Very well thought out post. I agree with it in spirit. However, you should realize that the timescales over which we do things in academia are shorter than in industry. What do I mean by that?
Usually, things move SLOWLY in industry. You have time to create a step-by-step process, discuss the safety implications and formalize the procedure AFTER the process has been shown to be useful. And to suggest otherwise would be naive in the extreme. No one in industry would spend thousands of dollars evaluating the safety of a procedure that has not been shown to be useful.
That is precisely what academia (in the hard, get-your-hands-dirty kind of sciences, not the scribble-on-a-chalkboard or bang-a-keyboard kind) is for. We test potential new ways of doing things and discard them or develop them on a weekly basis. You don't WASTE precious few grant monies on designing the safest environment for what is essentially a pilot test - more of a feasibility analysis. You make it as safe as possible and trust that the people doing the work are a step above a layperson off the street.
That's really what bothers me about OSHA. I work in an academic lab (rather senior grad student) and the idea of safety has become more of a "cover the administration's ass" rather than any meaningful debate on what we're trying to do to make things safe. They are trying to make it so that an idiot would be safe in these labs. Well, shouldn't you rather train your workers to not be idiots? Take the OHSA rule of 2 people in a machine shop - fine for 9 to 5 machinists but not for people who have a personal stake in their work. Or take the hysteria about lead or mercury. Gah!
This sh** is the single most important reason why working in R/D in industry turns me off big time - kills my intellectual erection just like that:P.
You may not agree with what I've said above, and that's fine. I happen to take the point of view that research is dangerous - you get into it knowing that it won't be as safe as a desk job. There are horrible things that can happen to you if you're not careful, but that office bureaucrats CANNOT gauge the relative size of these dangers and weigh them against your own sense of survival and the training you've received. You cannot extend the boundaries of knowledge without taking some risks, sometimes unknown - the idea is to take these risks intelligently and BY DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to eliminate the known risks.
Safety is absolutely critical, make no mistake about it. But trusting the bureaucrats usually in charge of it to make WISE decisions about it - decisions that are fueled by actual concern for workers rather than heading off potential lawsuits - is naive, to say the least. The other big danger is that if you hand off the authority for making safety decisions to the bureaucrats, it makes the actual researchers intellectually lazy (and with good reason - responsibility without authority is the job description of a eunuch in ancient times).
Anyway, I recognize that I'm not altogether objective when it comes to this stuff, so if I were a budding young researcher reading my rant above, I would take it with a grain of salt and the caveat that these things vary TREMENDOUSLY across the spectrum of research schools here in the US.
Baen is THE best example of a publishing house that actually gets it. Not that all their authors are worth reading, but a few prolific authors who can also write well (David Weber, Lois M. Bujold) make it all worth it.
Also, their ebooks are priced VERY fairly. The hardcover of "Storm from the shadows" was around $20 or so on amazon. The ebook on Baen.com is $6.
Not trying to rob your customers blind can get you some long-term loyalty - something the other PHs and other media can try to learn:P.
College isn't just for the lazy, but also for the mediocre... and anyone who intends to get into research.
Would mod you up if I had any points left. I think you have the right idea. I'm in research and I don't think any amount of "seeing the real world" would have helped train me in the rigor that my physical science profession requires (12-14hrs a day 6-7 days a week of enjoyable work is rarer than rare in the so-called "real world". Besides, in this day and age, people who think academic work (again: in the hard sciences) is bookworm material are out of their freaking mind. Running a lab (or even being partly responsible for one - as a lowly grad student) requires a scary breadth and depth in your skill set (I like to think of it as having to be "jack of all trades and master of a few", to turn that hoary old cliche on its head:P)
In my experience, people who tout 'real-world' experience are usually masters of resume-padding and self-delusion (not necessarily referring to GP:P). This is ESPECIALLY true in professions that don't deal with tangible end-products (this doesn't include software:P - to me that is tangible).
The only things I DON'T have to deal with (that the real world has aplenty) is boredom with repetitive tasks that a monkey could perform and dealing with assholes (imagine how many abrasive idiots a customer service rep has to deal with). If that's the real world, you can have it. Life is too short to WILLFULLY embrace such madness:P and then further, to brag about it as so many people are wont to do. Celebs are the worst at this - just because a famous actor or basketball player or a self-made millionaire "made it" in the real world doesn't mean that everyone can or should drop out of school and have silly adventures just so they have good stories to tell at parties:P. Prodigies are usually sensible enough to know when their accomplishments are due to their special skills and when they are simply due to lots of hard work (and then again, sometimes they aren't and give out advice that would lead average people to drop out of high school/college like lemmings off a cliff - in pursuit of that indefinable... coolness is the only word for it... associated with successful people.
Besides, that leads me to another thing that tfa missed entirely: you can't do research "at a distance". And only a "real-worlder" would believe that research is the domicile of grad students and postdocs and professors. These days, more and more undergrads participate to a greater extent than ever in research (without necessarily staying in academia afterward) so that brick and mortar universities are gaining MORE relevance in the hard sciences.
Disclaimer: please don't give me counterexamples OUTSIDE the hard sciences - I have nothing to say about that. I've stated my domain of interest (for this post) very clearly.
A final observation: as society gets ever more technical, the BASIC level of competence that a potential employee needs (in a field that is at least a little complex) simply becomes too deep to be tested for at the interview level. In essence, a college degree (in theory) attests to THIS basic competence. Now, you may well argue (sometimes justly) whether this is satisfied in practice. I don't disagree. But that is not a reason to throw the entire thing away and start "going with our gut" every time we want to hire someone. That only works in cheap novels and sappy movies:P.
I'm also noticing a disturbing trend in "quantum mechanics" being spewed whenever we don't understand something. I caution you that people in the future might look back on this and laugh that such crude research could in any way conclude that quantum mechanics is at work. It's almost as if we assume we understand other possible explanation so it must be the one we don't understand very well. We don't understand photosynthesis --> must be quantum mechanics! We don't understand the human mind --> must be quantum mechanics! etc. Am I saying quantum mechanics has nothing to do with these things? No. I'm just saying I have seen no conclusive proof.
Ordinarily, I would agree with you in being irritated by the now-rampant quantum fetish in academia (far outside physics). To be fair to this particular study though, they are simply using a quantum probability model (i.e. simply co-opting the mathematics of QM, not the physics to see if that formalism yields better predictions). No sane person would think that quantum mechanical physical processes can actually scale up to the human behavioral level.
These researchers are just doing what anyone seeking to make quantitative predictions in the social sciences are essentially forced to do - in the absence of any bottom up understanding of the relevant variables and dynamics, one simply has to resort to a top-down heuristic approach. Try mathematical models that make intuitive sense and then try to figure out WHY those models work - possibly yielding some true insight into the phenomenon being investigated.
The new thing in this study is that a non-intuitive model is being used for the express purpose of "let's see what happens". Please don't try to read much more into the quantum stuff.
As I said before, your general complaint is quite justified. Too many hacks (usually "healers" of some kind or the other) stretch analogies into metaphors and finally into gooey taffy:P and you end up with movies like "What the bleep do we know":P.
Hell, we work with quantum coherent matter (which includes something technical called a vortex) in our research and my colleague has the funniest newspaper clipping pinned to the wall - some kind of workshop by an "expert" on using a "vortex" to heal people:D. Ever since I saw that, I've been trying to heal myself by worshiping our experimental apparatus - no luck yet:(.
To concatenate the unknown with the unknowable is geriatric blunder of the worst kind, for it presupposes that our descendants are stupider than we are - a hypothesis that continues to be proved false with every succeeding generation.
//not calling you geriatric - I've just really wanted to say that... for a long time:)
That's true: E=mc^2 is valid for moving particles if m is interpreted as the relativistic mass.
The grumbling comes about because physicists themselves almost never talk about relativistic mass in this sense anymore. Nowadays we usually say that a particle has an invariant mass m (its rest mass) which determines the relationship between its energy and momentum; E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2. That way a particle's mass has a single, well-defined value regardless of how fast it's moving. What you might call the "relativistic mass" I just call E/(c^2).
The two formalisms are completely equivalent, of course, but modern notation has swung toward defining "mass" as the rest mass only.
The two formalisms are NOT completely equivalent even within the framework of classical special relativity and especially not when you think about relativistic quantum theory. In quantum theory, mass is a quantum number and therefore invariant (a true scalar). THAT is why the idea of "rest mass" is at best a quaint holdover from the early years.
The early physicists wanted to preserve the Newtonian definition of momentum as p = mv so they absorbed the relativistic gamma factor into the mass term and thought of the mass as varying with speed. In the modern mathematical treatment, this is absurd. The proper (fully consistent) way is to modify the Newtonian definition of momentum to include the gamma factor p = gamma*m0*v (where m0 is the MASS, period.
It is not surprising that incorrect terminology survives to this day. for one thing, pop sci books insist on using the "cooler" names. Why else would we be using names like "alpha", "beta", "gamma" and "X-ray" radiation for things we now fully understand?
Mastering the advanced concepts in Math and science is a lot more involved then High School. So if there is no interest, brilliance now could translate into mediocrity.
THIS.
It's about your reference frame. High school math and science are piss-poor indicators of both difficulty and coolness. The tragedy is never that an originally interested student loses interest or gets bored due to college math/science. It is that the stuff gets exponentially more interesting (as you start doing REAL math that can serve as a REAL tool to understand the universe around you) while at the same time getting progressively more involved.
I won't say that it gets more difficult (it does get involved - as in lots of diverse concepts to integrate) on an absolute scale because it doesn't. Math is one of the VERY few fields that get easier with time IF (and only if:P) you build a strong foundation to begin with. Contrary to most fields, math truly requires you to have mastered everything and remember almost everything (rather - integrate it into your thinking until it becomes second nature) from semester to semester.
My fellow students who refused to believe this are precisely the ones who faltered later.
That's one of the hard parts about taking math/science classes though. People are used to the idea (from the humanities perhaps) that information content in classes is sparse (low signal to noise) so that remembering the key points is sufficient. Quite so. TO put it simply, the humanities are noted for their verbosity (not a bad thing - in fact, sometimes it's the only redeeming feature in some otherwise redundant fields:P) while the sciences are noted for being too laconic. Perhaps we should sprinkle some 'noise' into the curriculum (Mythbusters anyone?). Unfortunately, some students tend to tune to the 'noise' in that case and miss the signal entirely:P.
But the history of math and science has been the history of consolidation (both of concepts and notation) until the information is packed VERY densely into the core curriculum. The problem with very high signal to noise in the transmitter is that you need a nearly lossless receiver or you lose a LOT of information. That is precisely what happens in math and science classes.
Remember: if a picture is worth a thousand words, an equation is worth at least a trillion:P.
But, I'm rambling. My point (to echo the parent) is simply that the high school curriculum is a ridiculous indicator of what to expect in college/grad school. Talk to some students/profs at a good university. Look at some course sites (MIT's open course ware is a god example).
The bottom line is that the "nerdiness" of a profession is a meaningless concept. People are nerdy, not professions. If you can't establish your own personality in what you do, you are merely a slave to social trends (or worse, a geek who gets his credo by following WIRED advice:P).
You might be right about Penrose's thesis (about the mind being quantum mechanical) in the book - I have no idea, nor do I particularly care. I have read that book several times over my high school/undergrad/grad career (physics) and I have NEVER read it to the very end (so, I essentially skipped over all his ruminations on the nature of the mind:P).
BUT, I think that his chapters on math and physics and their interface (everything prior to the biology chapters) constitute the SINGLE GREATEST and only successful attempt ever to present a NON-DUMBED DOWN layperson's introduction to mathematical physics. I gained more physical and mathematical insight from that book than I did from any other source prior to graduate school. For that alone, I salute him. Popularizations of physics a la Hawking are a dime a dozen. An "Emperor's new mind" having (what I can only describe as) 'conceptual math' to TRULY describe the physics comes along maybe once in a lifetime.
His latest book is the extension of that effort and the culmination of a lifetime of thinking clearly and succinctly about math and physics. He is the only writer alive who imo has earned the right to use a title like "The road to reality: a complete guide to the laws of physics".
As for Hofstadter, GEB was merely pretty (while ENM was beautiful), but essentially useless (to me) beyond that. Perhaps it was meant as simply a guide to aesthetic appreciation, in which case it succeeded magnificently. As far as reality is concerned, it offered me no new insight that I could see. Stimulating prose though - I guess no book dealing with Escher can be entirely bad. I haven't read anything else by Hofstadter so I can't comment there.
Plus, the EEtimes reporter screwed up (unsurprising). He misunderstood a paragraph from the original paper in Science that talked about trying to prevent decomposition in the Silane jacket:
Thus, we avoided decomposition by loading silane and performing further measurements at low temperatures below 120-150 K. We warmed the sample up to 300 K only at pressures above 100 GPa.
- Science 14 March 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5869, pp. 1506 - 1509 DOI: 10.1126/science.1153282
Superconductivity in Hydrogen Dominant Materials: Silane
M. I. Eremets, I. A. Trojan, S. A. Medvedev, J. S. Tse, Y. Yao
From the same paper:
We report the transformation of insulating molecular silane to a metal at 50 GPa, becoming superconducting at a transition temperature of Tc = 17 kelvin at 96 and 120 GPa. 17K is far from room temperature.
On the other hand, one of the co-authors is named Trojan. How cool is that?
images are all false-color nonsense, maybe the best way to experience objects at these scales is some kind of touch interface. False colors != nonsense. Just think of them as XY graphs with RGB values for heights and/or other physical properties (sometimes conductivity or even tunneling barriers). If you think of them as "real" pictures in the sense of everyday "seeing", it is obvious that they won't live up to your expectations. After all, every sense we have (except for the esp nutjobs) involves us (at least qualitatively) measuring the physical properties (reflectivity, heat, atomic binding forces, chemical composition and air density fluctuations) of objects around us (match the properties to their commonly used names:P). In that broader sense, STM, SEM and AFM are extensions to our sense, measuring more exotic properties at more outlandish length scales. IN fact, they measure the properties precisely and quantitatively, with no ambiguities as our own limited senses do.
And touch interfaces, using the same criteria for judgment (criteria that I do not endorse), would be quite absurd as touch (the way we feel it intuitively) ceases to have meaning at length scales several orders of magnitude higher than the nanoworld. We're talking single electrons tunneling from samples to STM tips. That's how an STM "touches" the specimen.
As for looking alien, EVERYTHING that you cannot see with your unaided eyes is alien on a gut level. This is merely one more step down the road of machine-aided sight. I do take your point about these STM images though. That is simply because it is still a young field and fast scanning is still in development. I don't have the citation handy (and it's WAYYY to late here to look it up - it was a physics group at Cornell headed by K. Schwab) but they have already made breakthroughs in performing fast scans, enough to make flyby movies using an STM.
This is analogous to the history of the SEM (the regular electron microscope, essentially e-beams instead of light, but working off the same optical principles). Today's SEM pictures look like the masterpieces dreamed of by a crazy alien high on meth. My faith in artistic vision falls far short of it being able to dream up something like that. Trite I know, but truth is truly stranger than fiction. No Picasso can conceive of, or paint the landscapes uncovered by these fantastic instruments.
Heck, when I worked on an SEM at times, it took all my resolve to not lose myself for my alloted time (several hundred dollars per hour I might add:P) zooming in more and more and more... on what was essentially a dust speck, or chemical debris. It's a whole 'nuther world down there folks. Feels like Fantastic Voyage when you go and visit. Things look disturbingly familiar but you know they're not. That feeling, greatly magnified, must be what a future explorer might feel when he/she steps onto a brand new planet.
Mainly because YOU were "wishwashy" about life, not me. You never gave a definition, you just said "Life is what we know".
Like you said, the word "life" has a specific meaning, but NOT the rather crappy one you use. I NEVER attempted to define "life". Please read what I actually wrote. I will attempt to clarify it again: "Life" as currently defined (whatever the definition is:P) can ONLY make sense in the context of what we currently know. It is ABSURD to try to cram every possible meaning into the term just because a science fiction writer had the imagination to dream up a plausible organism that didn't fit into current biological norms. I could then argue that "life" might everywhere, including the interstellar vacuum, because beings composed of resonant EM fields might possibly exist there, fulfilling all the terms in the "best" definition you found.
You seem to be tense, seeing argumentative opponents where none exist:P. I have no intention of looking up the word because I am NOT arguing about the word itself. I was pointing out to you that it is ridiculous to brand scientists as arrogant for using "life" or "life forms" in the way they do because the limitations of the definitions are understood, implicit and trivial.
The rest of your post did not arouse my interest so I did not respond to it, particularly your biochemical conjectures.
Pretty much every single statement about life made by a human being should really have an asterick [sic] saying "Life as we know know it." That's rather redundant. You've fallen into the same semantic trap that most armchair philosophers do (I'm not calling you one, just saying). Our usage of ANY word for a concept automatically implies the concept "AS WE KNOW IT", and not "as all it could ever be". If and when life that operates on principles other than "as we know them" is discovered, we will then have to decide whether to expand the meaning of the word 'life' to include the new stuff or whether to come up with a new word for it. Do you see what I'm getting at here? Science, thankfully, has explicit definitions for words. "Life" means something specific and is not wishy-washy and fluid as it is in mysticism and popular perception.
Michael Crichton had a witty scene in The Andromeda Strain where the lead scientist systematically "proves" that a rock is "alive". It illustrates perfectly the danger of losing oneself in semantic trivialities instead of heeding the advice of an ancient quantum mechanic [sic]:P to "shut up and calculate".
If I said that humans can't fly, it's not arrogance on my part. Our current definition of "human" has implicit "no-fly" clauses built into it:P. If you find a flying human somewhere, the International Linguistics Organization* would have to convene to redefine "human".
I am a physicist and I agree 100%. The essence of the article was summarized ages ago by Hawking in his first book. Nothing new at all. It was speculation then and it remains speculation now. To make USE of these speculative conjectures about the universe requires a technology on a much grander scale than we presently have. To wit - imagine particle accelerators girdling the globe or actual probes dispatched to the neighborhoods of black holes. Yeah, we ain't there yet, and until we are, expect more empty articles as the one above and more mathematical masturbation than experimental observation.
audio is sampled at a rate of 44.1MHz, meaning frequencies up to 22.05MHz exist in the file, but it's known that humans can only hear up to 20MHz or so anyway. Getcher SI prefixes right:P. The human auditory range is from 20Hz to 20KHz and audio is sampled at ~44 KHz, twice the maximum useful frequency.
Correction: it has been suspected, theorized, speculated upon, and other similar verbs.
NOW, we KNOW. A good mathematical model is half what's needed to select ONE candidate from a host of good, competing theories about a phenomenon. The other half is evidence supporting NEW predictions then made by that model. We still await that of course.
Before I get flamed, allow me to clarify the obvious: time doesn't slow down because humans feel endangered. Our perception of time may slow down because of psychological and physiological conditions.
If I read the summary correctly, they have shown (to a limited extent) that EVEN our perception of time does NOT change during such events. What they concluded therefore is that our MEMORY is more to blame for compositing (AFTER the fact) an apparent slowdown or speedup of time during the event.
FTA:
'The answer to the paradox is that time estimation and memory are intertwined: the volunteers merely thought the fall took a longer time in retrospect'." [emphasis mine]
So, the posters so far have been stating the obvious, but seem to have missed this point. The researchers were trying to TEST the long-held conventional belief that our perceptions do slow down or speed up during certain special events. They seem to have come up with a startling result - our perceptions stay pretty much the same, our later MEMORIES seem to be edited after the fact to make it seem that we perceived time differently during the event. Brains are so devious. *cackle* *rubs hands in glee*
When Einstein published on relativity, some of the best scientists of his age stood up to decry his work as ludicrous; pure mathematical abstraction with no provable physical reality underlying it . Yet evidence accumulated and today we agree that Einstein was right.
Indeed. And this is bad how? The former IS the correct stance until and unless there is evidence to back it up. It was true of relativity and it remains true of String theory (for which there is as yet NO evidence - so it is pure mathematical abstraction at the moment). Would you rather we hopped, skipped and jumped from theory to theory with no evidence? You prove my point for me. Science has progressed thus far and maintained its objectivity precisely because EVIDENCE is used to separate the true from the false, not armchair philosophizing and "thought experiments" (that are perfectly ok to use during hypothesis construction but NOT, repeat, NOT as ultimate proof of validity). The trouble with religion, and indeed any secular philosophy before empiricism came on the scene, is that abstract proof was considered SUFFICIENT to establish physical reality, which we now know is simply not the case. It is necessary to establish adequate understanding of physical phenomena and enable predictions, but it is simply not sufficient.
And if you don't think there's no dogmatism in science, then you don't know all that much about the history of science. Science is inherently forward-looking and self-correcting, but it's also a human institution, which means it's unavoidably subject to the same biases as anything else we do.
Good going. Putting words into someone else's mouth and capping it off with ad hominem attacks is a wonderful way to make your point. My point was (and remains) that religion is fundamentally and admittedly NOT forward-looking (hence my tirade against blind ancestor worship) and definitely NOT self-correcting (to fix something you have to first admit to yourself that it's broken - something that religion is not built for). Biases in science do exist but must of necessity bow before evidence. They therefore stay limited to hypotheses.
Since this is/. no post would be complete without a computing analogy:P. Religion is a read-only text document. Science is an amalgam of programming languages, for better or for worse. That is precisely why I feel that the two are NOT in conflict - they have different goals, different methods and mutually exclusive participating classes (to stretch the analogy to its breaking point:P).
Listen, pal, if you don't trust scientists, then give up all your modern conveniences and move into a cave. You should be respectful of the work they've done to provide you with what you have.
YES! I second that. I call that the paradox of dogma: "Praise be to god(s) when the Doctors succeed and a malpractice suit when they occasionally fail". It's like the Maxwell's Daemon of theology:P, channeling blame away from the gods. It extends neatly into other realms of scientific inquiry of course.
Which only means it was written by less informed people. How does this help you? Guess what, there are religious texts/artifacts that are older than the Bible. Perhaps you should switch to paganism.
Another point you made perfectly is the pathological ancestral worship that can be found in ALL belief systems. Science seems to be the only process that seeks ALWAYS to improve upon the past and avoid deifying any past scientists, no matter how insightful they might have been. This for instance, neatly explains why most IDers always use Darwin's Origin of the Species in their arguments. They are incapable of wrapping their minds around the fact that science itself evolves. Heck, in Darwin's time, people didn't even know about the chemical basis for genes. That makes Darwin a good pioneer - nothing more, nothing less. It is therefore meaningless to even expect a scientist to defend Darwin's original work - it is quite outdated.
Sound to me like an escuse for living a wickerd life.
Sounds to me like your spelling and comprehension are roughly equivalent.
I'd say your critique of evolution lacks credibility too, but on the evidence available, I don't blame you for wanting a god to look after you.
I dunno, his sig seems to shout "satire" unless that's just wishful thinking on my part =D. Surely no one can be that dense in such an obvious way?
THIS:
Fer Bush & Jezus, puttin the fear in heathen's and commies on teh intarweb since 2001.
Other conditions, such as bimodal and multimodal models, further distort the use of normal distribution approaches in forecasting events.
Sure. One could then simply use Bayesian analysis (once its machinery is developed further) and give the entire distribution as a prediction. The physical interpretation might be something like a metastable state where the system might flip between two or more states rather easily or may even be made to do so by deliberate manipulation.
As more general observation, I find it amusing that the mere statement about the limitations of free will and the possible existence of a statistical version of "humanity" made so many people rear up on their hind legs:P. Well, it's hardly the first time I've been called naive, but I would have been a little more swayed by people's arguments if their ad hominem attacks didn't move me to tears (uncontrollable chuckles actually but let's not quibble =D). And what's with all the Asimov-hatin'?:P Neither I nor he (in his writing) ever said that we had a PROCEDURE for such statistical prediction or that such a thing was even practically possible (perhaps with a lot more computing power but more importantly with newer and better analytical methods - Bayesian data analysis seems like a good candidate: I've just started learning this so I'm not sure yet). I merely stated my opinion that free will is highly overrated in terms of its ACTUAL existence in today's society. I am actually of the opinion that we DO have free will. For several reasons, most of us CHOOSE not to exercise it (teenage "rebellion" is actually nothing of the kind - it is merely a transference of control from parental authority to that of one's peers and as such is highly predictable). This could be simply due to the fact that we live in an interconnected society where we try to behave in accordance with established norms and deviations that interfere with others' lives are punished in some form or the other.
That is the only point I was trying to make - individual components when allowed to interact in sufficient numbers, tend to form conglomerations with highly predictable qualities. As a reader pointed out, I was indeed referring (partly) to thermodynamics, but more aptly to the generic phenomenon of "emergent order". As such, the broad trends CAN imo be plotted in terms of probabilities (this is done to some extent today - I don't see any fundamental reason why it can't be extended to more problems).
Anyway, I've seen very few insightful replies to my post (which itself was hardly the best possible exposition of these ideas - blame it on lack of caffeine:P or my so-called naivete) so I'll just shut up now:P (unless I see something worth replying to - could happen:P).
You are, of course, presuming that Asimov was doing more than writing good FICTION.
Simply trying to save time by pointing readers to a good source for a feasibility analysis of psychohistory (the statistical prediction of future trends). Science fiction may be "just fiction" but in my experience, and in the hands of an honest author (which the good Doctor indubitably was), it offers excellent first order feasibility studies of speculative sciences.
The program in the article may have limited success, but all I said in my original post was that it should, in principle, be possible to have a working psychohistory because any modern society has such strongly coupled components that individual freedom of action does little to produce broad changes in socio-economic patterns.
So, I do disagree with your statement that "any program" would fail at this. Our computing power and programming panache may be too primitive to build such a program today but I have a feeling that it can be done... someday.
Of course, you would also read that not all systems are inherently chaotic. It is by no means obvious that human society is complex enough to be called unpredictable in principle. People who tout their own "free will" should think long and hard about that and realize that simply being able to imagine a multitude of choices does not mean that each is likely to occur. Remember that a human being living in society has more in common with an electron BOUND in a crystal than a free electron. The former has several constraints while the latter is in principle unpredictable.
Readers of Asimov will know the qualitative reasons for why such things as broad socio-economic-historical trends and the actions of large groups of people can in principle be made predictable. For a system to be chaotic, it must have a large PHASE SPACE of possibilities (physical size is not always important but it is significant). What matters is the degrees of freedom and how parts of the system are coupled to other parts. Do small perturbations in the system dissipate or do they spread? Modern society has evolved into a 2-phase system where it reacts to new perturbations by simply breaking them into two possibilities - this helps relieve tensions and most people get stuck in one of the two states. This has the rather fascinating effect of re-stabilizing the system despite the introduced disturbance.
So, as the above example leads us to suspect, modern human societies are just not as complex as our egos would lead us to believe. There is strong coupling between its parts and few people stay undecided about issues - they simply get stuck orbiting one of two strong attractors in the space of possibilities and this serves to relieve any stress. In such a system of course, revolutions (in the sense of widely held beliefs changing within the lifetime of a single individual) simply cannot happen. At the worst, there might be a slow decay and unraveling of the social fabric. Barely noticeable.
Equivalent arguments apply to the "free will" of individual human beings. Humans tend to congregate in packs - behaviorally, philosophically or otherwise. This strong tribal leaning that is presumably built into our genes ensures that most behavior patterns will be statistical in nature. Indeed, the actions of an individual can be simply predicted to a first approximation by merely qualitative means even in the absence of complete information by assuming rational behavior. A better approximation can be achieved by modeling the level of rationality of the individual and assigning probabilities based on that.
While human beings may not be predictable in a strictly deductive sense, most people are (for better or for worse) rather mundane in terms of how eccentric they can be (in a way that actually affects other parts of society). This can hardly be a bad thing as the timescale of societal change must be greater than the lifetime of an individual for a society to be called "stable". If it is MUCH greater, we would call that society degenerate or decayed.
I think the sensible strategy, in terms of performance and security, is to use a lightweight minimalist PDF reader for 99% of your PDF needs, and then to only open up Adobe Acrobat when you absolutely need its extra features. Acrobat is a rather large program (some might say "bloated") and it supports a wide variety of features, plugins, etc.
People have different definitions of "bloat". Mine is when you have to clutter up your system with more than one application to d the same job. Besides, I'm of the opinion that it's alright to use the incredibly fast and high-RAM computers of today to run these application without being stingy about resources for every single thing (unless it actually does slow down your system). While I've pitied the users who have 16 things in their system tray that eat up resources (Acrobat does this too btw, with its quick load helper service), it is also true that today's systems are built for multi-tasking in a way that is frequently not taken full advantage of, especially by power users who pride themselves on choosing efficient programs (which is great!) and getting rid of bloat (while at the same time having several different programs that have overlapping functions).
I also like how given ONE zero-day sploit from acrobat reader and we have the usual gurus predicting doom and calling on corporations to switch to xpdf (if it wasn't so ridiculous as to be funny, I'd be concerned:P) and "why do we need pdf forms anyway when you can have html forms?".
The suicides you refer to continue to rise in spite of the apparently enlightened changes made in the system
What changes have been made in the system? How have they been instrumental in reducing pressure on the kids? Has child/parent counseling been made compulsory in schools? I'm not talking about career counselors, I'm talking about psychologists.
Where the hell did that come from? We were discussing ONE issue and one issue only: the meritocratic system (henceforth I'll call this MS) that you seem to hate so much. As such, if you'd read my original post with a bit of concentration, you would have seen my gripe that they dismantled the MS a few years ago. And yet, the suicides and the problems continue to rise. At the very least, this means that the MS was negligible in terms of causing and perpetuating these problems.
PLEASE don't make the pathetic mistake of automatically assuming that I support any other thing in the system. The discussion was about the MS, and it was MS that I was supporting (and still support).
Surely, you haven't forgotten so much of your childhood as to assume that this sort of meritocracy was the only pressure a student had upon him/her?
You're extremely lucky that meritocracy was the only pressure you had in your student life. Many had other problems to cope.
Is there an echo in here?:P Isn't that precisely what I said in the line that you responded to? My point was (and still is) that the MS was the least significant factor in pressuring a student. In fact, one might argue that the not-so-smart students got to compete at a less stressful level and actually stand out in the lower divisions. The MS, way I see it, was simply chopping up the Bell curve into sections so that each section could compete on its own level. Yes, I was perhaps a bit flippant about the "fuckups" in my original post but this logic does make sense to me.
Your later comments like this one:
An approach like this is better than hardcore segregation. Segregation works like the caste system, which results in the snootiness.
and this:
All I am saying is that while hardcore segregation may lead to better academic results, it leads to fucked up social education.
make it clear that you really don't give a fuck about the lower division students. All you're really interested in is cutting the alleged arrogance of the upper divisions down to size. Bad childhood experience?
Again, read the linked post above, it really does provide a more interesting solution.
I did read the post and it did make sense to me. I would think that an MS would be quite useful in such cases. Devote a "disproportionate amount of resources to the people who need it"? Fine. Go for it. Isn't it better to have these needy people in one place so that this can be done more effectively? Or would you rather mix everyone up and then make a point of singling out these needy students in front of all the other better-endowed students so they can be better directed to these extra resources? Wouldn't that just fuck them up socially? I know I would be embarrassed if I was one of these kids and I was given special attention in every class IN FRONT OF the kids who didn't need it. How cruel is that? Once again, your arguments seem to support an MS. The smart kids need to be left alone, preferably in a group of their intellectual peers. After that, you don't really have to do much to them, they can take care of themselves, and you're free to focus on the deserving kids.
I don't know what it's like in the US but here in India we never had jocks/nerds. In fact, you seem to have forgotten that the nerds are actually the popular ones here.
Of course we had them. There just weren't many conflicts between them, precisely because each class knew its
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Usually, things move SLOWLY in industry. You have time to create a step-by-step process, discuss the safety implications and formalize the procedure AFTER the process has been shown to be useful. And to suggest otherwise would be naive in the extreme. No one in industry would spend thousands of dollars evaluating the safety of a procedure that has not been shown to be useful.
That is precisely what academia (in the hard, get-your-hands-dirty kind of sciences, not the scribble-on-a-chalkboard or bang-a-keyboard kind) is for. We test potential new ways of doing things and discard them or develop them on a weekly basis. You don't WASTE precious few grant monies on designing the safest environment for what is essentially a pilot test - more of a feasibility analysis. You make it as safe as possible and trust that the people doing the work are a step above a layperson off the street.
That's really what bothers me about OSHA. I work in an academic lab (rather senior grad student) and the idea of safety has become more of a "cover the administration's ass" rather than any meaningful debate on what we're trying to do to make things safe. They are trying to make it so that an idiot would be safe in these labs. Well, shouldn't you rather train your workers to not be idiots? Take the OHSA rule of 2 people in a machine shop - fine for 9 to 5 machinists but not for people who have a personal stake in their work. Or take the hysteria about lead or mercury. Gah!
This sh** is the single most important reason why working in R/D in industry turns me off big time - kills my intellectual erection just like that :P.
You may not agree with what I've said above, and that's fine. I happen to take the point of view that research is dangerous - you get into it knowing that it won't be as safe as a desk job. There are horrible things that can happen to you if you're not careful, but that office bureaucrats CANNOT gauge the relative size of these dangers and weigh them against your own sense of survival and the training you've received. You cannot extend the boundaries of knowledge without taking some risks, sometimes unknown - the idea is to take these risks intelligently and BY DOING EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to eliminate the known risks.
Safety is absolutely critical, make no mistake about it. But trusting the bureaucrats usually in charge of it to make WISE decisions about it - decisions that are fueled by actual concern for workers rather than heading off potential lawsuits - is naive, to say the least. The other big danger is that if you hand off the authority for making safety decisions to the bureaucrats, it makes the actual researchers intellectually lazy (and with good reason - responsibility without authority is the job description of a eunuch in ancient times).
Anyway, I recognize that I'm not altogether objective when it comes to this stuff, so if I were a budding young researcher reading my rant above, I would take it with a grain of salt and the caveat that these things vary TREMENDOUSLY across the spectrum of research schools here in the US.
Baen is THE best example of a publishing house that actually gets it. Not that all their authors are worth reading, but a few prolific authors who can also write well (David Weber, Lois M. Bujold) make it all worth it.
Also, their ebooks are priced VERY fairly. The hardcover of "Storm from the shadows" was around $20 or so on amazon. The ebook on Baen.com is $6.
Not trying to rob your customers blind can get you some long-term loyalty - something the other PHs and other media can try to learn :P.
College isn't just for the lazy, but also for the mediocre ... and anyone who intends to get into research.
Would mod you up if I had any points left. I think you have the right idea. I'm in research and I don't think any amount of "seeing the real world" would have helped train me in the rigor that my physical science profession requires (12-14hrs a day 6-7 days a week of enjoyable work is rarer than rare in the so-called "real world". Besides, in this day and age, people who think academic work (again: in the hard sciences) is bookworm material are out of their freaking mind. Running a lab (or even being partly responsible for one - as a lowly grad student) requires a scary breadth and depth in your skill set (I like to think of it as having to be "jack of all trades and master of a few", to turn that hoary old cliche on its head :P)
In my experience, people who tout 'real-world' experience are usually masters of resume-padding and self-delusion (not necessarily referring to GP :P). This is ESPECIALLY true in professions that don't deal with tangible end-products (this doesn't include software :P - to me that is tangible).
The only things I DON'T have to deal with (that the real world has aplenty) is boredom with repetitive tasks that a monkey could perform and dealing with assholes (imagine how many abrasive idiots a customer service rep has to deal with). If that's the real world, you can have it. Life is too short to WILLFULLY embrace such madness :P and then further, to brag about it as so many people are wont to do. Celebs are the worst at this - just because a famous actor or basketball player or a self-made millionaire "made it" in the real world doesn't mean that everyone can or should drop out of school and have silly adventures just so they have good stories to tell at parties :P. Prodigies are usually sensible enough to know when their accomplishments are due to their special skills and when they are simply due to lots of hard work (and then again, sometimes they aren't and give out advice that would lead average people to drop out of high school/college like lemmings off a cliff - in pursuit of that indefinable ... coolness is the only word for it ... associated with successful people.
Besides, that leads me to another thing that tfa missed entirely: you can't do research "at a distance". And only a "real-worlder" would believe that research is the domicile of grad students and postdocs and professors. These days, more and more undergrads participate to a greater extent than ever in research (without necessarily staying in academia afterward) so that brick and mortar universities are gaining MORE relevance in the hard sciences.
Disclaimer: please don't give me counterexamples OUTSIDE the hard sciences - I have nothing to say about that. I've stated my domain of interest (for this post) very clearly. A final observation: as society gets ever more technical, the BASIC level of competence that a potential employee needs (in a field that is at least a little complex) simply becomes too deep to be tested for at the interview level. In essence, a college degree (in theory) attests to THIS basic competence. Now, you may well argue (sometimes justly) whether this is satisfied in practice. I don't disagree. But that is not a reason to throw the entire thing away and start "going with our gut" every time we want to hire someone. That only works in cheap novels and sappy movies :P.
>eldavojohn (898314)
I'm also noticing a disturbing trend in "quantum mechanics" being spewed whenever we don't understand something. I caution you that people in the future might look back on this and laugh that such crude research could in any way conclude that quantum mechanics is at work. It's almost as if we assume we understand other possible explanation so it must be the one we don't understand very well. We don't understand photosynthesis --> must be quantum mechanics! We don't understand the human mind --> must be quantum mechanics! etc. Am I saying quantum mechanics has nothing to do with these things? No. I'm just saying I have seen no conclusive proof.
Ordinarily, I would agree with you in being irritated by the now-rampant quantum fetish in academia (far outside physics). To be fair to this particular study though, they are simply using a quantum probability model (i.e. simply co-opting the mathematics of QM, not the physics to see if that formalism yields better predictions). No sane person would think that quantum mechanical physical processes can actually scale up to the human behavioral level.
These researchers are just doing what anyone seeking to make quantitative predictions in the social sciences are essentially forced to do - in the absence of any bottom up understanding of the relevant variables and dynamics, one simply has to resort to a top-down heuristic approach. Try mathematical models that make intuitive sense and then try to figure out WHY those models work - possibly yielding some true insight into the phenomenon being investigated.
The new thing in this study is that a non-intuitive model is being used for the express purpose of "let's see what happens". Please don't try to read much more into the quantum stuff.
As I said before, your general complaint is quite justified. Too many hacks (usually "healers" of some kind or the other) stretch analogies into metaphors and finally into gooey taffy :P and you end up with movies like "What the bleep do we know" :P.
Hell, we work with quantum coherent matter (which includes something technical called a vortex) in our research and my colleague has the funniest newspaper clipping pinned to the wall - some kind of workshop by an "expert" on using a "vortex" to heal people :D. Ever since I saw that, I've been trying to heal myself by worshiping our experimental apparatus - no luck yet :(.
..., is unknown and unknowable.
To concatenate the unknown with the unknowable is geriatric blunder of the worst kind, for it presupposes that our descendants are stupider than we are - a hypothesis that continues to be proved false with every succeeding generation.
That's true: E=mc^2 is valid for moving particles if m is interpreted as the relativistic mass.
The grumbling comes about because physicists themselves almost never talk about relativistic mass in this sense anymore. Nowadays we usually say that a particle has an invariant mass m (its rest mass) which determines the relationship between its energy and momentum; E^2 = (mc^2)^2 + (pc)^2. That way a particle's mass has a single, well-defined value regardless of how fast it's moving. What you might call the "relativistic mass" I just call E/(c^2).
The two formalisms are completely equivalent, of course, but modern notation has swung toward defining "mass" as the rest mass only.
The two formalisms are NOT completely equivalent even within the framework of classical special relativity and especially not when you think about relativistic quantum theory. In quantum theory, mass is a quantum number and therefore invariant (a true scalar). THAT is why the idea of "rest mass" is at best a quaint holdover from the early years.
The early physicists wanted to preserve the Newtonian definition of momentum as p = mv so they absorbed the relativistic gamma factor into the mass term and thought of the mass as varying with speed. In the modern mathematical treatment, this is absurd. The proper (fully consistent) way is to modify the Newtonian definition of momentum to include the gamma factor p = gamma*m0*v (where m0 is the MASS, period.
It is not surprising that incorrect terminology survives to this day. for one thing, pop sci books insist on using the "cooler" names. Why else would we be using names like "alpha", "beta", "gamma" and "X-ray" radiation for things we now fully understand?
Mastering the advanced concepts in Math and science is a lot more involved then High School. So if there is no interest, brilliance now could translate into mediocrity.
THIS.
It's about your reference frame. High school math and science are piss-poor indicators of both difficulty and coolness. The tragedy is never that an originally interested student loses interest or gets bored due to college math/science. It is that the stuff gets exponentially more interesting (as you start doing REAL math that can serve as a REAL tool to understand the universe around you) while at the same time getting progressively more involved.
I won't say that it gets more difficult (it does get involved - as in lots of diverse concepts to integrate) on an absolute scale because it doesn't. Math is one of the VERY few fields that get easier with time IF (and only if :P) you build a strong foundation to begin with. Contrary to most fields, math truly requires you to have mastered everything and remember almost everything (rather - integrate it into your thinking until it becomes second nature) from semester to semester.
My fellow students who refused to believe this are precisely the ones who faltered later.
That's one of the hard parts about taking math/science classes though. People are used to the idea (from the humanities perhaps) that information content in classes is sparse (low signal to noise) so that remembering the key points is sufficient. Quite so. TO put it simply, the humanities are noted for their verbosity (not a bad thing - in fact, sometimes it's the only redeeming feature in some otherwise redundant fields :P) while the sciences are noted for being too laconic. Perhaps we should sprinkle some 'noise' into the curriculum (Mythbusters anyone?). Unfortunately, some students tend to tune to the 'noise' in that case and miss the signal entirely :P.
But the history of math and science has been the history of consolidation (both of concepts and notation) until the information is packed VERY densely into the core curriculum. The problem with very high signal to noise in the transmitter is that you need a nearly lossless receiver or you lose a LOT of information. That is precisely what happens in math and science classes.
Remember: if a picture is worth a thousand words, an equation is worth at least a trillion :P.
But, I'm rambling. My point (to echo the parent) is simply that the high school curriculum is a ridiculous indicator of what to expect in college/grad school. Talk to some students/profs at a good university. Look at some course sites (MIT's open course ware is a god example).
The bottom line is that the "nerdiness" of a profession is a meaningless concept. People are nerdy, not professions. If you can't establish your own personality in what you do, you are merely a slave to social trends (or worse, a geek who gets his credo by following WIRED advice :P).
BUT, I think that his chapters on math and physics and their interface (everything prior to the biology chapters) constitute the SINGLE GREATEST and only successful attempt ever to present a NON-DUMBED DOWN layperson's introduction to mathematical physics. I gained more physical and mathematical insight from that book than I did from any other source prior to graduate school. For that alone, I salute him. Popularizations of physics a la Hawking are a dime a dozen. An "Emperor's new mind" having (what I can only describe as) 'conceptual math' to TRULY describe the physics comes along maybe once in a lifetime.
His latest book is the extension of that effort and the culmination of a lifetime of thinking clearly and succinctly about math and physics. He is the only writer alive who imo has earned the right to use a title like "The road to reality: a complete guide to the laws of physics".
As for Hofstadter, GEB was merely pretty (while ENM was beautiful), but essentially useless (to me) beyond that. Perhaps it was meant as simply a guide to aesthetic appreciation, in which case it succeeded magnificently. As far as reality is concerned, it offered me no new insight that I could see. Stimulating prose though - I guess no book dealing with Escher can be entirely bad. I haven't read anything else by Hofstadter so I can't comment there.
- Science 14 March 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5869, pp. 1506 - 1509 DOI: 10.1126/science.1153282
Superconductivity in Hydrogen Dominant Materials: Silane
M. I. Eremets, I. A. Trojan, S. A. Medvedev, J. S. Tse, Y. Yao
From the same paper:
We report the transformation of insulating molecular silane to a metal at 50 GPa, becoming superconducting at a transition temperature of Tc = 17 kelvin at 96 and 120 GPa. 17K is far from room temperature.On the other hand, one of the co-authors is named Trojan. How cool is that?
And touch interfaces, using the same criteria for judgment (criteria that I do not endorse), would be quite absurd as touch (the way we feel it intuitively) ceases to have meaning at length scales several orders of magnitude higher than the nanoworld. We're talking single electrons tunneling from samples to STM tips. That's how an STM "touches" the specimen.
As for looking alien, EVERYTHING that you cannot see with your unaided eyes is alien on a gut level. This is merely one more step down the road of machine-aided sight. I do take your point about these STM images though. That is simply because it is still a young field and fast scanning is still in development. I don't have the citation handy (and it's WAYYY to late here to look it up - it was a physics group at Cornell headed by K. Schwab) but they have already made breakthroughs in performing fast scans, enough to make flyby movies using an STM.
This is analogous to the history of the SEM (the regular electron microscope, essentially e-beams instead of light, but working off the same optical principles). Today's SEM pictures look like the masterpieces dreamed of by a crazy alien high on meth. My faith in artistic vision falls far short of it being able to dream up something like that. Trite I know, but truth is truly stranger than fiction. No Picasso can conceive of, or paint the landscapes uncovered by these fantastic instruments.
Heck, when I worked on an SEM at times, it took all my resolve to not lose myself for my alloted time (several hundred dollars per hour I might add :P) zooming in more and more and more ... on what was essentially a dust speck, or chemical debris. It's a whole 'nuther world down there folks. Feels like Fantastic Voyage when you go and visit. Things look disturbingly familiar but you know they're not. That feeling, greatly magnified, must be what a future explorer might feel when he/she steps onto a brand new planet.
You seem to be tense, seeing argumentative opponents where none exist :P. I have no intention of looking up the word because I am NOT arguing about the word itself. I was pointing out to you that it is ridiculous to brand scientists as arrogant for using "life" or "life forms" in the way they do because the limitations of the definitions are understood, implicit and trivial.
The rest of your post did not arouse my interest so I did not respond to it, particularly your biochemical conjectures.
Michael Crichton had a witty scene in The Andromeda Strain where the lead scientist systematically "proves" that a rock is "alive". It illustrates perfectly the danger of losing oneself in semantic trivialities instead of heeding the advice of an ancient quantum mechanic [sic] :P to "shut up and calculate".
If I said that humans can't fly, it's not arrogance on my part. Our current definition of "human" has implicit "no-fly" clauses built into it :P. If you find a flying human somewhere, the International Linguistics Organization* would have to convene to redefine "human".
____
*it could exist!
I am a physicist and I agree 100%. The essence of the article was summarized ages ago by Hawking in his first book. Nothing new at all. It was speculation then and it remains speculation now. To make USE of these speculative conjectures about the universe requires a technology on a much grander scale than we presently have. To wit - imagine particle accelerators girdling the globe or actual probes dispatched to the neighborhoods of black holes. Yeah, we ain't there yet, and until we are, expect more empty articles as the one above and more mathematical masturbation than experimental observation.
NOW, we KNOW. A good mathematical model is half what's needed to select ONE candidate from a host of good, competing theories about a phenomenon. The other half is evidence supporting NEW predictions then made by that model. We still await that of course.
If I read the summary correctly, they have shown (to a limited extent) that EVEN our perception of time does NOT change during such events. What they concluded therefore is that our MEMORY is more to blame for compositing (AFTER the fact) an apparent slowdown or speedup of time during the event.
FTA:
'The answer to the paradox is that time estimation and memory are intertwined: the volunteers merely thought the fall took a longer time in retrospect'." [emphasis mine]So, the posters so far have been stating the obvious, but seem to have missed this point. The researchers were trying to TEST the long-held conventional belief that our perceptions do slow down or speed up during certain special events. They seem to have come up with a startling result - our perceptions stay pretty much the same, our later MEMORIES seem to be edited after the fact to make it seem that we perceived time differently during the event. Brains are so devious. *cackle* *rubs hands in glee*
Indeed. And this is bad how? The former IS the correct stance until and unless there is evidence to back it up. It was true of relativity and it remains true of String theory (for which there is as yet NO evidence - so it is pure mathematical abstraction at the moment). Would you rather we hopped, skipped and jumped from theory to theory with no evidence? You prove my point for me. Science has progressed thus far and maintained its objectivity precisely because EVIDENCE is used to separate the true from the false, not armchair philosophizing and "thought experiments" (that are perfectly ok to use during hypothesis construction but NOT, repeat, NOT as ultimate proof of validity). The trouble with religion, and indeed any secular philosophy before empiricism came on the scene, is that abstract proof was considered SUFFICIENT to establish physical reality, which we now know is simply not the case. It is necessary to establish adequate understanding of physical phenomena and enable predictions, but it is simply not sufficient.
And if you don't think there's no dogmatism in science, then you don't know all that much about the history of science. Science is inherently forward-looking and self-correcting, but it's also a human institution, which means it's unavoidably subject to the same biases as anything else we do.Good going. Putting words into someone else's mouth and capping it off with ad hominem attacks is a wonderful way to make your point. My point was (and remains) that religion is fundamentally and admittedly NOT forward-looking (hence my tirade against blind ancestor worship) and definitely NOT self-correcting (to fix something you have to first admit to yourself that it's broken - something that religion is not built for). Biases in science do exist but must of necessity bow before evidence. They therefore stay limited to hypotheses.
Since this is /. no post would be complete without a computing analogy :P. Religion is a read-only text document. Science is an amalgam of programming languages, for better or for worse. That is precisely why I feel that the two are NOT in conflict - they have different goals, different methods and mutually exclusive participating classes (to stretch the analogy to its breaking point :P).
YES! I second that. I call that the paradox of dogma: "Praise be to god(s) when the Doctors succeed and a malpractice suit when they occasionally fail". It's like the Maxwell's Daemon of theology :P, channeling blame away from the gods. It extends neatly into other realms of scientific inquiry of course.
Which only means it was written by less informed people. How does this help you? Guess what, there are religious texts/artifacts that are older than the Bible. Perhaps you should switch to paganism.Another point you made perfectly is the pathological ancestral worship that can be found in ALL belief systems. Science seems to be the only process that seeks ALWAYS to improve upon the past and avoid deifying any past scientists, no matter how insightful they might have been. This for instance, neatly explains why most IDers always use Darwin's Origin of the Species in their arguments. They are incapable of wrapping their minds around the fact that science itself evolves. Heck, in Darwin's time, people didn't even know about the chemical basis for genes. That makes Darwin a good pioneer - nothing more, nothing less. It is therefore meaningless to even expect a scientist to defend Darwin's original work - it is quite outdated.
I dunno, his sig seems to shout "satire" unless that's just wishful thinking on my part =D. Surely no one can be that dense in such an obvious way? THIS:
Fer Bush & Jezus, puttin the fear in heathen's and commies on teh intarweb since 2001.I LOL'D
Sure. One could then simply use Bayesian analysis (once its machinery is developed further) and give the entire distribution as a prediction. The physical interpretation might be something like a metastable state where the system might flip between two or more states rather easily or may even be made to do so by deliberate manipulation.
As more general observation, I find it amusing that the mere statement about the limitations of free will and the possible existence of a statistical version of "humanity" made so many people rear up on their hind legs :P. Well, it's hardly the first time I've been called naive, but I would have been a little more swayed by people's arguments if their ad hominem attacks didn't move me to tears (uncontrollable chuckles actually but let's not quibble =D). And what's with all the Asimov-hatin'? :P Neither I nor he (in his writing) ever said that we had a PROCEDURE for such statistical prediction or that such a thing was even practically possible (perhaps with a lot more computing power but more importantly with newer and better analytical methods - Bayesian data analysis seems like a good candidate: I've just started learning this so I'm not sure yet). I merely stated my opinion that free will is highly overrated in terms of its ACTUAL existence in today's society. I am actually of the opinion that we DO have free will. For several reasons, most of us CHOOSE not to exercise it (teenage "rebellion" is actually nothing of the kind - it is merely a transference of control from parental authority to that of one's peers and as such is highly predictable). This could be simply due to the fact that we live in an interconnected society where we try to behave in accordance with established norms and deviations that interfere with others' lives are punished in some form or the other.
That is the only point I was trying to make - individual components when allowed to interact in sufficient numbers, tend to form conglomerations with highly predictable qualities. As a reader pointed out, I was indeed referring (partly) to thermodynamics, but more aptly to the generic phenomenon of "emergent order". As such, the broad trends CAN imo be plotted in terms of probabilities (this is done to some extent today - I don't see any fundamental reason why it can't be extended to more problems).
Anyway, I've seen very few insightful replies to my post (which itself was hardly the best possible exposition of these ideas - blame it on lack of caffeine :P or my so-called naivete) so I'll just shut up now :P (unless I see something worth replying to - could happen :P).
Simply trying to save time by pointing readers to a good source for a feasibility analysis of psychohistory (the statistical prediction of future trends). Science fiction may be "just fiction" but in my experience, and in the hands of an honest author (which the good Doctor indubitably was), it offers excellent first order feasibility studies of speculative sciences.
The program in the article may have limited success, but all I said in my original post was that it should, in principle, be possible to have a working psychohistory because any modern society has such strongly coupled components that individual freedom of action does little to produce broad changes in socio-economic patterns.
So, I do disagree with your statement that "any program" would fail at this. Our computing power and programming panache may be too primitive to build such a program today but I have a feeling that it can be done ... someday.
I LOL'D ... hard =D.
Readers of Asimov will know the qualitative reasons for why such things as broad socio-economic-historical trends and the actions of large groups of people can in principle be made predictable. For a system to be chaotic, it must have a large PHASE SPACE of possibilities (physical size is not always important but it is significant). What matters is the degrees of freedom and how parts of the system are coupled to other parts. Do small perturbations in the system dissipate or do they spread? Modern society has evolved into a 2-phase system where it reacts to new perturbations by simply breaking them into two possibilities - this helps relieve tensions and most people get stuck in one of the two states. This has the rather fascinating effect of re-stabilizing the system despite the introduced disturbance.
So, as the above example leads us to suspect, modern human societies are just not as complex as our egos would lead us to believe. There is strong coupling between its parts and few people stay undecided about issues - they simply get stuck orbiting one of two strong attractors in the space of possibilities and this serves to relieve any stress. In such a system of course, revolutions (in the sense of widely held beliefs changing within the lifetime of a single individual) simply cannot happen. At the worst, there might be a slow decay and unraveling of the social fabric. Barely noticeable.
Equivalent arguments apply to the "free will" of individual human beings. Humans tend to congregate in packs - behaviorally, philosophically or otherwise. This strong tribal leaning that is presumably built into our genes ensures that most behavior patterns will be statistical in nature. Indeed, the actions of an individual can be simply predicted to a first approximation by merely qualitative means even in the absence of complete information by assuming rational behavior. A better approximation can be achieved by modeling the level of rationality of the individual and assigning probabilities based on that.
While human beings may not be predictable in a strictly deductive sense, most people are (for better or for worse) rather mundane in terms of how eccentric they can be (in a way that actually affects other parts of society). This can hardly be a bad thing as the timescale of societal change must be greater than the lifetime of an individual for a society to be called "stable". If it is MUCH greater, we would call that society degenerate or decayed.
People have different definitions of "bloat". Mine is when you have to clutter up your system with more than one application to d the same job. Besides, I'm of the opinion that it's alright to use the incredibly fast and high-RAM computers of today to run these application without being stingy about resources for every single thing (unless it actually does slow down your system). While I've pitied the users who have 16 things in their system tray that eat up resources (Acrobat does this too btw, with its quick load helper service), it is also true that today's systems are built for multi-tasking in a way that is frequently not taken full advantage of, especially by power users who pride themselves on choosing efficient programs (which is great!) and getting rid of bloat (while at the same time having several different programs that have overlapping functions).
I also like how given ONE zero-day sploit from acrobat reader and we have the usual gurus predicting doom and calling on corporations to switch to xpdf (if it wasn't so ridiculous as to be funny, I'd be concerned :P) and "why do we need pdf forms anyway when you can have html forms?".
The suicides you refer to continue to rise in spite of the apparently enlightened changes made in the system
What changes have been made in the system? How have they been instrumental in reducing pressure on the kids? Has child/parent counseling been made compulsory in schools? I'm not talking about career counselors, I'm talking about psychologists.
Where the hell did that come from? We were discussing ONE issue and one issue only: the meritocratic system (henceforth I'll call this MS) that you seem to hate so much. As such, if you'd read my original post with a bit of concentration, you would have seen my gripe that they dismantled the MS a few years ago. And yet, the suicides and the problems continue to rise. At the very least, this means that the MS was negligible in terms of causing and perpetuating these problems.
PLEASE don't make the pathetic mistake of automatically assuming that I support any other thing in the system. The discussion was about the MS, and it was MS that I was supporting (and still support).
Surely, you haven't forgotten so much of your childhood as to assume that this sort of meritocracy was the only pressure a student had upon him/her?
You're extremely lucky that meritocracy was the only pressure you had in your student life. Many had other problems to cope.
Is there an echo in here? :P Isn't that precisely what I said in the line that you responded to? My point was (and still is) that the MS was the least significant factor in pressuring a student. In fact, one might argue that the not-so-smart students got to compete at a less stressful level and actually stand out in the lower divisions. The MS, way I see it, was simply chopping up the Bell curve into sections so that each section could compete on its own level. Yes, I was perhaps a bit flippant about the "fuckups" in my original post but this logic does make sense to me.
Your later comments like this one:
An approach like this is better than hardcore segregation. Segregation works like the caste system, which results in the snootiness.
and this:
All I am saying is that while hardcore segregation may lead to better academic results, it leads to fucked up social education.
make it clear that you really don't give a fuck about the lower division students. All you're really interested in is cutting the alleged arrogance of the upper divisions down to size. Bad childhood experience?
Again, read the linked post above, it really does provide a more interesting solution.
I did read the post and it did make sense to me. I would think that an MS would be quite useful in such cases. Devote a "disproportionate amount of resources to the people who need it"? Fine. Go for it. Isn't it better to have these needy people in one place so that this can be done more effectively? Or would you rather mix everyone up and then make a point of singling out these needy students in front of all the other better-endowed students so they can be better directed to these extra resources? Wouldn't that just fuck them up socially? I know I would be embarrassed if I was one of these kids and I was given special attention in every class IN FRONT OF the kids who didn't need it. How cruel is that? Once again, your arguments seem to support an MS. The smart kids need to be left alone, preferably in a group of their intellectual peers. After that, you don't really have to do much to them, they can take care of themselves, and you're free to focus on the deserving kids.
I don't know what it's like in the US but here in India we never had jocks/nerds. In fact, you seem to have forgotten that the nerds are actually the popular ones here.
Of course we had them. There just weren't many conflicts between them, precisely because each class knew its