratic society. They vote mainly to maintain their ability to continue to consume.
I would lay the blame for that squarely on the 24 hour media machines, and the news industry in general, as ownership diversity shrinks.
No doubt this is part of the problem. But consider what might have caused the systemic decay of our media system. It used to be that those who graduated from university were schooled in Greek and/or Roman literature and philosophy. Through this, ideally they gained a sense of ethics and a clear view of the principles that make western democracies thrive. Such education would give students an understanding of history, of logic and region, of life. In many ways, these educated citizens were important leaders in society.
Over the last three decades, classical education has largely disappeared from universities. Universities have shifted emphasis to the social sciences, to economics, to technology. Education has increasingly had to give utilitarian justification for its existence. The social sciences, which seem to look at society from the outside perspective of alien observers, have spread views of cultural relativism. Fields such as economics are largely valueless attempts to maximize "economic activity" (the assumption that increased economic activity will improve human well being is implicit, but I believe this connection is dubious).
As a result of this, I would argue that the educated elite in our society have lost a sense of the roots of western civilization. Our elites are increasingly technocratic, tweaking knobs and dials with little appreciation of the big picture of our civilization (I am referring to the elites on both the "left" and the "right"). Our elites seem to fall under the spell of faddish and simplistic ideologies. On the right, the dominant ideology is centred around the idea that selfishness on the part of all units of society will maximize economic activity. The Greeks would have said that selfishness is a negative quality, that when people act selfishly, it encourages the worst aspects of human nature. So much for that wisdom today.
These oblivious elites have allowed or encouraged the development of media monopolies. They don't seem to understand the ultimate consequences of their policies. They don't seem to understand that free and open discussion is the lifeblood of our society, socially, politically, AND economically.
I posted the following comment recently, but I think it is germane to this discussion at hand:
I am noticing in many of the posts here a distinct lack of intellectual rigor. A friend of mine is an engineering professor, and he notices this amongst his students too. Specifically, many of his students have an attitude where they feel they can question any scientific theory. Fine you might say. After all, isn't it good to be skeptical? Well yes, perhaps. But when he asks these students specifically why they doubt a particular theory, they can't make a logical argument to support their position. They just say it doesn't intuitively seem right. It is almost as if they don't really comprehend the reasons for their opinions. And this is amongst elite engineering students.
If I could venture my own opinion on this, I think that relativistic values (and I don't mean Einstein) have seeped into much of our educational system, and by extension to society at large. This relativistic world is a place where there is no real truth, where all opinions are relative to the self and are essentially given equal value. In such a world, taken to its extreme, there are no facts, only opinions. Everything is relative.
On the left, we see university professors pontificating from institutions founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry that these Greek principles are merely just another cultural view in their relativistic universe. And from the right, we see religious leaders cavalierly rejecting the search for Truth through rational inquiry and observation, preferring to create their own "Truth" as revealed in the bible. What both of these extremes are forgetting is that this country was founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry, that in the founders' minds, the Greeks were a primary inspiration. Separation of Church and State; Science; Universities where Truth is the primary virtue; the ideals of Justice; a three class society, in which the Middle Class (the Polis) forms the backbone of society; Democracy. These were ALL Greek values and ideals. And has been these Greek ideals that have made our country great.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you read some Greek literature. Plato. Aristotle. Aristophanes. Sophocles. In Greek literature you will find commentary on many of the most important issues our society faces. The Greeks even wrote about cultural relativism. I believe we are sorely in need of a rediscovery of Greek wisdom.
And here is my main point. I believe that many in our society are abandoning the Greek values that have made our civilization great. Values such as searching for Truth for Truth's sake through rational inquiry and logic. Skills such as rigorous logic applied in rational debate. In our modern technological society it often seems that Truth should only be pursued for material gain, for profit and not simply because it is noble to pursue the truth. Thus it is easy for business executives to ignore inconvenient facts if those facts might interfere with profit margins. And it is easy for religious followers to adopt truths that make them feel more comfortable with their chosen worldview. After all, if all Truth is relative, then why not pick an easy and comfortable Truth.
If the North polar ice shrinks it is Global Warming.
Yet when the Antarctic ice grows it is Climate Change.
There is a difference between the potential disappearance of Northern sea ice near the North Pole and fleeting and temporary growth in seasonal sea ice around Antarctica. In the former case, the sea ice has remained intact for hundreds of thousands of years, while in the case of the latter, the sea ice disappears every year. And before you assert that Antarctic land ice has been growing, I would point out to you that the parts of Antarctica that may have had snow growth are mountainous. In the lower regions, the land ice is disappearing.
Your comment demonstrates possibly willful ignorance of the detailed complexity of physical systems. The apparent growth of opinions such as yours demonstrates a dangerous decay in the level of intellectual rigor in our society. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I am noticing in many of the posts here a distinct lack of intellectual rigour. A friend of mine is an engineering professor, and he notices this amongst his students too. Specifically, many of his students have an attitude where they feel they can question any scientific theory. Fine you might say. After all, isn't it good to be skeptical? Well yes, perhaps. But when he asks these students specifically why they doubt a particular theory, they can't make a logical argument to support their position. They just say it doesn't intuitively seem right. It is almost as if they don't really comprehend the reasons for their opinions. And this is amongst elite engineering students.
If I could venture my own opinion on this, I think that relativistic values (and I don't mean Einstein) have seeped into much of our educational system, and by extension to society at large. This relativistic world is a place where there is no real truth, where all opinions are relative to the self and are essentially given equal value. In such a world, taken to its extreme, there are no facts, only opinions. Everything is relative.
On the left, we see university professors pontificating from institutions founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry that these Greek principles are merely just another cultural view in their relativistic universe. And from the right, we see religious leaders cavalierly rejecting the search for Truth through rational inquiry and observation, preferring to create their own "Truth" as revealed in the bible. What both of these extremes are forgetting is that this country was founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry, that in the founders' minds, the Greeks were a primary inspiration. Separation of Church and State; Science; Universities where Truth is the primary virtue; the ideals of Justice; a three class society, in which the Middle Class (the Polis) forms the backbone of society; Democracy. These were ALL Greek values and ideals. And has been these Greek ideals that have made our country great.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you read some Greek literature. Plato. Aristotle. Aristophanes. Sophocles. In Greek literature you will find commentary on many of the most important issues our society faces. The Greeks even wrote about cultural relativism. I believe we are sorely in need of a rediscovery of Greek wisdom.
And here is my main point. I believe that many in our society are abandoning the Greek values that have made our civilization great. Values such as searching for Truth for Truth's sake through rational inquiry and logic. Skills such as rigorous logic applied in rational debate. In our modern technological society it often seems that Truth should only be pursued for material gain, for profit and not simply because it is noble to pursue the truth. Thus it is easy for business executives to ignore inconvenient facts if those facts might interfere with profit margins. And it is easy for religious followers to adopt truths that make them feel more comfortable with their chosen worldview. After all, if all Truth is relative, then why not pick an easy and comfortable Truth.
Look, it was a swing, and a miss. If it is about content consumption, it must, 100% must, have flash.
Flash is awful. HTML5 will do all flash can do and more, without sucking my CPU cycles and battery life. My browser blocks flash. Whenever I open flash component, my browser with flash eventually goes to the top of my thread list in terms of processor usage. My CPU fan eventually whirs on.
I think we should boycott flash. If enough people start blocking it, ad producers will be forced to change over to HTML5, which is an open standard.
Yes, the interstate highway system did kill trains, especially the interurban trains surrounding urban areas. But that isn't the point. The building of the interstate system, a massive government project, succeeded in reaching its goal of allowing the utilization of vast swaths of under-utilized land, allowing commensurate increases in economic capacity. This was the real goal of pushing automobile transportation. Unfortunately, implicit in this goal was a massive surge in urban sprawl, pollution, and most importantly a huge surge in the production of greenhouse gasses.
I am arguing here that the assumption that government programs always fail and are almost always fundamentally flawed is incorrect, and is not born out by historical evidence. Government CAN achieve constructive goals in society, IF those in government are wise rulers.
I'm not sure if the potential of this device is immediately apparent. Wait for a couple of years for the apps to be developed. I don't see any real reason why this device cannot outperform current tablet PC's. Firstly, what is to stop you from using a stylus? What is stopping application developers from creating apps that allow annotation of PDF files or that duplicate the functionality of "One Note". If the market demands such functionality, will the market not deliver it?
Furthermore, what makes you think that software such as "One Note" is anything but a niche market for certain professionals? And do you really need to be able to scribble ugly handwriting on the screen? Aren't there better ways of inputting text? I suppose the market will decide.
Anyways, my opinion is that this is an embryonic platform. Once HTML5 starts to take over, the Flash issue will be less of a concern. And with HTML5, you will be able to do things with a browser that you probably couldn't imagine.
I am not saying that the skills learned in business school are useless. Only that claims that management is a completely transferrable skill independent of the specifics of the operations of any type of business are overblown.
I should also specify something more about the particular food plant that I am familiar with. The previous manager had worked his way up from the shop floor. He new the ins and outs of food manufacturing. He was familiar with how much maintenance was necessary on the machines, how much cleaning was necessary, how hard he could push the machinery and the workers. He was fair minded but firm. And when he ran the plant, operations ran smoothly and the company made lots of money. The plant gained a reputation for reliability and quality. But he didn't have an MBA, and so he was pushed out by upper management types with MBA's.
Fast forward to the new guy, an MBA manager who previously ran a train plant. He would sit up in his office staring at graphs. His method of management was basically to control money flows. He would cut money from sanitation, from quality control, from food safety testing. He would push the system to its limits, and several times the system broke, hurting the reputation of the company. To top it off, the company lost more money under his watch.
The business schools, to a certain extent, teach managers to cut themselves off from the details of operations, to abstract the operations of a company to a certain number of parameters. I am arguing that this is not a good methodology, and will not usually lead to an agile and innovative company.
A good manager should also be able to recognize what areas they don't understand and then assemble a group of people to advise & teach her/him on the details of the specific industry or company.
Fair enough. No one knows everything. But wouldn't it be better if a manager had familiarity with the business he was managing? Wouldn't that improve the ability to make strategic decisions? Wouldn't direct and detailed knowledge of the workings of a company help a manager in discerning whether his subordinates are giving him accurate information? Wouldn't such familiarity allow a leader to improve his vision for the future of his product and his industry?
according to business school product a manager doesn't need business-specific knowledge so hire business school product. Nice scam. As transparent as it is destructive...
Failure upon failure, and yet MBA's just keep on hiring clones of themselves.
I think that Apple Computers is an excellent example contrasting the differences in management styles between MBA types and actual product experts. Steve Jobs has detailed knowledge and definite ideas about the types of products he wants his company to produce. He was closely involved in the creation of the original Mac interface in the mid-1980's, and the company grew quite well. Jobs was forced out, and the company was then run by MBA types, who sought to "maximize" return from existing product lines. Apple ceased to be a leader in its industry, and it nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990's. Steve Jobs was brought back to the company, and has succeeded in transforming Apple into a technical leader again.
To the typical business school product, Steve Jobs would likely seem as a reckless dreamer. Management types would likely focus less on envisioning a future for a company, and more time gazing at graphs and other proxies for reality, in a quest to magically bring a company to profitability.
Managing people is directly transferrable between many different fields.
Managing business processes and operations is almost always industry (if not company) specific.
Yes, that is what the business schools say. While I don't deny that there is some truth to this assertion, I think that the situation is more complicated than your assertion would imply.
Interesting article. From what I have observed over the past few decades, there has been a steady growth in ideology in business schools and economics departments. These ideologies are usually simplistic models or sets of ideas that are supposed to be broadly applicable. Many of these ideologies have come and gone like fads. Many of them, while useful, are not axiomatic. Business school graduates often treat the "management" skill-set that they learn in school as broadly applicable to any field. Thus, MBA graduates may move between extremely diverse positions. I know of one that went from managing a train manufacturing plant to managing a food manufacturing facility. Because he had no previous experience with working with food, he faced significant difficulties both in making the food plant operate smoothly, and in making a profit. He didn't have a clear idea of where he could cut within the operation without endangering food safety. He lacked both detailed knowledge of production methods, and had a poor understanding of scientific principles. Under the ideology of business school, this person's management skills should have been directly transferrable between many different fields. The reality on the ground was quite different
In the case of the topic at hand, it seems to me that one particular model, consisting of customers and service providers with all such relationships entail, is not optimally applicable to a specific situation (IT). The economy, and the world, is far more complicated and subtle than simplistic and faddish business school ideologies.
Many of the posts seem to be missing a key feature of this airplane: cabin comfort. To quote from Wikipedia,
The internal pressure will be increased to the equivalent of 6,000 feet (1,800 m) altitude instead of the 8,000 feet (2,400 m) on conventional aircraft. According to Boeing, in a joint study with Oklahoma State University, this will significantly improve passenger comfort.[99][100] A higher cabin pressure is possible in part due to better properties of composite materials.[101] Higher humidity in the passenger cabin is possible because of the use of composites, which do not corrode. Cabin air is provided by electrically driven compressors using no engine bleed air.[102] An advanced cabin air-conditioning system provides better air quality: Ozone is removed from outside air; HEPA filters remove bacteria, viruses and fungi; and a gaseous filtration system removes odors, irritants and gaseous contaminants.[84]
Okay, now prove to me that the tree ring data prior to the 1960's stayed married to the actual temperature back farther than 1900. What's that? You can't? Well, doesn't that more or less invalidate all the tree ring data collected?
Well, first of all, your comment gives it away that you do NOT understand the scientific method. You ask that I "prove" the tree ring proxy data is associated with temperatures before 1900. If you knew anything important about science, you would understand that you can never "prove" anything. Science provides a way to disprove nonsense. After disproving competing hypotheses, the most likely hypotheses are the only ones left standing.
Secondly, it is likely that the tree ring data has been correlated with other temperature proxies going back 1000 years. If tree ring temperature proxies imply the same temperature trends as several other proxies, then it is highly probable that the tree ring proxies are a valid stand in for temperature, even going back 1000 years.
If you don't understand science, then you have no business making the type of certain pronouncements that you have. Your comments are an example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Or you are just trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
History is littered with the remains of societies that tried to use extreme measures to wipe out human characteristics that are inherent in our nature. The simple fact is that there will always be crime. Period. Criminal behavior is wired into our genome and is amplified depending on what type of society we live in. We can act to create a society that minimizes criminal behavior, implementing penalties while at the same time addressing inequities that increase criminal behavior. However, no measure can ever truly eliminate crime. We could become a totalitarian society, where big brother watches our every move, and still we would have crime. Less crime, possibly. But would the reduction in crime be worth the loss of freedom?
To me, taking a DNA sample for each citizen would be a step towards America becoming a totalitarian society, and a significant one at that. The potential for abuse would be huge, and we would still be unable to wipe out criminal behavior. This law student obviously doesn't have a good sense of history and of the abuses that are possible when citizens give up their rights in a Quixotic quest to wipe out traits inherent in human nature.
I hate to be semantic here, but the iPhone uses a unix based kernel, and at its heart already does multitasking. Beneath the user facing side, many processes run simultaneously already. What most of the posters here, and TFA are referring to is the ability to run multiple user-facing apps at the same time. This feature has been disabled to simplify the user interface and to reduce battery depletion. While we can debate the merits of that decision, the assertion that the iPhone is like a mid 1980's computer because of a lack of pre-emptive multitasking is fallacious.
The above post is an example of the profound decay in the intellectual level of the public. It is devoid of logic and reason. It is an irrational appeal to emotion and prejudice. If this post is an indicator of the intellectual life of "educated" members of the public, then God help us.
In watching this spectacle, this faux debacle unfold, I am struck that most of what is being said is devoid of any real rational scientific argument. A statement was written that made an unsubstantiated claim. SO BLOODY WHAT! It is freely admitted that the evidence for all of the Himalayan glaciers disappearing by 2035 doesn't exist. So the scientific process works then, it admits what it doesn't know. But most if not all of the attacks I am reading do not make actual scientific arguments. They instead attack the public's trust in the institutions of science. And the public's trust in scientists is completely irrelevant to the truth of their arguments. Most of what I read from the attack posts here amounts to irrational ad-hominem attacks on honorable and truth seeking scientists. Nothing more. You denialists. You faux-skeptics. By relying on irrational ad-hominem attacks you are chipping away at the rational foundations of our society, eroding the foundations of logic and reason which have enabled our civlization to rise above humanity's savage and irrational nature. Your attacks on the noble scientific institutions that have given us unprecedented prosperity have the potential to eventually devastate our social and economic well being. Shame on you.
A premise of the social sciences is that human social behavior can be studied from outside, as if the person observing the social behavior is not part of society, an impartial alien observer. I think that there is an important consequence of thinking like a social scientist that is often overlooked. I believe that this type of thinking, where one observes society from the outside encourages passivity in the observer. Specifically, in the case of TFA, it is found that people filter their scientific views through a political spectrum, that they don't use logic, reason, and observation to form their opinions, that in fact many of the participants in the study are quite irrational. A person who views society from the outside, through the lens of social science might shrug their shoulders and think "hmmm....that's interesting. I guess people aren't as rational as we believe them to be.". And if enough of us think this way, a sense of profound apathy and passivity about our civilization becomes widespread.
I however have a problem with this passive outside view. In my opinion, if the participants in the study were behaving irrationally when forming opinions, then they should be ashamed of themselves!. Our civilization, our democracy depends on rational and logical decision making on the part of the public. If too many of us abandon logic and reason, then our democracy will begin to make increasingly bad and irrational decisions. If too many of us start to believe that there are no facts, only opinions, then democratic dialog between citizens will become increasingly difficult. Instead of debating based on a common set of facts, we will "debate" by shouting opinions back and forth at each other, with little reason and logic.
I do believe that the social sciences have their place, and that some useful insights can be gained from them. But I also believe that the ascendancy of the social sciences to the top of our academic pyramid has had damaging consequences, which if left unchecked could result in societal decay, intellectually, socially, and economically. We must remember that we are all part of this civilization, and that the willful ignorance of our fellow citizens can and will affect us. Though we are all free to think and believe whatever we want, there are some beliefs and ways of thinking that are worthy of shame.
I suspect my beliefs on this are closer to yours than you think. Although I believe that it is a good and noble thing to pursue the Truth through rational enquiry, I am not under any illusions that we as puny and flawed humans will find that Truth. I suspect that many of the horrible tragedies you ascribe to a "sterile system of thought" occur when humans arrogantly assume that they have found this Truth. The more I have pursued my education, the more I have pursued "Truth" in my life, the more I realize how puny we are, and how little we ever know. That humility is one of the great rewards of a real education. In the words of Voltaire, "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is absurd".
And yet the very logical structure of your argument belies a Greek origin. The scholarly inquiry you speak of will be performed at institutions that are explicitly inspired by the Greeks. You are no doubt a member of the middle class, whose creation was inspired by the Polis of Greek society. You own property I assume, and are thus also a beneficiary of Greek wisdom, as private property was originally a Greek idea. You live in a country governed according to a constitution, that is ultimately accountable to the public...that is a Greek idea too.
I am not appealing to truth as expounded by the Greeks. I am referring to a Greek ethic in which the pursuit of Truth is a noble thing. It is that ethic that has been one of the primary reasons for the rise of our civilization.
It wasn't too long ago that to graduate with a PhD at any reputable university you had to have studied some Greek and/or Latin. The classics were also central to primary and secondary education in the general public. If I am not mistaken, a large proportion of high school students would have read some Homer and/or Plato. That type of education permeates throughout society, and would influence people in subtle and important ways.
I think that I would argue that classical education at the primary and secondary level could have even more impact on society than including it at the university level. If you can instil in children a solid sense of ethics in grade 7, those habits of mind will echo throughout their lives.
Also, when I write about classical education at the university level, I don't just refer to students majoring in classics (though classics majors are a dying breed, and the field itself is rotting from the inside). I am in the midst of reading Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World", and Sagan recollects studying the Greeks during his PhD. I would argue that not only are universities not mentioning the Greek origins of our intellectual traditions, they are in fact abandoning those traditions by moving away from the idea that Truth should be pursued for Truth's sake.
Classical education should be more than simply learning authors, dates, and places. It should be about learning how the Greeks thought, how they acted. Students should be explicitly taught logic and rhetoric. Those skills should be applied in debating important current issues. They should read and critically analyze Socratic dialogues, Homeric myths and Sophoclean tragedies. Such an education has the power to change lives, altering and broadening one's outlook on life. Take an honest look at the Greek worldview and you will realize how empty, how vacuous our modern consumer culture is. It is no wonder people are turning to fanatical religion.
So in the end, I would argue that if classical education was more widespread, our society would be less likely to tolerate the kind of rampant corruption that is currently creeping through our halls of power. We would demand better news, more intelligent debate in our media. Instead, we are left with hermetically isolated consumers interested almost entirely in their own short to medium term ability to consume. Such people are drones who have lost much of their ability to participate actively in a democratic society. They vote mainly to maintain their ability to continue to consume.
No doubt this is part of the problem. But consider what might have caused the systemic decay of our media system. It used to be that those who graduated from university were schooled in Greek and/or Roman literature and philosophy. Through this, ideally they gained a sense of ethics and a clear view of the principles that make western democracies thrive. Such education would give students an understanding of history, of logic and region, of life. In many ways, these educated citizens were important leaders in society.
Over the last three decades, classical education has largely disappeared from universities. Universities have shifted emphasis to the social sciences, to economics, to technology. Education has increasingly had to give utilitarian justification for its existence. The social sciences, which seem to look at society from the outside perspective of alien observers, have spread views of cultural relativism. Fields such as economics are largely valueless attempts to maximize "economic activity" (the assumption that increased economic activity will improve human well being is implicit, but I believe this connection is dubious).
As a result of this, I would argue that the educated elite in our society have lost a sense of the roots of western civilization. Our elites are increasingly technocratic, tweaking knobs and dials with little appreciation of the big picture of our civilization (I am referring to the elites on both the "left" and the "right"). Our elites seem to fall under the spell of faddish and simplistic ideologies. On the right, the dominant ideology is centred around the idea that selfishness on the part of all units of society will maximize economic activity. The Greeks would have said that selfishness is a negative quality, that when people act selfishly, it encourages the worst aspects of human nature. So much for that wisdom today.
These oblivious elites have allowed or encouraged the development of media monopolies. They don't seem to understand the ultimate consequences of their policies. They don't seem to understand that free and open discussion is the lifeblood of our society, socially, politically, AND economically.
I posted the following comment recently, but I think it is germane to this discussion at hand:
I am noticing in many of the posts here a distinct lack of intellectual rigor. A friend of mine is an engineering professor, and he notices this amongst his students too. Specifically, many of his students have an attitude where they feel they can question any scientific theory. Fine you might say. After all, isn't it good to be skeptical? Well yes, perhaps. But when he asks these students specifically why they doubt a particular theory, they can't make a logical argument to support their position. They just say it doesn't intuitively seem right. It is almost as if they don't really comprehend the reasons for their opinions. And this is amongst elite engineering students.
If I could venture my own opinion on this, I think that relativistic values (and I don't mean Einstein) have seeped into much of our educational system, and by extension to society at large. This relativistic world is a place where there is no real truth, where all opinions are relative to the self and are essentially given equal value. In such a world, taken to its extreme, there are no facts, only opinions. Everything is relative.
On the left, we see university professors pontificating from institutions founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry that these Greek principles are merely just another cultural view in their relativistic universe. And from the right, we see religious leaders cavalierly rejecting the search for Truth through rational inquiry and observation, preferring to create their own "Truth" as revealed in the bible. What both of these extremes are forgetting is that this country was founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry, that in the founders' minds, the Greeks were a primary inspiration. Separation of Church and State; Science; Universities where Truth is the primary virtue; the ideals of Justice; a three class society, in which the Middle Class (the Polis) forms the backbone of society; Democracy. These were ALL Greek values and ideals. And has been these Greek ideals that have made our country great.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you read some Greek literature. Plato. Aristotle. Aristophanes. Sophocles. In Greek literature you will find commentary on many of the most important issues our society faces. The Greeks even wrote about cultural relativism. I believe we are sorely in need of a rediscovery of Greek wisdom.
And here is my main point. I believe that many in our society are abandoning the Greek values that have made our civilization great. Values such as searching for Truth for Truth's sake through rational inquiry and logic. Skills such as rigorous logic applied in rational debate. In our modern technological society it often seems that Truth should only be pursued for material gain, for profit and not simply because it is noble to pursue the truth. Thus it is easy for business executives to ignore inconvenient facts if those facts might interfere with profit margins. And it is easy for religious followers to adopt truths that make them feel more comfortable with their chosen worldview. After all, if all Truth is relative, then why not pick an easy and comfortable Truth.
There is a difference between the potential disappearance of Northern sea ice near the North Pole and fleeting and temporary growth in seasonal sea ice around Antarctica. In the former case, the sea ice has remained intact for hundreds of thousands of years, while in the case of the latter, the sea ice disappears every year. And before you assert that Antarctic land ice has been growing, I would point out to you that the parts of Antarctica that may have had snow growth are mountainous. In the lower regions, the land ice is disappearing.
Your comment demonstrates possibly willful ignorance of the detailed complexity of physical systems. The apparent growth of opinions such as yours demonstrates a dangerous decay in the level of intellectual rigor in our society. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I am noticing in many of the posts here a distinct lack of intellectual rigour. A friend of mine is an engineering professor, and he notices this amongst his students too. Specifically, many of his students have an attitude where they feel they can question any scientific theory. Fine you might say. After all, isn't it good to be skeptical? Well yes, perhaps. But when he asks these students specifically why they doubt a particular theory, they can't make a logical argument to support their position. They just say it doesn't intuitively seem right. It is almost as if they don't really comprehend the reasons for their opinions. And this is amongst elite engineering students.
If I could venture my own opinion on this, I think that relativistic values (and I don't mean Einstein) have seeped into much of our educational system, and by extension to society at large. This relativistic world is a place where there is no real truth, where all opinions are relative to the self and are essentially given equal value. In such a world, taken to its extreme, there are no facts, only opinions. Everything is relative.
On the left, we see university professors pontificating from institutions founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry that these Greek principles are merely just another cultural view in their relativistic universe. And from the right, we see religious leaders cavalierly rejecting the search for Truth through rational inquiry and observation, preferring to create their own "Truth" as revealed in the bible. What both of these extremes are forgetting is that this country was founded on Greek principles of Truth and Freedom of Inquiry, that in the founders' minds, the Greeks were a primary inspiration. Separation of Church and State; Science; Universities where Truth is the primary virtue; the ideals of Justice; a three class society, in which the Middle Class (the Polis) forms the backbone of society; Democracy. These were ALL Greek values and ideals. And has been these Greek ideals that have made our country great.
If you don't believe this, I suggest you read some Greek literature. Plato. Aristotle. Aristophanes. Sophocles. In Greek literature you will find commentary on many of the most important issues our society faces. The Greeks even wrote about cultural relativism. I believe we are sorely in need of a rediscovery of Greek wisdom.
And here is my main point. I believe that many in our society are abandoning the Greek values that have made our civilization great. Values such as searching for Truth for Truth's sake through rational inquiry and logic. Skills such as rigorous logic applied in rational debate. In our modern technological society it often seems that Truth should only be pursued for material gain, for profit and not simply because it is noble to pursue the truth. Thus it is easy for business executives to ignore inconvenient facts if those facts might interfere with profit margins. And it is easy for religious followers to adopt truths that make them feel more comfortable with their chosen worldview. After all, if all Truth is relative, then why not pick an easy and comfortable Truth.
Flash is awful. HTML5 will do all flash can do and more, without sucking my CPU cycles and battery life. My browser blocks flash. Whenever I open flash component, my browser with flash eventually goes to the top of my thread list in terms of processor usage. My CPU fan eventually whirs on.
I think we should boycott flash. If enough people start blocking it, ad producers will be forced to change over to HTML5, which is an open standard.
Yes, the interstate highway system did kill trains, especially the interurban trains surrounding urban areas. But that isn't the point. The building of the interstate system, a massive government project, succeeded in reaching its goal of allowing the utilization of vast swaths of under-utilized land, allowing commensurate increases in economic capacity. This was the real goal of pushing automobile transportation. Unfortunately, implicit in this goal was a massive surge in urban sprawl, pollution, and most importantly a huge surge in the production of greenhouse gasses.
I am arguing here that the assumption that government programs always fail and are almost always fundamentally flawed is incorrect, and is not born out by historical evidence. Government CAN achieve constructive goals in society, IF those in government are wise rulers.
I'm not sure if the potential of this device is immediately apparent. Wait for a couple of years for the apps to be developed. I don't see any real reason why this device cannot outperform current tablet PC's. Firstly, what is to stop you from using a stylus? What is stopping application developers from creating apps that allow annotation of PDF files or that duplicate the functionality of "One Note". If the market demands such functionality, will the market not deliver it?
Furthermore, what makes you think that software such as "One Note" is anything but a niche market for certain professionals? And do you really need to be able to scribble ugly handwriting on the screen? Aren't there better ways of inputting text? I suppose the market will decide.
Anyways, my opinion is that this is an embryonic platform. Once HTML5 starts to take over, the Flash issue will be less of a concern. And with HTML5, you will be able to do things with a browser that you probably couldn't imagine.
I am not saying that the skills learned in business school are useless. Only that claims that management is a completely transferrable skill independent of the specifics of the operations of any type of business are overblown.
I should also specify something more about the particular food plant that I am familiar with. The previous manager had worked his way up from the shop floor. He new the ins and outs of food manufacturing. He was familiar with how much maintenance was necessary on the machines, how much cleaning was necessary, how hard he could push the machinery and the workers. He was fair minded but firm. And when he ran the plant, operations ran smoothly and the company made lots of money. The plant gained a reputation for reliability and quality. But he didn't have an MBA, and so he was pushed out by upper management types with MBA's.
Fast forward to the new guy, an MBA manager who previously ran a train plant. He would sit up in his office staring at graphs. His method of management was basically to control money flows. He would cut money from sanitation, from quality control, from food safety testing. He would push the system to its limits, and several times the system broke, hurting the reputation of the company. To top it off, the company lost more money under his watch.
The business schools, to a certain extent, teach managers to cut themselves off from the details of operations, to abstract the operations of a company to a certain number of parameters. I am arguing that this is not a good methodology, and will not usually lead to an agile and innovative company.
Fair enough. No one knows everything. But wouldn't it be better if a manager had familiarity with the business he was managing? Wouldn't that improve the ability to make strategic decisions? Wouldn't direct and detailed knowledge of the workings of a company help a manager in discerning whether his subordinates are giving him accurate information? Wouldn't such familiarity allow a leader to improve his vision for the future of his product and his industry?
Failure upon failure, and yet MBA's just keep on hiring clones of themselves.
I think that Apple Computers is an excellent example contrasting the differences in management styles between MBA types and actual product experts. Steve Jobs has detailed knowledge and definite ideas about the types of products he wants his company to produce. He was closely involved in the creation of the original Mac interface in the mid-1980's, and the company grew quite well. Jobs was forced out, and the company was then run by MBA types, who sought to "maximize" return from existing product lines. Apple ceased to be a leader in its industry, and it nearly went bankrupt in the late 1990's. Steve Jobs was brought back to the company, and has succeeded in transforming Apple into a technical leader again.
To the typical business school product, Steve Jobs would likely seem as a reckless dreamer. Management types would likely focus less on envisioning a future for a company, and more time gazing at graphs and other proxies for reality, in a quest to magically bring a company to profitability.
Yes, that is what the business schools say. While I don't deny that there is some truth to this assertion, I think that the situation is more complicated than your assertion would imply.
Interesting article. From what I have observed over the past few decades, there has been a steady growth in ideology in business schools and economics departments. These ideologies are usually simplistic models or sets of ideas that are supposed to be broadly applicable. Many of these ideologies have come and gone like fads. Many of them, while useful, are not axiomatic. Business school graduates often treat the "management" skill-set that they learn in school as broadly applicable to any field. Thus, MBA graduates may move between extremely diverse positions. I know of one that went from managing a train manufacturing plant to managing a food manufacturing facility. Because he had no previous experience with working with food, he faced significant difficulties both in making the food plant operate smoothly, and in making a profit. He didn't have a clear idea of where he could cut within the operation without endangering food safety. He lacked both detailed knowledge of production methods, and had a poor understanding of scientific principles. Under the ideology of business school, this person's management skills should have been directly transferrable between many different fields. The reality on the ground was quite different
In the case of the topic at hand, it seems to me that one particular model, consisting of customers and service providers with all such relationships entail, is not optimally applicable to a specific situation (IT). The economy, and the world, is far more complicated and subtle than simplistic and faddish business school ideologies.
False dichotomy.
Could some of these chemicals have originated on Earth and were blasted onto the moon by an asteroid impact?
Many of the posts seem to be missing a key feature of this airplane: cabin comfort. To quote from Wikipedia,
Well, first of all, your comment gives it away that you do NOT understand the scientific method. You ask that I "prove" the tree ring proxy data is associated with temperatures before 1900. If you knew anything important about science, you would understand that you can never "prove" anything. Science provides a way to disprove nonsense. After disproving competing hypotheses, the most likely hypotheses are the only ones left standing.
Secondly, it is likely that the tree ring data has been correlated with other temperature proxies going back 1000 years. If tree ring temperature proxies imply the same temperature trends as several other proxies, then it is highly probable that the tree ring proxies are a valid stand in for temperature, even going back 1000 years.
If you don't understand science, then you have no business making the type of certain pronouncements that you have. Your comments are an example of "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing". Or you are just trolling.