I don't think anti-hate speech laws (or hate crime laws in the USA... a crime is a crime!) are a good thing, but I do understand where they come from. Using your example: Gay people are a minority facing a lot of violence and hate coming from (mostly) religious people for no good reason. And a government needs to protect minorities from harm (In my opinion that's only violence and discrimination, not being offended), so that's probably the best they could think of. In Ireland, it might be a misguided attempt to lower religious violence - although its very non-secular constitution might suggest other reasons.
Yes, belief. Homosexuality being good or bad for society is a belief, too...
Semantically that's true, but "The sun is revolving around the earth" or "1+1=3" are beliefs too. Thinking that a statement is true (believing it) does not mean that there isn't strong evidence or proof to the contrary. Especially for homosexuality there are studies that show that it is neither voluntary or changeable (at the moment) and as for the "bad for society/humanity" issue - as long as we use statements we both agree on, we could find a definite answer for that. But I think the burden of proof is on your side. If it wasn't, I could say something like "shoes are responsible for 10% of all deaths" and then go around yelling at all people who wear shoes, urging them to prove me wrong.
So, personally I find the logical errors (and their consequences) made by religious people frightening, annoying, upsetting, infuriating, morally bad and bad for society. But other than "bad for society" that's all just emotional, irrelevant stuff that has nothing to do with law. But I'm inclined to agree with you that blasphemy laws and hate laws are equally unfair, just based on the notions that free speech is desirable and that there will always be some group that will not receive the same protection.
I guess now it's up to the religious leaders to redefine what "blasphemy" means. We'll see what they come up with...
So when a religious person and an atheist meet and say something like "I find your views completely ridiculous" at the same time to each other then the religious person can sue the atheist but not vice versa?
Reminds me of this
Remember how germany outlawed "hacker tools"? I guess these anti-sec-terrorists can relate to that. Thinking that banning something easily available will help anyone but criminals is very similar to thinking that bullying people into shutting up will stop hackers from finding security holes.
Well-meaning but technologically ignorant politicians are one thing (personally I think they are the biggest threat to science and progress), jerks like this are another. I'm sure they are a bunch (if there is more than one) of angry young men who feel like they know exactly what's best for the world and who are almost religiously passionate about imposing their will on others.
I'm sure many of us have felt something similar at some point of our lives, but the origin of that emotion is a need to feel powerful - not solving some problem or anything altruistic at all. If you resort to terrorizing people so they act the way you want them to, then you are nothing but a power-hungry terrorist. No matter how pure you think your reasons are.
Frequent users of this site usually know more acronyms than proper words. Some posts would simply be too long if you actually wrote things like "do it yourself", "unmanned aerial vehicle", or "GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GN
might be not as many if they find out what brain "modules" can be replaced by more conservative machinery. Like some parts of the auditive / visual signal processing... or try leaving them out altogether. A simulated brain does not really need all senses, does it? (Probably a good idea to leave out pain and tactile information processing for now)
I was really irritated by the comments here until this one. What's with all the random hate from people who didn't even see one episode?
Anyway, I saw the entire show and though I liked it enough to keep watching. But it never really took off. Just like with Heroes I kept waiting for some story to unfold (unfortunately the last episode seemed to promise that). It was kind of painful to watch the ex-fbi-guy trying to convice the robot that he needs religion. The rest was neither very deep nor challenging, but OK.
FOX could have at least given them one more (shortened?) season to wrap things up. How am I supposed to watch other shows like that if I don't know if there will ever be a clean ending?
The metric for something like that might be the really interesting part. For that microsoft project I'd try capturing keystrokes: if you encounter strings like "nhi h8hunigtizl978hkz8i", then the user is probably banging his head against the keyboard.
If movies are art, then games are art. Look at what types of movies exist today and what types of games might exist once they completly shed their "kids only"-image. But I agree that they will continue to coexist and be separated for many years.
Most of the time he simply finds trends that grow at a strictly exponential rates and makes predicitons on what will happen when the underlying technology breaks a certain barrier that would have been far off if growth had been linear or polynomial. For example, realistically (without too much abstraction) simulating a human brain has a known computational cost. Kurzweil made a predicition when the neccessary computing power will be available. There you go.
They want to use self-replicating nano-entities? Don't they know that anything that self-replicates immediately covers the entire earth and destroys life as we know it?
So what? There is no logical reason why this should not be possible. Calling his predictions outlandish and baseless in this way is pretty baseless in itself.
I do think he is overly optimistic, but then again there were so many points in time where people would never have expected some invention to be possible (telephone, automobile, plane, television) or useful (computers) that I think dismissing outlandish ideas can make you look like an idiot in no time.
I'm not sure if the ghz race is really over, or if it's just on a break. Instructions per cycle are going up. Better interfaces for parallel architectures are being developed (like OpenCL). There's always the possibility of some non-von-neumann-architecture to take over. Chemical/Molecular computing. Single-electron-transistors... Anyway, I would never bet against computers becoming faster and more powerful. Better worry about the software, that's the real headache.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to mock or fear people who completely misunderstand something and then get angry at their hallucinations.
It was kind of funny when the media reported on the "internet hate machine" and "internet terrorists" calling themselves anonymous. Or when they got Oprah to say something about "over 9000 penises". But I think this is more serious, because there seem to be people making decisions who did not even do the research to find out that calling anonymous a group is a JOKE. Even "the atheists" are more of an organization than that (that's another similar misconception...).
Maybe they should find something better to do, like fighting windmills.
So you are saying that at some point in evolution pain was promoted from "programmed behavioral response" to "discomfort and possible agony". And you, having admittedly no clue how pain or conciousness work, DO draw the line. Conveniently right above what you consider delicious.
damn, I just lost my comment to the "back"-function.
But it was pretty much what you just said. I think the reason why so many people dismiss animals feeling pain (with stupid jokes, by acting tough etc) is that otherwise they would have to acknowledge that the world is a lot worse (in terms of suffering) than they imagined and that they contributed to it being like that.
I found most of the negative arguments (except maybe for "I don't care") to be bad, unscientific excuses rife with logical fallacies.
Unfortunately this is only one example where intelligent people behave like drooling idiots. Others are
- Religion (But you can't DISPROVE God! What? If I can disprove a invisible pink unicorn? That's just silly.)
- Conspiracy theories (Everything significant is connected to somebody saing "I love it when a plan comes together". Percieved patterns always carry meaning.)
- Free will (Ok, supernatural things are bullshit. But my decisions happen OUTSIDE physics and causality!)
Reminds me of that one story from "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman" where Richard Feynman attends a meeting of some of the greatest scientists of his time. They have to decide on something (I forgot what it was), and several people are presenting their ideas. Feynman quickly identifies the best one but expects some kind of argument, with the owners of the inferior ideas trying to sell whatever they came up with. Instead, once the last person's talk is over someone says something like "I guess we can all agree that X's idea was the best" and everybody does.
I think one of the points he was trying to make is that the greatest minds of the world have even more in common than just being smart and having special insights in their respective fields.
So... in other words these are two very successful subs and they just proved that they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do by banging into each other. I think I like that idea.
I always wondered if creationists know what kind of role Darwin plays in today's sciences (as far as I know it's comparable to Freud's role in psychology).
I guess most creationists or people who "study" "intelligent design" simply do not have the faintest idea what the scientific principle is about. Authority comes first. So to them, Ad Hominem attacks are completely valid since there is nothing other than belief systems in the world: If those silly scientists have another name for their religion (like "theory", as in "it is just a theory"), that doesn't mean that it can't be defeated just like any other idea that contradicts their beliefs: by attacking the authority figure.
This whole discussion will have no outcome. Nothing. Even if the creationists acknowledge there is more to Evolution than what Darwin found out, this won't change the fact that an argument with someone who doesn't understand logic or logical fallacies will never come to an end.
To sum it up:
Science: make and refine theories based on observations, discard a theory if facts contradict it
Creationism: life was created by a higher power, discard facts if they contradict the bible
There's just no common ground, only two sides fighting over a number of undecided people who will follow the group which sounds most compelling. Sadly, those are probably the same people who will listen to arguments like "Do you really want to believe the guy who thinks your great-grandfather was a monkey?" but fall asleep while listening to "Well, Darwin was just the guy who pointed in the right direction and inspired a lot of scientists to test his theories, and some aspects were verified and others were not, but since then so much has happened..."
Slashdot Mirror
And here's your webcomic reference: PhD Comics
I don't think anti-hate speech laws (or hate crime laws in the USA... a crime is a crime!) are a good thing, but I do understand where they come from. Using your example: Gay people are a minority facing a lot of violence and hate coming from (mostly) religious people for no good reason. And a government needs to protect minorities from harm (In my opinion that's only violence and discrimination, not being offended), so that's probably the best they could think of. In Ireland, it might be a misguided attempt to lower religious violence - although its very non-secular constitution might suggest other reasons.
Yes, belief. Homosexuality being good or bad for society is a belief, too...
Semantically that's true, but "The sun is revolving around the earth" or "1+1=3" are beliefs too. Thinking that a statement is true (believing it) does not mean that there isn't strong evidence or proof to the contrary. Especially for homosexuality there are studies that show that it is neither voluntary or changeable (at the moment) and as for the "bad for society/humanity" issue - as long as we use statements we both agree on, we could find a definite answer for that. But I think the burden of proof is on your side. If it wasn't, I could say something like "shoes are responsible for 10% of all deaths" and then go around yelling at all people who wear shoes, urging them to prove me wrong.
So, personally I find the logical errors (and their consequences) made by religious people frightening, annoying, upsetting, infuriating, morally bad and bad for society. But other than "bad for society" that's all just emotional, irrelevant stuff that has nothing to do with law. But I'm inclined to agree with you that blasphemy laws and hate laws are equally unfair, just based on the notions that free speech is desirable and that there will always be some group that will not receive the same protection.
I guess now it's up to the religious leaders to redefine what "blasphemy" means. We'll see what they come up with...
So when a religious person and an atheist meet and say something like "I find your views completely ridiculous" at the same time to each other then the religious person can sue the atheist but not vice versa?
Reminds me of this
Remember how germany outlawed "hacker tools"? I guess these anti-sec-terrorists can relate to that. Thinking that banning something easily available will help anyone but criminals is very similar to thinking that bullying people into shutting up will stop hackers from finding security holes.
Well-meaning but technologically ignorant politicians are one thing (personally I think they are the biggest threat to science and progress), jerks like this are another. I'm sure they are a bunch (if there is more than one) of angry young men who feel like they know exactly what's best for the world and who are almost religiously passionate about imposing their will on others.
I'm sure many of us have felt something similar at some point of our lives, but the origin of that emotion is a need to feel powerful - not solving some problem or anything altruistic at all. If you resort to terrorizing people so they act the way you want them to, then you are nothing but a power-hungry terrorist. No matter how pure you think your reasons are.
1 2 3 4, I declare an edit war! (5 6 7 8, log in while it's not too late!)
wait... damn... I fail at recursion :D
Frequent users of this site usually know more acronyms than proper words. Some posts would simply be too long if you actually wrote things like "do it yourself", "unmanned aerial vehicle", or "GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GNU's GN
might be not as many if they find out what brain "modules" can be replaced by more conservative machinery. Like some parts of the auditive / visual signal processing... or try leaving them out altogether. A simulated brain does not really need all senses, does it? (Probably a good idea to leave out pain and tactile information processing for now)
I was really irritated by the comments here until this one. What's with all the random hate from people who didn't even see one episode?
Anyway, I saw the entire show and though I liked it enough to keep watching. But it never really took off. Just like with Heroes I kept waiting for some story to unfold (unfortunately the last episode seemed to promise that). It was kind of painful to watch the ex-fbi-guy trying to convice the robot that he needs religion. The rest was neither very deep nor challenging, but OK.
FOX could have at least given them one more (shortened?) season to wrap things up. How am I supposed to watch other shows like that if I don't know if there will ever be a clean ending?
The metric for something like that might be the really interesting part. For that microsoft project I'd try capturing keystrokes: if you encounter strings like "nhi h8hunigtizl978hkz8i", then the user is probably banging his head against the keyboard.
If movies are art, then games are art. Look at what types of movies exist today and what types of games might exist once they completly shed their "kids only"-image. But I agree that they will continue to coexist and be separated for many years.
Most of the time he simply finds trends that grow at a strictly exponential rates and makes predicitons on what will happen when the underlying technology breaks a certain barrier that would have been far off if growth had been linear or polynomial. For example, realistically (without too much abstraction) simulating a human brain has a known computational cost. Kurzweil made a predicition when the neccessary computing power will be available. There you go.
They want to use self-replicating nano-entities? Don't they know that anything that self-replicates immediately covers the entire earth and destroys life as we know it?
So what? There is no logical reason why this should not be possible. Calling his predictions outlandish and baseless in this way is pretty baseless in itself.
I do think he is overly optimistic, but then again there were so many points in time where people would never have expected some invention to be possible (telephone, automobile, plane, television) or useful (computers) that I think dismissing outlandish ideas can make you look like an idiot in no time.
I'm not sure if the ghz race is really over, or if it's just on a break. Instructions per cycle are going up. Better interfaces for parallel architectures are being developed (like OpenCL). There's always the possibility of some non-von-neumann-architecture to take over. Chemical/Molecular computing. Single-electron-transistors... Anyway, I would never bet against computers becoming faster and more powerful. Better worry about the software, that's the real headache.
It's probably already inhabited by Kevin Costners. Or at least Kevin Costner-like creatures.
I'm not sure if I'm supposed to mock or fear people who completely misunderstand something and then get angry at their hallucinations.
It was kind of funny when the media reported on the "internet hate machine" and "internet terrorists" calling themselves anonymous. Or when they got Oprah to say something about "over 9000 penises". But I think this is more serious, because there seem to be people making decisions who did not even do the research to find out that calling anonymous a group is a JOKE. Even "the atheists" are more of an organization than that (that's another similar misconception...).
Maybe they should find something better to do, like fighting windmills.
So you are saying that at some point in evolution pain was promoted from "programmed behavioral response" to "discomfort and possible agony". And you, having admittedly no clue how pain or conciousness work, DO draw the line. Conveniently right above what you consider delicious.
damn, I just lost my comment to the "back"-function.
But it was pretty much what you just said. I think the reason why so many people dismiss animals feeling pain (with stupid jokes, by acting tough etc) is that otherwise they would have to acknowledge that the world is a lot worse (in terms of suffering) than they imagined and that they contributed to it being like that.
I found most of the negative arguments (except maybe for "I don't care") to be bad, unscientific excuses rife with logical fallacies.
Unfortunately this is only one example where intelligent people behave like drooling idiots. Others are
- Religion (But you can't DISPROVE God! What? If I can disprove a invisible pink unicorn? That's just silly.)
- Conspiracy theories (Everything significant is connected to somebody saing "I love it when a plan comes together". Percieved patterns always carry meaning.)
- Free will (Ok, supernatural things are bullshit. But my decisions happen OUTSIDE physics and causality!)
Reminds me of that one story from "Surely you are joking, Mr. Feynman" where Richard Feynman attends a meeting of some of the greatest scientists of his time. They have to decide on something (I forgot what it was), and several people are presenting their ideas. Feynman quickly identifies the best one but expects some kind of argument, with the owners of the inferior ideas trying to sell whatever they came up with. Instead, once the last person's talk is over someone says something like "I guess we can all agree that X's idea was the best" and everybody does. I think one of the points he was trying to make is that the greatest minds of the world have even more in common than just being smart and having special insights in their respective fields.
Someone's already working on it: http://code.google.com/p/qtd/
So... in other words these are two very successful subs and they just proved that they were doing exactly what they were supposed to do by banging into each other. I think I like that idea.
I always wondered if creationists know what kind of role Darwin plays in today's sciences (as far as I know it's comparable to Freud's role in psychology).
I guess most creationists or people who "study" "intelligent design" simply do not have the faintest idea what the scientific principle is about. Authority comes first. So to them, Ad Hominem attacks are completely valid since there is nothing other than belief systems in the world: If those silly scientists have another name for their religion (like "theory", as in "it is just a theory"), that doesn't mean that it can't be defeated just like any other idea that contradicts their beliefs: by attacking the authority figure.
This whole discussion will have no outcome. Nothing. Even if the creationists acknowledge there is more to Evolution than what Darwin found out, this won't change the fact that an argument with someone who doesn't understand logic or logical fallacies will never come to an end.
To sum it up:
Science: make and refine theories based on observations, discard a theory if facts contradict it
Creationism: life was created by a higher power, discard facts if they contradict the bible
There's just no common ground, only two sides fighting over a number of undecided people who will follow the group which sounds most compelling. Sadly, those are probably the same people who will listen to arguments like "Do you really want to believe the guy who thinks your great-grandfather was a monkey?" but fall asleep while listening to "Well, Darwin was just the guy who pointed in the right direction and inspired a lot of scientists to test his theories, and some aspects were verified and others were not, but since then so much has happened..."
Deutsche Schraegstrichpunkter fuer den Gewinn!
you forgot "you insensitive clod", you insensitive clod!