Except for the fact that the "crime" can be eliminated by simply increasing speed limits.
The fact is, the law should conform to the will of the people, not the people to the will of the law.
Well, no. The law should promote the overall well-being of the people. There is a difference.
One of the basic examples of this is "the commons problem". If you have a shared resource, and everyone has unrestricted access to it, the resource will ultimately be over-used and abused until it is worthless. Basically, there's going to be someone, somewhere out there who will use this resource selfishly and irresponsibly - and so anyone at all who wants to benefit from the resource must do the same, and try to do it first. The more stable, more widely beneficial case, in which everyone uses the resource responsibly, derives a moderate benefit, and leaves the resource in a condition where others can do the same - it's a kind of equilibrium but not what you'd call a stable equilibrium. Therefore, a resource like that must be managed and protected if it is to be of any benefit.
In the context of speeding limits - one could argue that a higher speed limit serves a few who really feel a need to move faster, while making everyone suffer a higher incidence of traffic accidents (and the resulting traffic jams)
I don't reject the idea that some speed limits out there are ridiculously low - but when the law follows the wishes of the people, it serves only a few. Therefore I reject the idea that the law ought to serve the "will of the people" in all cases.
When millions of people in key positions have artificial hearts, limbs, microchips in their body, nanotechnology with RFID in their clothes, then cyberwarfare becomes something physical.
It's times like this that I really wish I hadn't spent all that money in the 1990s on Internet-enabled toasters... My bagel came out overcooked this morning and I just know it was because of cyber-warfare!
If something/someone is bad, say it's bad. Fuck "balance".
Us nerds should care about truth more than "balance".
The problem is that judgments like "bad" are subjective - and providing just raw, verifiable information usually isn't much help to the audience, they need analysis as well so they can understand the bigger picture, the significance of that data... And analysis, too, varies depending on the source.
They actually did find evidence of WMDs in Iraq - unfortunately the dog ate the photos and documents they'd retrieved before they could be properly archived.
My biggest problem with Fox News is that they lie and edit their footage (like the most recent example, editing out the applause at Obama's West Point speech).
I haven't seen the footage in question - but if the story is about the speech, and not the applause, it seems sensible to edit that out for brevity. Sometimes in those speeches the amount of pauses for applause can get kind of cumbersome...
I'm not talking about there being too much traffic. I'm talking about mob action, like 15 people going at once from one side of a 4-way stop instead of waiting in sequence, or a mob of bicycles crossing at a red light, cutting off traffic.
In that case I'd tend to agree, they shouldn't be doing that. I bike, and I don't like when pedestrians or bicyclists (or anyone else for that matter) disregard traffic laws because it happens to suit them at that moment. Auto traffic is obligated to yield to bicyclists and pedestrians under various conditions - cyclists and pedestrians in turn owe it to drivers to follow the rules that apply to them.
Don't tell me you're defending them. Yes, people have a right to assemble. No, assembling in the middle of the street and blocking traffic doesn't count.
In that case maybe they could arrest all the people who drive into town to go to the baseball game - they're blocking traffic.
No, actually, they are traffic, and the fact that there's enough traffic to cause congestion and inconvenience me doesn't mean I'm entitled to dismiss their right to use the road. Same is true for bikes.
In retrospect, NASA officials have decided that the time-honoured countdown-to-launch procedure is overly complicated - so this time around the flight controller will simply say "FALCON... LAUNCH!" and it will take off.
Any real operating system, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux and Solaris, makes it extremely easy to create sandboxes or jails for native processes.
Now hold on a second... This is something I've done a little bit of research into, and from what I can tell it is not easy to create a really safe process jail - at least not on all of those systems - unless I've missed something... (And don't get me wrong - I believe in this kind of approach - maybe not for quite the scenario you're describing but I believe jailing a process is a valuable and important feature - which is why I looked into the options in the first place...)
There's chroot(), of course, but that only limits filesystem access (not network access, at least not on Linux where net devices are "special" and exist outside the filesystem hierarchy) - plus my understanding is that they're not really escape-proof. (Been a while since I looked into all the details there...)
BSD jails sounded promising - and I guess there's a Linux implementation available as an add-on kernel module... I think my main concern about this approach was that the use of a full VM environment just to jail a process seemed kind of excessive - but, on the other hand, such an approach would be safer than trying to block or filter system calls...
ptrace() can be used to allow one process to filter a second process's access to system calls - but dealing with fork() calls without the newly-forked process escaping is a problem...
seccomp is (I believe) Linux-only, and it kills the jailed process if it tries to do anything other than read from or write to previously-opened file descriptors... So it's rather limited in what it can allow.
If you know more about the subject than I do, please enlighten me.
As for most devices using one of a few types of CPU - I guess, then, the next question is, can ARM CPUs create the virtual machine environment that would be needed to run a BSD jail? Or would such platforms have to rely on a jailing procedure based on syscall filtering or something like that?
Personally I think a good, cross-platform bytecode is a better choice for executable web content than compiling executables for numerous platforms... I think it's a better sweet spot between ease of development and efficiency than either script code like Javascript or multi-platform native code like you suggested... Even just dealing with multiple browsers is fairly frustrating at times - having to deal with multiple compilation targets for different architectures and testing them sounds worse. Plus this reduces the barriers to switching to new architectures as they come along.
To extrapolate from those few extreme cases to cover everyone who plays a game every day for a few hours is just wrong.
I don't think the incidence of people being overly invested in passive entertainment is as rare as you suggest - though I freely admit I've conducted no study to determine if, even by my own subjective criteria, this really is the case. I feel like it's in our present culture, that most of what we experience comes from a relatively few sources...
I can see your point, though, that it is possible to incorporate certain amounts of these activities into a lifestyle that's healthy overall. I didn't really mean to suggest otherwise - though I feel there's a lot of good potential being wasted here.
Can't speak for everyone, of course, but some of us enjoy consuming in the evening because we spend the whole day making.
And if my kids grow up and find that this is the lifestyle that works best for them, then fine, I'll be glad that they're happy.
But your comment seems to imply that there's no potential for overlap between one's personal interests and their work. I know for some people, their work represents their true ambition, and the rest is down-time. For me, this isn't the case - my current interests aren't terribly marketable, and to the extent they are, I haven't developed the skills far enough yet. I think that's the more common case. My brother-in-law is a DJ but has a day job. A friend of mine makes films but not professionally. But when you're a kid, you probably don't work a full-time job, and you may not know what your ambitions are yet. So it's very important to explore the possibilities, and there's plenty of opportunity to do so. I'd rather not see that wasted.
Games aren't killing your free time, you are killing your free time with games.
That's pretty much what I said. Gaming and TV aren't the problem, the problem is a lifestyle dominated by passive entertainment. A lifestyle like that doesn't leave one much room to pursue other interests. It's not just a question of self-discipline, it's a question of what you set out to achieve with those powers of self-discipline.
You know....I think once you start being concerned with "So much time wasted" when you were younger, you may be taking yourself too seriously
Not taking myself too seriously, I think - I just believe I would have enjoyed life more had I not lived a lifestyle that depended so heavily on TV and games. To put it bluntly I needed to get out more.:)
Beyond that, my wife and I both have great interest in making things - spending time on creative pursuit and on the effort required to see the work through to fruition. We're each artists after our own fashion, though I rarely describe myself as such. We believe this is an important part of living happily, and we want this to be part of the household culture in which our children are raised.
So it's not about focusing on a single goal and making a lifelong commitment to it - it's about taking the time to explore one's interests. That, of course, is also a form of "preparing for adulthood" - if in adulthood you settle into a routine, then it's good to spend the time before adulthood working out what you want that routine to be...
Coding isn't something someone else chooses for you, it's something you choose for himself. And it has NOTHING to do with him being a gamer. Relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to code games" is no less absurd than relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to be an electrician." Gaming and coding are two completely different things, only tangentially related by the thinnest of connections.
Except that if your love of gaming leads to you wanting to make games, then you need to be a programmer*. If you want to express your love of games through electronics, you still need software (well, assuming your game uses a CPU of some kind - which it almost certainly will...)
This was the case for me. In fifth grade I wanted to write my own platformer game like "Super Mario Brothers". I kind of wish I had - it would have been tough but everything I would have needed was available to me, and I was a smart kid, and motivated - I could have pulled it off.
(* well, technically, perhaps not. I don't know what's involved in writing Flash games, for instance - how much programming goes into that... And there's "game maker"-type products that can take the edge off...)
In case you didn't realize, 40% of AMERICA plays video games, and the AVERAGE video gamer is OVER THIRTY YEARS OLD.
This doesn't mean they're not wasting their time... Though of course that judgment is subjective. I would just say that after seeing how that all played out for me I'd like to think carefully about whether I want my kids to be too heavily invested in passive entertainment.
I guess most HUMANS just don't have enough interesting things to talk about...
Honestly - I don't know if I'd say "most" humans but a lot of them, sure... Lots of people are hopelessly mired in their favorite TV series or sports team. Generally I don't think those are healthy interests or "interesting things to talk about" - not to say good things can't come from them (for instance, these can be social activities) but on the whole, when I have kids, I'd rather see them be makers than consumers.
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
I think you may want to check the main target demographics for every $300+ console since the PS1.
Also, "important" is subjective. Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
It's a subjective argument, of course - but being a parent means trying to guide a child to make decisions that will give him or her a good, rewarding life.
Personally, I think I wasted far too much time in the 90's watching TV and playing games. I don't blame anyone for the decisions I made, but it really makes me think about how I want to approach the whole thing when I have kids. I love playing games, and I want to build an arcade machine and play more games. But I also recognize that games are killing my free time, even standing in the way of other things I want to do. For that reason, frogzilla's perspective resonates with me. As much as I like gaming I feel like it's unhealthy to get drawn into it too much. I don't want that for my kids.
As for "important" - I build models, and my wife is an artist. Neither pursuit is "important to the world at large" - and sometimes I wonder if what I do isn't even sufficiently personally rewarding. But I believe it's important to develop active interests as opposed to passive interests. Enjoying work that others have made is fun but I believe it's important to learn to make your own contributions as well. Otherwise, you're just a slave of sorts - hanging forever on that next episode, the next playoff, or the next new release. Making things yourself is more challenging - and probably more expensive - but the potential rewards are greater as well.
Science is a tool, a methodology. It has no ideology, any more than a hammer or a matchstick has an ideology. That's not to say that proponents or practitioners can't have ideologies, but part of the design of science is to eliminate the biases by forcing methodological strictures on research. Science is all about the evidence, ideologies are all, so far as I can tell, about ego stroking.
Well, I think we're all misusing the word "ideology" here. Dictionary definition seems to say that it's just a systematic body of ideas that characterizes an individual or group... From that definition one could certainly say "science" is the ideology of "scientists"...
I think the argument was that some people accept science too blindly - and that surely is possible. The very nature of science is to explore ideas, and embrace the possibility that some of the ideas we embrace may be disproven. It is a rigorous process of building knowledge over generations, because the knowledge we generate as a race is too far-reaching to be fully explored by one person in one lifetime. But the fact that we're building this knowledge collaboratively, and over long periods of time, means we must accept, often as a matter of faith, that many of the investigations carried out by others or in the past were done so properly, and that the ideas are, as a result, at least somewhat reliable.
Of course, it's the same kind of trust we must place in any knowledge that comes from outside ourselves. I have heard that there exists a country called Turkey - I have seen in on maps and in history books - but I have no personal experience that confirms this. If you question everything you can't personally verify, it severely hinders your working relationship with the world.:) I think that placing one's trust in science is about the best one can do. It's the best information we have about how the world works, subject to the best discipline of verification. It's not infallible, but we're only human after all...
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion. Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking. And if you accept rational science then you're doing something morally wrong.
I don't think that's it, exactly.
I think it's more a sort of inferiority complex. Basically, people don't want to feel that other people are fundamentally better than they are - particularly due to a little distinction like the level of education they've achieved. It's not as though more education does make a person fundamentally better - not necessarily - but they still feel that as a kind of threat. For a person to accept that scientist's argument at face value means acknowledging that, in some particular domain, at least, the scientist is the better person. The scientist has, presumably, studied his field in enough depth to be able to speak with authority and confidence on certain issues - but a non-scientist must simply take it as a matter of faith that the scientist really knows what they're talking about. This can be hard to accept: when you've studied something in depth, you can feel justified in dismissing lines of thought that you know, from experience, to be fruitless. But the non-scientist hasn't made this exploration, and so the dismissal of certain lines of reasoning just feels like a rejection. It can be difficult to accept the idea of other people in the world greater than oneself - whether in terms of strength, knowledge, or authority...
But the alternative places an uncomfortable burden on the scientist to pander to ignorance. Entertaining, rather than flatly rejecting, ignorant challenges to scientific ideas means engaging the discussion at the most basic levels - arguing points long-since resolved, to the extent anyone can be sure of anything, simply because the challenger hasn't taken the time to learn these concepts, or the reasons for their widespread acceptance.
I believe it's a problem not of religion, but of culture: we embrace the fantasy that no one is fundamentally better than anyone else, reject authority, and make our own decisions about where to place our trust... To some extent that's not a bad thing - it's good to question the status quo, and to have ambition beyond your current grasp - but there is a difference between challenging standard wisdom in ignorance of it and challenging it after gaining a thorough understanding of it. The latter is productive, the former is not. The fact that rejecting the superior knowledge of others is comforting is the problem - that's the reason why, when a religious sect advocates a perspective that's at odds with the established scientific knowledge of the world, this perspective has appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the fact that the "crime" can be eliminated by simply increasing speed limits.
The fact is, the law should conform to the will of the people, not the people to the will of the law.
Well, no. The law should promote the overall well-being of the people. There is a difference.
One of the basic examples of this is "the commons problem". If you have a shared resource, and everyone has unrestricted access to it, the resource will ultimately be over-used and abused until it is worthless. Basically, there's going to be someone, somewhere out there who will use this resource selfishly and irresponsibly - and so anyone at all who wants to benefit from the resource must do the same, and try to do it first. The more stable, more widely beneficial case, in which everyone uses the resource responsibly, derives a moderate benefit, and leaves the resource in a condition where others can do the same - it's a kind of equilibrium but not what you'd call a stable equilibrium. Therefore, a resource like that must be managed and protected if it is to be of any benefit.
In the context of speeding limits - one could argue that a higher speed limit serves a few who really feel a need to move faster, while making everyone suffer a higher incidence of traffic accidents (and the resulting traffic jams)
I don't reject the idea that some speed limits out there are ridiculously low - but when the law follows the wishes of the people, it serves only a few. Therefore I reject the idea that the law ought to serve the "will of the people" in all cases.
Anyone who does not take cyberwarfare seriously is not envisioning a world where nanotechnology is everywhere in everything.
Oh, not to worry... I've read Ghost in the Shell...
When millions of people in key positions have artificial hearts, limbs, microchips in their body, nanotechnology with RFID in their clothes, then cyberwarfare becomes something physical.
It's times like this that I really wish I hadn't spent all that money in the 1990s on Internet-enabled toasters... My bagel came out overcooked this morning and I just know it was because of cyber-warfare!
"Funny enough the Sun is horribly liberally biased"
Ha, haa, haaa, haaaa! What colour is the sky on your planet?
It is a Murdoch paper. He eats liberals for breakfast.
They don't let him have liberals in the VA hospital - he only gets those if Faceman swings by to bust him out first.
If something/someone is bad, say it's bad. Fuck "balance".
Us nerds should care about truth more than "balance".
The problem is that judgments like "bad" are subjective - and providing just raw, verifiable information usually isn't much help to the audience, they need analysis as well so they can understand the bigger picture, the significance of that data... And analysis, too, varies depending on the source.
They actually did find evidence of WMDs in Iraq - unfortunately the dog ate the photos and documents they'd retrieved before they could be properly archived.
My biggest problem with Fox News is that they lie and edit their footage (like the most recent example, editing out the applause at Obama's West Point speech).
I haven't seen the footage in question - but if the story is about the speech, and not the applause, it seems sensible to edit that out for brevity. Sometimes in those speeches the amount of pauses for applause can get kind of cumbersome...
I'm not talking about there being too much traffic. I'm talking about mob action, like 15 people going at once from one side of a 4-way stop instead of waiting in sequence, or a mob of bicycles crossing at a red light, cutting off traffic.
In that case I'd tend to agree, they shouldn't be doing that. I bike, and I don't like when pedestrians or bicyclists (or anyone else for that matter) disregard traffic laws because it happens to suit them at that moment. Auto traffic is obligated to yield to bicyclists and pedestrians under various conditions - cyclists and pedestrians in turn owe it to drivers to follow the rules that apply to them.
Don't tell me you're defending them. Yes, people have a right to assemble. No, assembling in the middle of the street and blocking traffic doesn't count.
In that case maybe they could arrest all the people who drive into town to go to the baseball game - they're blocking traffic.
No, actually, they are traffic, and the fact that there's enough traffic to cause congestion and inconvenience me doesn't mean I'm entitled to dismiss their right to use the road. Same is true for bikes.
I remember Guido Sohne tried to sell free software bar codes to the people of Africa. He is now dead. You can't make a living from that.
It's true; dyin' ain't much of a livin'...
In retrospect, NASA officials have decided that the time-honoured countdown-to-launch procedure is overly complicated - so this time around the flight controller will simply say "FALCON... LAUNCH!" and it will take off.
This article is basically saying Flash is too big to fail.
Can we please retire this phrase? Pretty please with a cherry on top?
While we're at it, can we also bury "in these difficult economic times"?
Any real operating system, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux and Solaris, makes it extremely easy to create sandboxes or jails for native processes.
Now hold on a second... This is something I've done a little bit of research into, and from what I can tell it is not easy to create a really safe process jail - at least not on all of those systems - unless I've missed something... (And don't get me wrong - I believe in this kind of approach - maybe not for quite the scenario you're describing but I believe jailing a process is a valuable and important feature - which is why I looked into the options in the first place...)
There's chroot(), of course, but that only limits filesystem access (not network access, at least not on Linux where net devices are "special" and exist outside the filesystem hierarchy) - plus my understanding is that they're not really escape-proof. (Been a while since I looked into all the details there...)
BSD jails sounded promising - and I guess there's a Linux implementation available as an add-on kernel module... I think my main concern about this approach was that the use of a full VM environment just to jail a process seemed kind of excessive - but, on the other hand, such an approach would be safer than trying to block or filter system calls...
ptrace() can be used to allow one process to filter a second process's access to system calls - but dealing with fork() calls without the newly-forked process escaping is a problem...
seccomp is (I believe) Linux-only, and it kills the jailed process if it tries to do anything other than read from or write to previously-opened file descriptors... So it's rather limited in what it can allow.
If you know more about the subject than I do, please enlighten me.
As for most devices using one of a few types of CPU - I guess, then, the next question is, can ARM CPUs create the virtual machine environment that would be needed to run a BSD jail? Or would such platforms have to rely on a jailing procedure based on syscall filtering or something like that?
Personally I think a good, cross-platform bytecode is a better choice for executable web content than compiling executables for numerous platforms... I think it's a better sweet spot between ease of development and efficiency than either script code like Javascript or multi-platform native code like you suggested... Even just dealing with multiple browsers is fairly frustrating at times - having to deal with multiple compilation targets for different architectures and testing them sounds worse. Plus this reduces the barriers to switching to new architectures as they come along.
That's funny because both niggers and shit are black.
What do you eat?
To extrapolate from those few extreme cases to cover everyone who plays a game every day for a few hours is just wrong.
I don't think the incidence of people being overly invested in passive entertainment is as rare as you suggest - though I freely admit I've conducted no study to determine if, even by my own subjective criteria, this really is the case. I feel like it's in our present culture, that most of what we experience comes from a relatively few sources...
I can see your point, though, that it is possible to incorporate certain amounts of these activities into a lifestyle that's healthy overall. I didn't really mean to suggest otherwise - though I feel there's a lot of good potential being wasted here.
I'd rather see them be makers than consumers.
Can't speak for everyone, of course, but some of us enjoy consuming in the evening because we spend the whole day making.
And if my kids grow up and find that this is the lifestyle that works best for them, then fine, I'll be glad that they're happy.
But your comment seems to imply that there's no potential for overlap between one's personal interests and their work. I know for some people, their work represents their true ambition, and the rest is down-time. For me, this isn't the case - my current interests aren't terribly marketable, and to the extent they are, I haven't developed the skills far enough yet. I think that's the more common case. My brother-in-law is a DJ but has a day job. A friend of mine makes films but not professionally. But when you're a kid, you probably don't work a full-time job, and you may not know what your ambitions are yet. So it's very important to explore the possibilities, and there's plenty of opportunity to do so. I'd rather not see that wasted.
Games aren't killing your free time, you are killing your free time with games.
That's pretty much what I said. Gaming and TV aren't the problem, the problem is a lifestyle dominated by passive entertainment. A lifestyle like that doesn't leave one much room to pursue other interests. It's not just a question of self-discipline, it's a question of what you set out to achieve with those powers of self-discipline.
You know....I think once you start being concerned with "So much time wasted" when you were younger, you may be taking yourself too seriously
Not taking myself too seriously, I think - I just believe I would have enjoyed life more had I not lived a lifestyle that depended so heavily on TV and games. To put it bluntly I needed to get out more. :)
Beyond that, my wife and I both have great interest in making things - spending time on creative pursuit and on the effort required to see the work through to fruition. We're each artists after our own fashion, though I rarely describe myself as such. We believe this is an important part of living happily, and we want this to be part of the household culture in which our children are raised.
So it's not about focusing on a single goal and making a lifelong commitment to it - it's about taking the time to explore one's interests. That, of course, is also a form of "preparing for adulthood" - if in adulthood you settle into a routine, then it's good to spend the time before adulthood working out what you want that routine to be...
Coding isn't something someone else chooses for you, it's something you choose for himself. And it has NOTHING to do with him being a gamer. Relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to code games" is no less absurd than relating "He likes to game" with "He will like to be an electrician." Gaming and coding are two completely different things, only tangentially related by the thinnest of connections.
Except that if your love of gaming leads to you wanting to make games, then you need to be a programmer*. If you want to express your love of games through electronics, you still need software (well, assuming your game uses a CPU of some kind - which it almost certainly will...)
This was the case for me. In fifth grade I wanted to write my own platformer game like "Super Mario Brothers". I kind of wish I had - it would have been tough but everything I would have needed was available to me, and I was a smart kid, and motivated - I could have pulled it off.
(* well, technically, perhaps not. I don't know what's involved in writing Flash games, for instance - how much programming goes into that... And there's "game maker"-type products that can take the edge off...)
In case you didn't realize, 40% of AMERICA plays video games, and the AVERAGE video gamer is OVER THIRTY YEARS OLD.
This doesn't mean they're not wasting their time... Though of course that judgment is subjective. I would just say that after seeing how that all played out for me I'd like to think carefully about whether I want my kids to be too heavily invested in passive entertainment.
I guess most HUMANS just don't have enough interesting things to talk about...
Honestly - I don't know if I'd say "most" humans but a lot of them, sure... Lots of people are hopelessly mired in their favorite TV series or sports team. Generally I don't think those are healthy interests or "interesting things to talk about" - not to say good things can't come from them (for instance, these can be social activities) but on the whole, when I have kids, I'd rather see them be makers than consumers.
I think anyone who spends a lot of time on games past about 16 years needs some help growing up. The need to play so much indicates (to me) that they don't have enough interesting, more important things to think about.
I think you may want to check the main target demographics for every $300+ console since the PS1.
Also, "important" is subjective. Unless you're the president, the pope, or a nobel prize winning physicist, chances are the stuff you're working on that you think is "important" is probably not worth a hill of beans to the rest of humanity at large.
It's a subjective argument, of course - but being a parent means trying to guide a child to make decisions that will give him or her a good, rewarding life.
Personally, I think I wasted far too much time in the 90's watching TV and playing games. I don't blame anyone for the decisions I made, but it really makes me think about how I want to approach the whole thing when I have kids. I love playing games, and I want to build an arcade machine and play more games. But I also recognize that games are killing my free time, even standing in the way of other things I want to do. For that reason, frogzilla's perspective resonates with me. As much as I like gaming I feel like it's unhealthy to get drawn into it too much. I don't want that for my kids.
As for "important" - I build models, and my wife is an artist. Neither pursuit is "important to the world at large" - and sometimes I wonder if what I do isn't even sufficiently personally rewarding. But I believe it's important to develop active interests as opposed to passive interests. Enjoying work that others have made is fun but I believe it's important to learn to make your own contributions as well. Otherwise, you're just a slave of sorts - hanging forever on that next episode, the next playoff, or the next new release. Making things yourself is more challenging - and probably more expensive - but the potential rewards are greater as well.
Science is a tool, a methodology. It has no ideology, any more than a hammer or a matchstick has an ideology. That's not to say that proponents or practitioners can't have ideologies, but part of the design of science is to eliminate the biases by forcing methodological strictures on research. Science is all about the evidence, ideologies are all, so far as I can tell, about ego stroking.
Well, I think we're all misusing the word "ideology" here. Dictionary definition seems to say that it's just a systematic body of ideas that characterizes an individual or group... From that definition one could certainly say "science" is the ideology of "scientists"...
I think the argument was that some people accept science too blindly - and that surely is possible. The very nature of science is to explore ideas, and embrace the possibility that some of the ideas we embrace may be disproven. It is a rigorous process of building knowledge over generations, because the knowledge we generate as a race is too far-reaching to be fully explored by one person in one lifetime. But the fact that we're building this knowledge collaboratively, and over long periods of time, means we must accept, often as a matter of faith, that many of the investigations carried out by others or in the past were done so properly, and that the ideas are, as a result, at least somewhat reliable.
Of course, it's the same kind of trust we must place in any knowledge that comes from outside ourselves. I have heard that there exists a country called Turkey - I have seen in on maps and in history books - but I have no personal experience that confirms this. If you question everything you can't personally verify, it severely hinders your working relationship with the world. :) I think that placing one's trust in science is about the best one can do. It's the best information we have about how the world works, subject to the best discipline of verification. It's not infallible, but we're only human after all...
It didn't begin that way, but it is becoming one.
Please explain your position. I am not rejecting your idea, but I am not inclined to fill in the blanks in your argument, either.
I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: religion. Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking. And if you accept rational science then you're doing something morally wrong.
I don't think that's it, exactly.
I think it's more a sort of inferiority complex. Basically, people don't want to feel that other people are fundamentally better than they are - particularly due to a little distinction like the level of education they've achieved. It's not as though more education does make a person fundamentally better - not necessarily - but they still feel that as a kind of threat. For a person to accept that scientist's argument at face value means acknowledging that, in some particular domain, at least, the scientist is the better person. The scientist has, presumably, studied his field in enough depth to be able to speak with authority and confidence on certain issues - but a non-scientist must simply take it as a matter of faith that the scientist really knows what they're talking about. This can be hard to accept: when you've studied something in depth, you can feel justified in dismissing lines of thought that you know, from experience, to be fruitless. But the non-scientist hasn't made this exploration, and so the dismissal of certain lines of reasoning just feels like a rejection. It can be difficult to accept the idea of other people in the world greater than oneself - whether in terms of strength, knowledge, or authority...
But the alternative places an uncomfortable burden on the scientist to pander to ignorance. Entertaining, rather than flatly rejecting, ignorant challenges to scientific ideas means engaging the discussion at the most basic levels - arguing points long-since resolved, to the extent anyone can be sure of anything, simply because the challenger hasn't taken the time to learn these concepts, or the reasons for their widespread acceptance.
I believe it's a problem not of religion, but of culture: we embrace the fantasy that no one is fundamentally better than anyone else, reject authority, and make our own decisions about where to place our trust... To some extent that's not a bad thing - it's good to question the status quo, and to have ambition beyond your current grasp - but there is a difference between challenging standard wisdom in ignorance of it and challenging it after gaining a thorough understanding of it. The latter is productive, the former is not. The fact that rejecting the superior knowledge of others is comforting is the problem - that's the reason why, when a religious sect advocates a perspective that's at odds with the established scientific knowledge of the world, this perspective has appeal.
That's not true. Everyone's had a turn at his sister.
Apparently, you've never farted around his sister.
Dude, I farted on his sister... it's a highly overrated experience.