The beliefs are different; the thought processes are exactly the same. But then, I don't expect someone who can't tell the difference between an ad hominem argument and a simple description to understand that.
Maybe science should stop doing warnings and studies and let things happens with no preparations from our side. We deserve it.
The problem with this from the scientists' point of view is that we have to live with the consequences too. Now, in my field I'm not likely to be issuing any dire warnings any time soon--but in the unlikely event that I did come across something in my work that could kill millions of people or crash the economy, I'd damn sure want to do something about it, if for no other reason than that my family and friends and I would be just as likely to be affected as anyone else.
To further your analogy, one of the passengers in the car is insisting that the acceleration has ceased because the slope leveled off for a few hundred feet a couple of miles back, and continues to claim that the speedometer reads 55 MPH even as the needle climbs toward 100 and the entire State Patrol is chasing the car down the highway.
That's exactly what will happen. A while back, a friend of mine described the Five Stages Of Climate Change Denial:
1. It's not happening. 2. If it is happening, humans have nothing to do with it. 3. If it's happening and we're causing it, we can't do anything about it because that would cost too much. 4. It's happening and we're causing it, but that's a good thing. 5. If those damned liberals hadn't interfered with all their regulations, the market would have taken care of this problem!
Mostly we see #1-3 right now, but I've seen #4 too, and I'm sure #5 will be along any time.
I don't have mod points right now, so I'll just repost AC's comment:
If I'm driving on the freeway, holding the gas pedal steady, and suddenly notice the car is speeding up, I don't think "gee, it must be the small fluctuations in the pressure I'm applying to the pedal, since the engine is the primary source of energy". I start looking at other factors, like a downward slope.
Do you understand? Of course not, because that would mean admitting you were wrong about this issue. If all the scientists in the world can't convince, no logic will ever get through.
This is the best possible answer to all the "Of course it's the sun, stupid scientists!" posts on this and any related story.
Yes, trucks have always been around... for people who had a use for them. Are you really going to claim that the hordes of urbanites running around in giant steroidal SUVs and pickups need those things to haul their groceries or get to work?
But much as car manufacturers change the cosmetics of cars each year to sell new models to people who don't really need to replace their old ones, we can expect Microsoft, Apple, Dell, et. al. to continue to change the cosmetics to convince us to "upgrade".
I have been stocking up on car analogies for years in preparation for exactly this moment.
PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around... they are going to be one out of x people.
So decades after they've almost vanished from mainstream use, they'll suddenly become faddish again, and manufacturers will be competing with each other to see who can build the biggest box to take up the most space on the desktop? Cool. I can't wait for the resurgence of 50-pound CRTs.
from the euro-centric crowd, but this is exactly why you embrace freedom-loving society and not authoritarian socialism like they have in Europe. As John Green has said, you cannot declare war on an idea or noun because nouns are so amazingly resilient.
Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you'd left off the second sentence there. The freedom-loving US has declared "War on $NON_MATERIAL_THING" more often than any other country I can think of.
Google glass is at least visible, many people in the future will simply put the camera in a piece of jewelry or a pen just because it looks less geeky.
Especially if the business in question caters to hipsters and half the customers are wearing those godawful chunky plastic BCGs. You can hide a lot of recording and processing power in those things these days...
Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.
Honesty is no longer treasured.
"Has become"? "No longer"? Look, whistleblowers have always been treated badly. Governmental, corporate, academic--no matter what kind of organization you're in, the organization will react badly to anything it sees as a threat. And the problem gets worse the larger the organizations are. In small groups, human beings act like human beings, but in large groups, they act more like the cells of some vast organism. Imagine how you'd react if some of your muscle cells suddenly started refusing to contract when you told them to, even if by that refusal they were preventing you from doing something you really shouldn't do.
I've worked in government, industry, and now academia each for about a third of my adult life. Believe me when I say that the uncertainty in academia is much, much greater than in the others. There are rewards, obviously, or people wouldn't do it at all, but security is not one of them. By comparison, the other sectors are much safer.
Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks "academics don't know anything about the real world," this probably won't get through to you.
Stepping in to save a stranger's life is pretty much the opposite of predation. If you're using this as an example of psychopathy, you're defining the word so broadly as to have no meaning.
It's not a disease, it's simply the trait of a predator. It means that he can manipulate people more easily, which is a useful skill. Rejecting it because it's badly seen by society is a mistake.
When people in a society prey on other people in that society, we usually identify their behavior a a disease, and rightly so.
Okay, tell you what: bury half a human skeleton in your yard, call the cops, and tell them you've found some interesting bones but you're not sure what they are. Be sure to let us know what happens next.
This is called "Lewontin's fallacy" and has been debunked far and wide.
Calling something a fallacy does not make it fallacious, nor does claiming it has been debunked constitute a debunking. I recommend you follow the links from the Hsu article and learn some more about what is still a very active debate.
So we have a world where many biologists are in denial and just stick their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALAAA I cannot hear you LALALALAAA" when people start wondering about the potential for viable hybrids to occur in nature.
Um, biologists have been aware of the fuzziness of species boundaries for a very long time. It's non-biologists who remember the archaic "mate and produce fertile offspring" definition of "species" from high school science class who make comments like OP's.
I forget the name, but a book exists ( yes it's classified ) that outlines all of the current warships that sail the Earth. Their known defenses, and how many / what type of offensive firepower it will take to guarantee a kill.
The book you're probably thinking of is Jane's Fighting Ships, which isn't classified at all--you can buy it on Amazon. Which is something that's been giving counterintelligence people fits for well over a century. The Jane's group is one of the world's largest and most effective spy agencies, and they sell everything they know.
The CLT is one of the most elegant and powerful results in all of mathematics, and can be used, quite appropriately, to justify normal models for all sorts of measurements. That being said, its usefulness has led to the dumbed-down idea of "the bell curve" being the appropriate model for all sorts of things where it's clearly not--I don't know how many times I've seen a normal curve superimposed on a histogram or kernel density estimation of data that are clearly non-normal. As another poster pointed out, there are simple and well-understood tests for normality, and failure to apply them when constructing a normal model is just ridiculous.
The problem with frequentist statistics as used in the article is that its "recipe" character often results in people using statistics that do not understand its limitations (a good example is assuming a normal distribution when there is none). The bayesian approach does not suffer from this problem, also because it forces you to think a little bit more about the problem you are trying to solve compared to the frequentist approach.
If only. The number of people who think "sprinkle a little Bayes on it" is the solution to everything is frighteningly large, and growing exponentially AFAICT. There's now a Bayesian recipe counterpart to just about every non-Bayesian recipe, and the only difference between them, as a practical matter, is that the people using the former think they're doing something special and better. One might say that their prior is on the order of P(correct|Bayes) = 1, which makes it very hard to convince them otherwise...
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot comment of the year.
The beliefs are different; the thought processes are exactly the same. But then, I don't expect someone who can't tell the difference between an ad hominem argument and a simple description to understand that.
It's always cute when denialists think they're somehow different from antivaxers and creationists.
Maybe science should stop doing warnings and studies and let things happens with no preparations from our side. We deserve it.
The problem with this from the scientists' point of view is that we have to live with the consequences too. Now, in my field I'm not likely to be issuing any dire warnings any time soon--but in the unlikely event that I did come across something in my work that could kill millions of people or crash the economy, I'd damn sure want to do something about it, if for no other reason than that my family and friends and I would be just as likely to be affected as anyone else.
To further your analogy, one of the passengers in the car is insisting that the acceleration has ceased because the slope leveled off for a few hundred feet a couple of miles back, and continues to claim that the speedometer reads 55 MPH even as the needle climbs toward 100 and the entire State Patrol is chasing the car down the highway.
That's exactly what will happen. A while back, a friend of mine described the Five Stages Of Climate Change Denial:
1. It's not happening.
2. If it is happening, humans have nothing to do with it.
3. If it's happening and we're causing it, we can't do anything about it because that would cost too much.
4. It's happening and we're causing it, but that's a good thing.
5. If those damned liberals hadn't interfered with all their regulations, the market would have taken care of this problem!
Mostly we see #1-3 right now, but I've seen #4 too, and I'm sure #5 will be along any time.
I don't have mod points right now, so I'll just repost AC's comment:
If I'm driving on the freeway, holding the gas pedal steady, and suddenly notice the car is speeding up, I don't think "gee, it must be the small fluctuations in the pressure I'm applying to the pedal, since the engine is the primary source of energy". I start looking at other factors, like a downward slope.
Do you understand? Of course not, because that would mean admitting you were wrong about this issue. If all the scientists in the world can't convince, no logic will ever get through.
This is the best possible answer to all the "Of course it's the sun, stupid scientists!" posts on this and any related story.
Yes, trucks have always been around ... for people who had a use for them. Are you really going to claim that the hordes of urbanites running around in giant steroidal SUVs and pickups need those things to haul their groceries or get to work?
But much as car manufacturers change the cosmetics of cars each year to sell new models to people who don't really need to replace their old ones, we can expect Microsoft, Apple, Dell, et. al. to continue to change the cosmetics to convince us to "upgrade".
I have been stocking up on car analogies for years in preparation for exactly this moment.
PCs are going to be like trucks. They are still going to be around ... they are going to be one out of x people.
So decades after they've almost vanished from mainstream use, they'll suddenly become faddish again, and manufacturers will be competing with each other to see who can build the biggest box to take up the most space on the desktop? Cool. I can't wait for the resurgence of 50-pound CRTs.
I know I'll get marked as a troll for this
"Mod me up! Mod me up!"
from the euro-centric crowd, but this is exactly why you embrace freedom-loving society and not authoritarian socialism like they have in Europe. As John Green has said, you cannot declare war on an idea or noun because nouns are so amazingly resilient.
Your argument would be a lot more convincing if you'd left off the second sentence there. The freedom-loving US has declared "War on $NON_MATERIAL_THING" more often than any other country I can think of.
Google glass is at least visible, many people in the future will simply put the camera in a piece of jewelry or a pen just because it looks less geeky.
Especially if the business in question caters to hipsters and half the customers are wearing those godawful chunky plastic BCGs. You can hide a lot of recording and processing power in those things these days ...
Unfortunately, the corporate world has become very much like the political arena.
Honesty is no longer treasured.
"Has become"? "No longer"? Look, whistleblowers have always been treated badly. Governmental, corporate, academic--no matter what kind of organization you're in, the organization will react badly to anything it sees as a threat. And the problem gets worse the larger the organizations are. In small groups, human beings act like human beings, but in large groups, they act more like the cells of some vast organism. Imagine how you'd react if some of your muscle cells suddenly started refusing to contract when you told them to, even if by that refusal they were preventing you from doing something you really shouldn't do.
So, welcome to the real world then
where uncertainty rules.
be glad you get 3 years in between.
I've worked in government, industry, and now academia each for about a third of my adult life. Believe me when I say that the uncertainty in academia is much, much greater than in the others. There are rewards, obviously, or people wouldn't do it at all, but security is not one of them. By comparison, the other sectors are much safer.
Of course, if you're one of those people who thinks "academics don't know anything about the real world," this probably won't get through to you.
Hey there, Internet Tough Guy. It's been a while. How ya been?
Stepping in to save a stranger's life is pretty much the opposite of predation. If you're using this as an example of psychopathy, you're defining the word so broadly as to have no meaning.
It's not a disease, it's simply the trait of a predator. It means that he can manipulate people more easily, which is a useful skill. Rejecting it because it's badly seen by society is a mistake.
When people in a society prey on other people in that society, we usually identify their behavior a a disease, and rightly so.
Okay, tell you what: bury half a human skeleton in your yard, call the cops, and tell them you've found some interesting bones but you're not sure what they are. Be sure to let us know what happens next.
It is idiotic to claim that there is no difference between free markets and socialism
It would indeed be idiotic, if anyone were making that claim. Who's making it?
"We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
This is called "Lewontin's fallacy" and has been debunked far and wide.
Calling something a fallacy does not make it fallacious, nor does claiming it has been debunked constitute a debunking. I recommend you follow the links from the Hsu article and learn some more about what is still a very active debate.
So we have a world where many biologists are in denial and just stick their fingers in their ears and go "LALALALALAAA I cannot hear you LALALALAAA" when people start wondering about the potential for viable hybrids to occur in nature.
Um, biologists have been aware of the fuzziness of species boundaries for a very long time. It's non-biologists who remember the archaic "mate and produce fertile offspring" definition of "species" from high school science class who make comments like OP's.
I forget the name, but a book exists ( yes it's classified ) that outlines all of the current warships that sail the Earth. Their known defenses, and how many / what type of offensive firepower it will take to guarantee a kill.
The book you're probably thinking of is Jane's Fighting Ships, which isn't classified at all--you can buy it on Amazon. Which is something that's been giving counterintelligence people fits for well over a century. The Jane's group is one of the world's largest and most effective spy agencies, and they sell everything they know.
The CLT is one of the most elegant and powerful results in all of mathematics, and can be used, quite appropriately, to justify normal models for all sorts of measurements. That being said, its usefulness has led to the dumbed-down idea of "the bell curve" being the appropriate model for all sorts of things where it's clearly not--I don't know how many times I've seen a normal curve superimposed on a histogram or kernel density estimation of data that are clearly non-normal. As another poster pointed out, there are simple and well-understood tests for normality, and failure to apply them when constructing a normal model is just ridiculous.
The problem with frequentist statistics as used in the article is that its "recipe" character often results in people using statistics that do not understand its limitations (a good example is assuming a normal distribution when there is none). The bayesian approach does not suffer from this problem, also because it forces you to think a little bit more about the problem you are trying to solve compared to the frequentist approach.
If only. The number of people who think "sprinkle a little Bayes on it" is the solution to everything is frighteningly large, and growing exponentially AFAICT. There's now a Bayesian recipe counterpart to just about every non-Bayesian recipe, and the only difference between them, as a practical matter, is that the people using the former think they're doing something special and better. One might say that their prior is on the order of P(correct|Bayes) = 1, which makes it very hard to convince them otherwise ...