1. Elitism. We bought the Mercedes-Benz of glamour computing, so we're hipper than you.
2. Paranoia. We are the minority of computer buyers, and we spend a lot of money, so the rest of you are in conspiracy to hate us.
3. Effetism. We are supposed to be the nice, Progressive, hip and liberal kids, so we can't take a strong stance on anything but hating PCs.
4. Emo. We are from the enlightened future, where everything is how you want it to be, where a cute interface is more important than function.
5. Cognitive dissonance. I paid twice what I should have for this thing, I can't upgrade it, and it has big problems, BUT it has a nice shiny interface. Therefore, it must be better in some mythical way, because I can't admit I'm basically a computer user like everyone else.
6. AIDS. Unproven.
I see the "Apple psychology" as being damaging to computing, specifically open source.
The Apple psychology rewards conspicuous consumption and ideological dogma. It does not reward what open source gives, which is pragmatic function.
The more people use Macs, the more they drift away from reality. I know this post will probably be modded "Troll, -1" but after 23 years of observing Macintosh users, and 11 years of being one, this is why I stay clear away from Apple products: The Smug(tm) wags the dog of the user's psychology.
I understand perfectly. Metaphor, by its very DEFINITION, is not literal. Get it? You can't "believe" in something if it has no literal meaning.
People can believe anything they want. As I showed you, abstraction is what differentiates metaphor from literal text. People can believe an abstract solution more than a literal one.
For example:
(a) I believe the sun will come up tomorrow, because every part of life is a cycle, including both days and seasons.
(b) I believe the sun will come up tomorrow because of the rotation of the earth.
The first is not a literal description, but it is accurate, even if abstract.
The second is literal.
People can believe both, and in many cases, prefer the abstraction.
The entire point of his book is that intelligence and personality are heritable, in contrast to the "blank slate" theory which suggests human beings can be shaped or educated into having certain intelligence and personality traits.
Every book has been criticized for its methodology. Criticism alone debunks nothing. Do you have a valid counterargument, or are you just trying to insult away the problem?
"The Bell Curve"? Are you fucking kidding me? Where do you get your reading list, the Josef Mengele Book Club?
Godwin's law in action: if you can't beat 'em, call them fascists.
The Bell Curve is still widely regarded as the definitive tome on an unpopular but valid scientific pursuit. Why are you trying to censor science for your personal preferences of what you think reality should be? What are you afraid of?
It's the new Scopes trial: can you accept thinkers like Pinker or Herrnstein/Murray, or must we find some way to shut science out of the debate?
* The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray -- although the portion about race attracted the most media attention, the real point of the book is that intelligence in populations follows a distribution curve so that only a few are actually all that smart.
You can see why people go into "cognitive dissonance" when they see this evidence. We all like to think we can be anyone we want to be. But just like few are as handsome as Paul Newman, few are smart enough to achieve the kind of results that are desired.
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole. Pentti Linkola
When you have two contradictory ideas in your model, one has to give. With humans, though, if one idea is too important to let go, something else has to give.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. F. Scott Fitzgerald
While I think "cognitive dissonance" is the answer, I think the conflict is between social status and individual knowledge, and that social status must always trump because it's the language we have to speak to survive in a civilization. Therefore, cognitive dissonance is people creating their own worlds to compensate for what hasn't happened in real life, and they pick a political platform to justify their failure.
While I am not a conservative, I am anti-liberal, and to my mind the greatest stronghold of cognitive dissonance is liberalism, or "revenge against nature" as Nietzsche called it.
Too bad that particularly nasty trait (greed) is built right into our genes. I don't ever see any well-meaning social movement eradicating it from our species.
One reason I oppose the doctrine that we're all equal is that I've observed the more intelligent, confident and physically attractive people are less greedy.
There are people out there who, unlike Hollywood stars, look great without makeup, went to good schools and have good careers doing things that (unlike Hollywood) make life better for people.
Then there are the ugly fat guys in Porsches who seem to think that having their own business as a patent sniper makes them "equal" to someone who is smarter, more attractive, and has greater moral character...
Right, so if you don't take it literally, you can't believe in it. By definition.
I don't think you understand.
Metaphors can describe reality as well as literal texts, and unlike literal texts, they describe it in abstraction and can remain accurate over the centuries as varying scientific ideas come and go.
This is why you can believe in them more than you can believe in literal texts; a literal text is detail work you need proven, a metaphorical text is a theory in abstraction.
Pro-choice people don't force abortions on other people who are against abortions. Pro-alcohol people don't force muslims and mormons to drink the stuff. Pro-stem cell research people don't require you to have your DNA fixed. Would-be parents with a serious inheritable disease don't force other people to have their embryo/egg tested. Pro sex toy people don't want to force the use of the toys on other people who think sex is sin. Gay people don't want to force you to have sex with a same sex person. Nobody is trying to force christians to have premarital sex. Nobody is trying to force catholics to use birth control. Atheists are not trying to bully other peoples' children into saying out loud brainwashing slogans such as "one nation, god is imaginary" five times a week. (You are free to do your brainwashing at home.)
You are ignoring the fact that actions have consequences. While the Christian side tries to negate actions, allowing those actions to continue can have consequences too.
I'm not the one trying to stop other people from dumping toxic waste in their backyards, therefore I'm not the aggressor.
I am not attempting to defend Christians or attack them, but I detest bad argument.
Now, I've never understood anybody who said they believed in the bible but didn't take it literally.
Umm...
Aren't all religions symbolic? Why would you make a literal religion? Not abstract enough.
It's a type of communication, like a high-level language versus the language of details. Symbols mean things. Ever read C.G. Jung on this topic? The first chapter of "Man and His Symbols" should do nicely. Or Joseph Campbell.
I wouldn't take a work of literature literally, nor would I take a poem literally, nor would I take a politician literally except when they indicate they are speaking as such. It doesn't make sense to try to find a literal religion, unless you're a Scientologist.
I know this from having been to several meetings. The atheist community is one of the most bitter and spiteful I have ever seen and actively wish to see all "non-rational" belief systems torn down and replaced with their "belief" system on a level that matches any religion. Pure tribalism at its best, two sets of group-think throwing stones at each other. the Atheists attack christen beliefs and they attack the atheists through ID.
The solution to the problem is not the one shown on/. of armchair intellectuals decrying the ignorance of the bible belt hicks, while smugly reassuring each other that they have the "best" ideology. It is through an understanding of their actions and why they do them and coming to terms with them. Calling their text book stupid isn't going to get them to stop. I don't know what the solution is, but I know what it isn't.
I couldn't agree more. Also: if "freedom" is our goal as a society, they have the right to have their belief, and to belief that a symbolic religion is more important than science. That's "freedom."
This guy had a good take:
The people who concretely affirm that there is in fact no higher being whatsoever are among the people that I do not agree with nor trust. I see such declarations as the epitome of self importance. Hard atheism is a belief structure and it is just as prideful and dangerous as the unflinching beliefs of religious extremists....But, like hard-line religious fanatics, the hard atheistsâ(TM) character flaw is an uncompromising belief in self. The individual fanatic and hard athiest both share the belief that they are right and disagreeing others are terribly misguided and wrong...
Thanks to the EU, it's now an alliance with internal tradiing advantages and collective leadership. In English, we call this a confederacy (no necessary relation to the Confederate States of America).
If Israel, Iran and Iraq started their own trade agreement, we might refer to the mid-East in the same way.
What this tells me: users are sick of their computer interrupting them with "crap data" while they're busy trying to do something else (even if that something else is photoshopping Lindsay Lohan's head onto a poodle).
The modern GUI stopped evolving about 1987 or so. We haven't gotten past the stage where when a new condition is discovered, the system pops up an error window that requires a user to click it before normal operation can resume.
For some things, like a system halt, this is necessary. For most? Unlikely.
Pay attention, Linux GUI-heads... you Windows GUI designers too, if your company allows you.
See, what you're missing is that people have no natural racism per se, but rather we have a natural tendency towards "group identity".
Good point. This group identity occurs on multiple levels, some genetic (race/ethnicity), some caste-based (profession, IQ), some political, some social, some simply personal (I like happy people), etc.
This natural tendency makes sense in an evolutionary perspective. If you want to become better at being what you are, find something like you with traits you would like to borrow.
I question whether pluralism will ever work, in any form even political pluralism, for this reason, and it seems the current election is giving fodder to that argument.
Every printer, network card, scanner and camera I've installed on Windows in the last ten years has tried to add useless dummyware on top of the driver.
You install the driver, then there's a "print manager" that has extra options, ink monitoring, visual queue monitors, and tons of crap that most people never need to do.
Of course, it also takes up residence in the system tray, in case you need dummyware at a click.
It's like our society in general. By attempting to pander to the stupid, it puts the smart in difficult positions and makes life worse for everyone.
Slashdot readers should know that corrupt.org is affiliated with nazi.org, hitler.org, nsbm.org and generally promotes fascist and nationalist politics.
No, they're not.
We're on a free speech ISP that is able to host us by hosting others, including a raft of porn and extreme political sites of both leftist and rightist stripe.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition, it's smarter than many of the voters.
1. Elitism. We bought the Mercedes-Benz of glamour computing, so we're hipper than you.
2. Paranoia. We are the minority of computer buyers, and we spend a lot of money, so the rest of you are in conspiracy to hate us.
3. Effetism. We are supposed to be the nice, Progressive, hip and liberal kids, so we can't take a strong stance on anything but hating PCs.
4. Emo. We are from the enlightened future, where everything is how you want it to be, where a cute interface is more important than function.
5. Cognitive dissonance. I paid twice what I should have for this thing, I can't upgrade it, and it has big problems, BUT it has a nice shiny interface. Therefore, it must be better in some mythical way, because I can't admit I'm basically a computer user like everyone else.
6. AIDS. Unproven.
I see the "Apple psychology" as being damaging to computing, specifically open source.
The Apple psychology rewards conspicuous consumption and ideological dogma. It does not reward what open source gives, which is pragmatic function.
The more people use Macs, the more they drift away from reality. I know this post will probably be modded "Troll, -1" but after 23 years of observing Macintosh users, and 11 years of being one, this is why I stay clear away from Apple products: The Smug(tm) wags the dog of the user's psychology.
I understand perfectly. Metaphor, by its very DEFINITION, is not literal. Get it? You can't "believe" in something if it has no literal meaning.
People can believe anything they want. As I showed you, abstraction is what differentiates metaphor from literal text. People can believe an abstract solution more than a literal one.
For example:
(a) I believe the sun will come up tomorrow, because every part of life is a cycle, including both days and seasons.
(b) I believe the sun will come up tomorrow because of the rotation of the earth.
The first is not a literal description, but it is accurate, even if abstract.
The second is literal.
People can believe both, and in many cases, prefer the abstraction.
Posting a link to Wikipedia is not a counterargument.
If anything that article points out that criticism of the book was inconclusive, but it has been kept out of print because it is controversial:
It is the only New York Times Bestselling book ever to remain permanently out of print.
But you know what. I am inclined to agree with Pinker but it's absolute statements like these that discredit him.
And the Bell Curve has not only been criticized for racism but also methodology.
I wouldn't consider him "popular science," since he uses hard science in the book and his research is about anything but a popular topic.
Stephen Pinker: Research
The entire point of his book is that intelligence and personality are heritable, in contrast to the "blank slate" theory which suggests human beings can be shaped or educated into having certain intelligence and personality traits.
Every book has been criticized for its methodology. Criticism alone debunks nothing. Do you have a valid counterargument, or are you just trying to insult away the problem?
"The Bell Curve"? Are you fucking kidding me? Where do you get your reading list, the Josef Mengele Book Club?
Godwin's law in action: if you can't beat 'em, call them fascists.
The Bell Curve is still widely regarded as the definitive tome on an unpopular but valid scientific pursuit. Why are you trying to censor science for your personal preferences of what you think reality should be? What are you afraid of?
It's the new Scopes trial: can you accept thinkers like Pinker or Herrnstein/Murray, or must we find some way to shut science out of the debate?
But the truth is that year after year, kids get more stupid.
Not disagreeing, but, why do you think that is?
TV? Genetics? Mutations? Social welfare? Religion?
Can't allow there to be so many AMD chips out there...
That's fair play under the rules of capitalism.
And if we want "freedom," we probably don't want a whole bunch of rules about what's fair play.
Then again, maybe we can do better than a capitalist system.
Technology in education has a great deal of potential when you put a computer in each kids hands.
Computers don't change the intelligence of kids, but they may help their motivation.
You cannot educate a congenital idiot into being a genius. You can make him flip burgers faster however.
I think people are hoping that buying computers for kids is the "magic bullet" to somehow turn them all into middle-class level performers.
No scientific evidence exists that shows that will work.
Some useful research:
* The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, by Stephen Pinker -- proves beyond a doubt that intelligence and personality are almost exclusively heritable.
* The Bell Curve, by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray -- although the portion about race attracted the most media attention, the real point of the book is that intelligence in populations follows a distribution curve so that only a few are actually all that smart.
You can see why people go into "cognitive dissonance" when they see this evidence. We all like to think we can be anyone we want to be. But just like few are as handsome as Paul Newman, few are smart enough to achieve the kind of results that are desired.
Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be an engineer or an acrobat, only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or mankind as a whole.
Pentti Linkola
When you have two contradictory ideas in your model, one has to give. With humans, though, if one idea is too important to let go, something else has to give.
The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
While I think "cognitive dissonance" is the answer, I think the conflict is between social status and individual knowledge, and that social status must always trump because it's the language we have to speak to survive in a civilization. Therefore, cognitive dissonance is people creating their own worlds to compensate for what hasn't happened in real life, and they pick a political platform to justify their failure.
While I am not a conservative, I am anti-liberal, and to my mind the greatest stronghold of cognitive dissonance is liberalism, or "revenge against nature" as Nietzsche called it.
Too bad that particularly nasty trait (greed) is built right into our genes. I don't ever see any well-meaning social movement eradicating it from our species.
One reason I oppose the doctrine that we're all equal is that I've observed the more intelligent, confident and physically attractive people are less greedy.
There are people out there who, unlike Hollywood stars, look great without makeup, went to good schools and have good careers doing things that (unlike Hollywood) make life better for people.
Then there are the ugly fat guys in Porsches who seem to think that having their own business as a patent sniper makes them "equal" to someone who is smarter, more attractive, and has greater moral character...
Something worth thinking about, at least.
Right, so if you don't take it literally, you can't believe in it. By definition.
I don't think you understand.
Metaphors can describe reality as well as literal texts, and unlike literal texts, they describe it in abstraction and can remain accurate over the centuries as varying scientific ideas come and go.
(See how much the ancients knew about science that we didn't know they knew -- The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought at the New York Times)
This is why you can believe in them more than you can believe in literal texts; a literal text is detail work you need proven, a metaphorical text is a theory in abstraction.
The ideal product will lessen the symptoms, but not cure the disease, at least until a 10-year-course of expensive treatment is over.
This is how you fellow humans view you: as a potential walking dollar sign, in exchange for their goods and services.
I hear horse urine cures cancer. I have fresh horse urine for only $9 per ounce. Do you want to be cured, or not?
Pro-choice people don't force abortions on other people who are against abortions.
Pro-alcohol people don't force muslims and mormons to drink the stuff.
Pro-stem cell research people don't require you to have your DNA fixed.
Would-be parents with a serious inheritable disease don't force other people to have their embryo/egg tested.
Pro sex toy people don't want to force the use of the toys on other people who think sex is sin.
Gay people don't want to force you to have sex with a same sex person.
Nobody is trying to force christians to have premarital sex.
Nobody is trying to force catholics to use birth control.
Atheists are not trying to bully other peoples' children into saying out loud brainwashing slogans such as "one nation, god is imaginary" five times a week. (You are free to do your brainwashing at home.)
You are ignoring the fact that actions have consequences. While the Christian side tries to negate actions, allowing those actions to continue can have consequences too.
I'm not the one trying to stop other people from dumping toxic waste in their backyards, therefore I'm not the aggressor.
I am not attempting to defend Christians or attack them, but I detest bad argument.
Now, I've never understood anybody who said they believed in the bible but didn't take it literally.
Umm...
Aren't all religions symbolic? Why would you make a literal religion? Not abstract enough.
It's a type of communication, like a high-level language versus the language of details. Symbols mean things. Ever read C.G. Jung on this topic? The first chapter of "Man and His Symbols" should do nicely. Or Joseph Campbell.
I wouldn't take a work of literature literally, nor would I take a poem literally, nor would I take a politician literally except when they indicate they are speaking as such. It doesn't make sense to try to find a literal religion, unless you're a Scientologist.
I know this from having been to several meetings. The atheist community is one of the most bitter and spiteful I have ever seen and actively wish to see all "non-rational" belief systems torn down and replaced with their "belief" system on a level that matches any religion. Pure tribalism at its best, two sets of group-think throwing stones at each other. the Atheists attack christen beliefs and they attack the atheists through ID.
The solution to the problem is not the one shown on /. of armchair intellectuals decrying the ignorance of the bible belt hicks, while smugly reassuring each other that they have the "best" ideology. It is through an understanding of their actions and why they do them and coming to terms with them. Calling their text book stupid isn't going to get them to stop. I don't know what the solution is, but I know what it isn't.
I couldn't agree more. Also: if "freedom" is our goal as a society, they have the right to have their belief, and to belief that a symbolic religion is more important than science. That's "freedom."
This guy had a good take:
It seems to me that the neutral position is agnosticism.
Atheism, or asserting definitively that a God/gods do not exist, is making a similarly conjectural and unprovable/non-disprovable assertion to theism.
Thanks to the EU, it's now an alliance with internal tradiing advantages and collective leadership. In English, we call this a confederacy (no necessary relation to the Confederate States of America).
If Israel, Iran and Iraq started their own trade agreement, we might refer to the mid-East in the same way.
What this tells me: users are sick of their computer interrupting them with "crap data" while they're busy trying to do something else (even if that something else is photoshopping Lindsay Lohan's head onto a poodle).
The modern GUI stopped evolving about 1987 or so. We haven't gotten past the stage where when a new condition is discovered, the system pops up an error window that requires a user to click it before normal operation can resume.
For some things, like a system halt, this is necessary. For most? Unlikely.
Pay attention, Linux GUI-heads... you Windows GUI designers too, if your company allows you.
In which all stories become a subset of:
* LOLcats
* Anti-Republican Activism
* Chicken Soup for the Failure-At-Life's Soul
* Tits (NSFW)
* Funniest Russian Cartoons Evar
I like the idea of Digg and Reddit, but one trip over there and suddenly you'll discover a new love for Slashdot and its moderators.
The family having a son who's into emo music, dresses in women's jeans, is bicurious and self-obsessed in a flood of his own drama should do nicely.
See, what you're missing is that people have no natural racism per se, but rather we have a natural tendency towards "group identity".
Good point. This group identity occurs on multiple levels, some genetic (race/ethnicity), some caste-based (profession, IQ), some political, some social, some simply personal (I like happy people), etc.
This natural tendency makes sense in an evolutionary perspective. If you want to become better at being what you are, find something like you with traits you would like to borrow.
I question whether pluralism will ever work, in any form even political pluralism, for this reason, and it seems the current election is giving fodder to that argument.
http://www.goodrumj.com/RFaqHTML.html
The Race FAQ is a good place to start.
I found this link after a previous article, on how European ethnicities can be determined by genetics, caused a hilarious flame war.
Every printer, network card, scanner and camera I've installed on Windows in the last ten years has tried to add useless dummyware on top of the driver.
You install the driver, then there's a "print manager" that has extra options, ink monitoring, visual queue monitors, and tons of crap that most people never need to do.
Of course, it also takes up residence in the system tray, in case you need dummyware at a click.
It's like our society in general. By attempting to pander to the stupid, it puts the smart in difficult positions and makes life worse for everyone.
It's the way all the new Wordpress blogs are doing it. Isn't it much easier than some ugly url like http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/09/08/1212252?
Either you're for the new Apache mod/rewrite enabled Wordpress URLs, or you're against progress! Sort of...
Slashdot readers should know that corrupt.org is affiliated with nazi.org, hitler.org, nsbm.org and generally promotes fascist and nationalist politics.
No, they're not.
We're on a free speech ISP that is able to host us by hosting others, including a raft of porn and extreme political sites of both leftist and rightist stripe.
You fail at internet pathology 101 ;)