Science can't properly research it (although the people writing grant applications might bank on the people giving out the grants not knowing that). If the universe appears non-deterministic it's possible that there's some hidden deterministic variable controlling the apparent randomness (and Occam's razor doesn't help much -- hidden deterministic variable v. hidden random number generator). Essentially "deterministic" is non-falsifiable.
Er, well, 78% against, 6% for, 24% abstentions. The EC will see that as a 78% v. 32% defeat, ie, only a 46% defeat. Because politicians seem to really believe you can do that sort of thing with statistics.
Not really. Free will existing/not existing and the universe being deterministic/not deterministic are both metaphysical issues, so it's unclear what would be meant by "evidence" short of absolute logical incompatibility.
I think you've missed the point. Some believe free will can exist in a deterministic universe (compatibilism, as you say), but others believe it cannot possibly exist even if the universe is not deterministic. In other words, free will and determinism have nothing to do with each other: they're orthogonal concepts. That was taught to me on a philosophy foundation course -- philosophy is way ahead of where you think it is.
And this, ladies and gentlement, is why real science is done by not only performing the experiement and recording the results, but by writing up your method with sufficient clarity that your results can be replicated by independent researchers.
Once that has been done sufficient times, if your method itself is sound, then the results are valid.
Nope, not good enough. It's not enough to write it up in such a way that it can be replicated by independent researchers. You should only start to trust the results when it has been replicated by independent researchers. Unfortunately that hardly ever happens, because it's all but impossible to get funding for replication of work that's already been done.
That wasn't "an anti-science bent". It was anti using the word "science" as a magical invocation over anything at all, scientific or not, to make people suspend their critical judgement. Using the word "science" as an invocation in that way is all too effective in some circles, and I for one am against it.
Define "being a whore" in this scenario. They make a good game. We wish to play it. We hate Windows. Dilemma. Nothing about being a whore in there.
Yeah, except for the part where you buy their game for Windows, sending them the message "You don't need to make a separate Linux client. We whores will happily still buy it for Windows and run it crippled in Wine."
Wow, that's what the whores do in your part of the world? That must lead to a lot of out-of-town punters being very disappointed.
I wonder whether the slide-to-unlock issue accounts for one of the changes in the latest update to my Galaxy Ace. It used to be slide-to-unlock. Now I make exactly the same gesture to unlock it, but instead of the screen sliding it shows a growing circle. It looks as if they're already working the way around some of the issues. Mind you, the Galaxy Ace is rectangular with rounded corners and has a button...
Pinning only makes sense for a few commonly-used apps, because it's completely unstructured. If I were to put all of the apps I ever use onto the taskbar I'd need a taskbar the length of a football pitch. I was at a conference yesterday, and one of the presenters used the taskbar to open the product he wanted to demonstrate and it took him an age to scroll along and find the one he wanted (it was on a Mac, not MS Windows, but it seems to be essentially the same design with a bit of extra animation). I would have been there in three clicks of a menu.
Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK's Digital Economy Act.
So now you're automatically assumed guilty.. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
No. After the three warnings, if you don't appeal to any of the warnings, your details are passed to the copyright owners who may choose to take legal action through the courts. The £20 (refundable if you win) is for if you want to avoid having to bother with due process; it isn't part of the due process which is still there. This looks to me to be a big improvement over the existing system where the first you might hear of copyright infringement accusations is a court summons.
I wasn't talking about those who have finished grad school, I was talking about the students who will be likely to take the OP's class.
Sorry, I did mean undergraduate level even though I said graduate level. Mea Culpa.
You really think a college sophomore English paper's consideration of possible counterarguments is "as logically rigorous as doing proofs"?
Yes. I'm in the unusual position of having done both science >em>and humanities to first degree level (I continued with science to postgrad level). I find that most people in one camp or the other actually have no idea what those in the other camp have to do to get through their exams. The stuff I did in my humanities degree wasn't scientific (well, most of it wasn't: I did do some research into computational stylistics which was, and some of the grammar and forensic linguistics was) but it was as logically rigorous as the science. In fact, parts of the philosophy element were a lot more logically rigorous than the science (even than the maths element of the science, though had I done mathematics rather than science I expect there would have been more logical rigour). The English sophomore has to show understanding of a lot of competing theories (just as the science student does), has to understand where those theories come from and what their implications are (just as the science students do) and has to be able to apply those theories in practice (just as science students do). There is every bit as much logical rigour in the humanities (and as far as I can see in the social sciences -- I don't have direct experience of that) as in the sciences, it just isn't usually scientific, and nor should it be.
It's that people have driven logic (which had been the core of a liberal arts education for centuries) from the core curriculum
It was a mandatory part of my humanities degree (as part of the foundation course). It wasn't addressed at all in science.
The result is that students outside those fields have never really grappled with the difference between valid argumentation and fallacious reasoning.
That was only addressed on my humanities degree, not on science.
The quality of the discourse that results may or may not be good enough for the humanities, but it's not good enough for anything that purports to be a science.
It's not good enough for either. The humanities degree I did recognised that and taught it. The science degree didn't.
they need a set of analytical tools that they can use, not necessarily derive.
While social scientists may not need to be able to re-derive all their statistical tools at a moment's notice, it's most assuredly not enough for them to just have a superficial knowledge of how to use them. They need to understand them. If they don't understand why they're doing what they're doing, they will do it wrong as soon as the situation deviates in the slightest from the textbook example, so they are incompetent at doing their job.
They need to understand them, yes, but not necessarily be able to prove them. I spent ages being taught how to prove the central limit theorem. That was completely irrelevant except as an exercise. What matters is understanding the implications of the central limit theorem and the cases in which it applies or doesn't apply.
That's just as true for engineers. Jobs for the people who say "just tell me the formula" went out the window with the slide rule; we don't need human pocket calculators any more.
There's a huge zone between "just tell me the formula" and being able to prove the formula. When my wife was doing business studies she struggled with applying the normal distribution to quality assurance problems. Telling her the formula and teaching her h
It's true enough that statistics get misused in the hard sciences too. But I really don't think the rates of misuse are as similar as you think.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "thinking rigorously." I'm talking about logical rigor, not difficulty/effort; I certainly don't mean that students in these fields don't have to think or work. But giving memorized answers or intuitively plausible arguments on exams and papers in their classes involves very different skills from those involved in e.g. doing a proof.
"Memorized answers or intuitively plausible arguments" shouldn't get the student past grade-school level, whatever discipline. If a graduate program lets a student get away with that (at least, with more than a scraped pass) then it's a poor quality program (and they exist in the sciences, too). But the skills they do need are not those involved in doing a proof. In the humanities, for example, it's not enough to give an "intuitively plausible" argument, you have to show thoroughness in considering possible counterarguments, something that is as logically rigorous as doing proofs but that doesn't often come up much in the hard sciences and that a lot of scientists are very poor at. And anyway, scientists very rarely form proofs anyway -- that's the domain of mathematicians and philosophers (who tend to annoy scientists by insisting on logical rigour over issues that the scientists want to dismiss with a hand-wave). Statistics for social scientists has no reason to teach proofs. An engineering approach is far more relevant: they need a set of analytical tools that they can use, not necessarily derive.
If I had a dollar for every paper published in a peer-reviewed social sciences journal which totally abused statistics, I'd retire and use my extra cash to fund organizations directed at basic logic and math education, trying to help with the situation.
Sadly that's true of the hard sciences, too.
Most social studies students I knew had little understanding of the statistics they were using. It was basically a magic incantation for giving them results and making their conclusions sound more credible to other people who likewise didn't understand statistics. The result is bad statistics and bad science. Yes, these people aren't idiots, but they've become used to being rewarded without having to think rigorously.
That's a remarkably naive view of the social sciences. There is absolutely no academic field in a responsible academic institution in which practitioners are "rewarded without having to think rigorously". The difference is in what they think rigorously about. Consider, for example, child development. The hard sciences will think rigorously about the factors that affect the rate of child development, the social sciences will think rigorously about how unusual rates of child development can be detected, and might be particularly concerned about how to make sure the tests are usable by those who are not necessarily statistically savvy (it is probably more efficient to simplify the application of tests at a loss of accuracy than to require all healthcare professionals to be highly numerate -- other skills are more important for them). And those in the humanities need to think rigorously about what (if anything) should be done with those who have unusual rates of development, working exhaustively through possibilities and consequences. In an ideal world all three fields should work together for the common good, but uninformed sniping like suggesting that people in some disciplines have "become used to being rewarded without having to think rigorously" is destructive of that.
If getting Rage Against the Machine to 2010's Christmas No. 1 has taught us anything, it's that all that is required to make changes is organised protest. Hundreds of thousands of people were willing to spend £0.99 buying that track on iTunes, buying the album in stores etc. just to ensure that generic Britain's Got Idol Pop Factor artists wouldn't, all because one guy started a Facebook group.
It taught us that we could replace one single released by Sony Music Entertainment with another single released by Sony Music Entertainment. In other words, even if we tackle the branches, it does no damage at all to the tree.
Note the switch to £ signs (and the poster's explanation of that in another posting). This was in the UK. Stupid Brits are much less likely to be religious that stupid Americans.
It was because they were headed this way that they clutched at the USP of the Microsoft deal. The MS deal isn't the cause of this, it just (unsurprisingly, as you say) didn't stop it.
The number of instances of udevd running seems to vary. I tried killing it (at a time when there was only one instance) and Linux ran for a few hours before grinding to a halt, so it looks as if the problem could be in that area but not exactly that.
Not exactly. There are rules on what can and can't be said in the House of Commons, and although they're enforced by parliamentary procedure, not by statute, they are enforced.
I'm told (I'm not an expert, so I'm open to correction) that in Switzerland pretty much anybody can get a work permit provided they will be paid above the average rate for the job. That means that if there are skills that cannot be sourced locally then employers have no problems recruiting globally, but they can't use that as a way of bringing in cheap foreign workers. I hope that is true -- it seems like an intelligent system.
Slashdot Mirror
Science can't properly research it (although the people writing grant applications might bank on the people giving out the grants not knowing that). If the universe appears non-deterministic it's possible that there's some hidden deterministic variable controlling the apparent randomness (and Occam's razor doesn't help much -- hidden deterministic variable v. hidden random number generator). Essentially "deterministic" is non-falsifiable.
"Slide to unlock" has been around since the first person fitted a bolt to a door or gate. I suspect the patent is a little more detailed.
Er, well, 78% against, 6% for, 24% abstentions. The EC will see that as a 78% v. 32% defeat, ie, only a 46% defeat. Because politicians seem to really believe you can do that sort of thing with statistics.
Not really. Free will existing/not existing and the universe being deterministic/not deterministic are both metaphysical issues, so it's unclear what would be meant by "evidence" short of absolute logical incompatibility.
Hah! Science has an Oedipus complex!
I think you've both missed the point. We were talking about smart headlights that can see through heavy rain...
You might have been...
I think you've missed the point. Some believe free will can exist in a deterministic universe (compatibilism, as you say), but others believe it cannot possibly exist even if the universe is not deterministic. In other words, free will and determinism have nothing to do with each other: they're orthogonal concepts. That was taught to me on a philosophy foundation course -- philosophy is way ahead of where you think it is.
And this, ladies and gentlement, is why real science is done by not only performing the experiement and recording the results, but by writing up your method with sufficient clarity that your results can be replicated by independent researchers.
Once that has been done sufficient times, if your method itself is sound, then the results are valid.
Nope, not good enough. It's not enough to write it up in such a way that it can be replicated by independent researchers. You should only start to trust the results when it has been replicated by independent researchers. Unfortunately that hardly ever happens, because it's all but impossible to get funding for replication of work that's already been done.
That wasn't "an anti-science bent". It was anti using the word "science" as a magical invocation over anything at all, scientific or not, to make people suspend their critical judgement. Using the word "science" as an invocation in that way is all too effective in some circles, and I for one am against it.
Define "being a whore" in this scenario. They make a good game. We wish to play it. We hate Windows. Dilemma. Nothing about being a whore in there.
Yeah, except for the part where you buy their game for Windows, sending them the message "You don't need to make a separate Linux client. We whores will happily still buy it for Windows and run it crippled in Wine."
Wow, that's what the whores do in your part of the world? That must lead to a lot of out-of-town punters being very disappointed.
I wonder whether the slide-to-unlock issue accounts for one of the changes in the latest update to my Galaxy Ace. It used to be slide-to-unlock. Now I make exactly the same gesture to unlock it, but instead of the screen sliding it shows a growing circle. It looks as if they're already working the way around some of the issues. Mind you, the Galaxy Ace is rectangular with rounded corners and has a button...
Pinning only makes sense for a few commonly-used apps, because it's completely unstructured. If I were to put all of the apps I ever use onto the taskbar I'd need a taskbar the length of a football pitch. I was at a conference yesterday, and one of the presenters used the taskbar to open the product he wanted to demonstrate and it took him an age to scroll along and find the one he wanted (it was on a Mac, not MS Windows, but it seems to be essentially the same design with a bit of extra animation). I would have been there in three clicks of a menu.
I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!
From the BBC News:
So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
No. After the three warnings, if you don't appeal to any of the warnings, your details are passed to the copyright owners who may choose to take legal action through the courts. The £20 (refundable if you win) is for if you want to avoid having to bother with due process; it isn't part of the due process which is still there. This looks to me to be a big improvement over the existing system where the first you might hear of copyright infringement accusations is a court summons.
I wasn't talking about those who have finished grad school, I was talking about the students who will be likely to take the OP's class.
Sorry, I did mean undergraduate level even though I said graduate level. Mea Culpa.
You really think a college sophomore English paper's consideration of possible counterarguments is "as logically rigorous as doing proofs"?
Yes. I'm in the unusual position of having done both science >em>and humanities to first degree level (I continued with science to postgrad level). I find that most people in one camp or the other actually have no idea what those in the other camp have to do to get through their exams. The stuff I did in my humanities degree wasn't scientific (well, most of it wasn't: I did do some research into computational stylistics which was, and some of the grammar and forensic linguistics was) but it was as logically rigorous as the science. In fact, parts of the philosophy element were a lot more logically rigorous than the science (even than the maths element of the science, though had I done mathematics rather than science I expect there would have been more logical rigour). The English sophomore has to show understanding of a lot of competing theories (just as the science student does), has to understand where those theories come from and what their implications are (just as the science students do) and has to be able to apply those theories in practice (just as science students do). There is every bit as much logical rigour in the humanities (and as far as I can see in the social sciences -- I don't have direct experience of that) as in the sciences, it just isn't usually scientific, and nor should it be.
It's that people have driven logic (which had been the core of a liberal arts education for centuries) from the core curriculum
It was a mandatory part of my humanities degree (as part of the foundation course). It wasn't addressed at all in science.
The result is that students outside those fields have never really grappled with the difference between valid argumentation and fallacious reasoning.
That was only addressed on my humanities degree, not on science.
The quality of the discourse that results may or may not be good enough for the humanities, but it's not good enough for anything that purports to be a science.
It's not good enough for either. The humanities degree I did recognised that and taught it. The science degree didn't.
While social scientists may not need to be able to re-derive all their statistical tools at a moment's notice, it's most assuredly not enough for them to just have a superficial knowledge of how to use them. They need to understand them. If they don't understand why they're doing what they're doing, they will do it wrong as soon as the situation deviates in the slightest from the textbook example, so they are incompetent at doing their job.
They need to understand them, yes, but not necessarily be able to prove them. I spent ages being taught how to prove the central limit theorem. That was completely irrelevant except as an exercise. What matters is understanding the implications of the central limit theorem and the cases in which it applies or doesn't apply.
That's just as true for engineers. Jobs for the people who say "just tell me the formula" went out the window with the slide rule; we don't need human pocket calculators any more.
There's a huge zone between "just tell me the formula" and being able to prove the formula. When my wife was doing business studies she struggled with applying the normal distribution to quality assurance problems. Telling her the formula and teaching her h
That having been said, if you want to seriously stop being thought of as the 51st state (but a bit colder)
Colder than Alaska? I'd call it a tie.
It's true enough that statistics get misused in the hard sciences too. But I really don't think the rates of misuse are as similar as you think.
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "thinking rigorously." I'm talking about logical rigor, not difficulty/effort; I certainly don't mean that students in these fields don't have to think or work. But giving memorized answers or intuitively plausible arguments on exams and papers in their classes involves very different skills from those involved in e.g. doing a proof.
"Memorized answers or intuitively plausible arguments" shouldn't get the student past grade-school level, whatever discipline. If a graduate program lets a student get away with that (at least, with more than a scraped pass) then it's a poor quality program (and they exist in the sciences, too). But the skills they do need are not those involved in doing a proof. In the humanities, for example, it's not enough to give an "intuitively plausible" argument, you have to show thoroughness in considering possible counterarguments, something that is as logically rigorous as doing proofs but that doesn't often come up much in the hard sciences and that a lot of scientists are very poor at. And anyway, scientists very rarely form proofs anyway -- that's the domain of mathematicians and philosophers (who tend to annoy scientists by insisting on logical rigour over issues that the scientists want to dismiss with a hand-wave). Statistics for social scientists has no reason to teach proofs. An engineering approach is far more relevant: they need a set of analytical tools that they can use, not necessarily derive.
If I had a dollar for every paper published in a peer-reviewed social sciences journal which totally abused statistics, I'd retire and use my extra cash to fund organizations directed at basic logic and math education, trying to help with the situation.
Sadly that's true of the hard sciences, too.
Most social studies students I knew had little understanding of the statistics they were using. It was basically a magic incantation for giving them results and making their conclusions sound more credible to other people who likewise didn't understand statistics. The result is bad statistics and bad science. Yes, these people aren't idiots, but they've become used to being rewarded without having to think rigorously.
That's a remarkably naive view of the social sciences. There is absolutely no academic field in a responsible academic institution in which practitioners are "rewarded without having to think rigorously". The difference is in what they think rigorously about. Consider, for example, child development. The hard sciences will think rigorously about the factors that affect the rate of child development, the social sciences will think rigorously about how unusual rates of child development can be detected, and might be particularly concerned about how to make sure the tests are usable by those who are not necessarily statistically savvy (it is probably more efficient to simplify the application of tests at a loss of accuracy than to require all healthcare professionals to be highly numerate -- other skills are more important for them). And those in the humanities need to think rigorously about what (if anything) should be done with those who have unusual rates of development, working exhaustively through possibilities and consequences. In an ideal world all three fields should work together for the common good, but uninformed sniping like suggesting that people in some disciplines have "become used to being rewarded without having to think rigorously" is destructive of that.
If getting Rage Against the Machine to 2010's Christmas No. 1 has taught us anything, it's that all that is required to make changes is organised protest. Hundreds of thousands of people were willing to spend £0.99 buying that track on iTunes, buying the album in stores etc. just to ensure that generic Britain's Got Idol Pop Factor artists wouldn't, all because one guy started a Facebook group.
It taught us that we could replace one single released by Sony Music Entertainment with another single released by Sony Music Entertainment. In other words, even if we tackle the branches, it does no damage at all to the tree.
First name "Anonymous", last name "Coward", but what's your middle name?
Note the switch to £ signs (and the poster's explanation of that in another posting). This was in the UK. Stupid Brits are much less likely to be religious that stupid Americans.
It was because they were headed this way that they clutched at the USP of the Microsoft deal. The MS deal isn't the cause of this, it just (unsurprisingly, as you say) didn't stop it.
The number of instances of udevd running seems to vary. I tried killing it (at a time when there was only one instance) and Linux ran for a few hours before grinding to a halt, so it looks as if the problem could be in that area but not exactly that.
Not exactly. There are rules on what can and can't be said in the House of Commons, and although they're enforced by parliamentary procedure, not by statute, they are enforced.
That's true of the EU, but Switzerland is not in the EU and it doesn't let residents of other European countries work there without a work permit.
I'm told (I'm not an expert, so I'm open to correction) that in Switzerland pretty much anybody can get a work permit provided they will be paid above the average rate for the job. That means that if there are skills that cannot be sourced locally then employers have no problems recruiting globally, but they can't use that as a way of bringing in cheap foreign workers. I hope that is true -- it seems like an intelligent system.