This article just assumes games should be competitive. There are cooperative games. The Wii is pioneering more such cooperative games. Here is a general site on the topic of cooperative computer games: http://www.co-optimus.com/
One great thing about cooperative games is that they make it easy for players of different skill levels to play together.
From Alfie Kohn's book, "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254 "Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation. He persuasively demonstrates how the ingrained American myth that competition is the only normal and desirable way of life -- from Little Leagues to the presidency -- is counterproductive, personally and for the national economy, and how psychologically it poisons relationships, fosters anxiety and takes the fun out of work and play. He charges that competition is a learned phenomenon and denies that it builds character and self-esteem. Kohn's measures to encourage cooperation in lieu of competition include promoting noncompetitive games, eliminating scholastic grades and substitution of mutual security for national security.... In closely reasoned argument he shows that, while competition is deeply ingrained, it is also inherently destructive, especially where self-esteem is contingent on winning at the expense of others."
Wikipedia sometimes links to primary sources but by itself is not a great primary source on a controversial issue (and I am arguing this issue is in part controversial because it is part of the justification for the current social pyramid). For a parallel example, for decades Jane Jacobs was arguing cities existed *before* agriculture, but only now are most people coming to accept that, and that in fact, cities created agriculture in the form we know it now.
On the issues you raise of: "Having abundant foods had little to do with life expectancy. For thousands years: a person got bitten by a bad mosquito, died; a woman having trouble delivering labor, died; an infant caught a fever, died. None of them got a chance to develop aging diseases."
On the medical issues you list, one by one, each has been made worse by "civilization":
Consider:
"History of Malaria Parasite And Its Global Spread" http://www.malariasite.com/MALARIA/history_parasite.htm "End of the last glacial period and warmer global climate heralded the beginnings of agriculture about 10000 years ago. It is argued that the entry of agricultural practice into Africa was pivotal to the subsequent evolution and history of human malaria. The Neolithic agrarian revolution, which is believed to have begun about 8,000 years ago in the "Fertile Crescent," southern Turkey and northeastern Iraq, reached the western and Central Africa around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. This led to the adaptations in the Anopheles vectors of human malaria. The human populations in sub-Saharan Africa changed from a low-density and mobile hunting and gathering life-style to communal living in settlements cleared in the tropical forest. This new, man-made environment led to an increase in the numbers and densities of humans on the one hand and generated numerous small water collections close to the human habitations on the other. This led to an increase in the mosquito population and the mosquitoes in turn had large, stable, and accessible sources of blood in the human population, leading to very high anthropophily and great efficiency of the vectors of African malaria. Even though the practice of agriculture had developed throughout the tropics and subtropics of Asia and the Middle East up to several thousand years before those in Africa, simultaneous animal domestication in Asia probably prevented the mosquitoes from developing exclusive anthropophilic habits. In most parts of the world, the anthropophilic index (the probability of a blood meal being on a human) of the vectors of malaria is much less than 50% and often less than 10 to 20%, but in sub-Saharan Africa, it is 80 to almost 100%. This is probably the most important single factor responsible for the stability and intensity of malaria transmission in tropical Africa today."
So, malaria in that sense is a recent cost of agriculture.
Women giving birth in traditional societies in traditional ways (squatting) in knowledeable communities do better than today's Westernized and out-of-shape women who give birth lying down attended by "professionals": http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/laborbasics/a/squatting.htm "The advantages of squatting have long been known, but in modern medicine has been ignored for positions that were more advantageous for the practitioner's view and the use of instruments such as forceps, stirrups and vacuum extractors. Benefits of squatting include:
* Shortens the second stage of labor (pushing phase)
* Decreases the need for forcep deliveries
* Reduces the need for episiotomy
* Shortens the depth of your birth canal
* Works with gravity
* Increases pelvic diameter by 10+% "
Please cite your evidence for human lifespans several thousand years ago. I'll agree that during the past few centuries they were lower, but in a sense, generalizing past that is a form a propaganda to justify the current political regime.
Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
You can see this in that human skeletons 10000 years ago were taller than all but for most people in the last 100 years. Medieval suits of armor show this too -- they are too short for most people of this generation.
The creation and spread of various diseases is also tied to humans living in densely packed cities and with livestock they are raising (see the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel").
So, there has been recent progress, but only after a great setback that took 10000 years to recover from.
Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.
As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."
Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens But,
Here is a more recent (2004) article suggesting it is only 75% of new drugs that are "me too": http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/truth-about-drug-companies """ The high price of prescription drugs has put -- and kept -- U.S. pharmaceutical companies in the news recently, but Dr. Marcia Angell argues that problems with the industry run even deeper. In her new book, The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (reviewed in the current issue of Mother Jones), the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine contends that the industry has become a marketing machine that produces few innovative drugs and is dependent on monopoly rights and public-sponsored research.
Angell disputes the industry's reputation as an "engine of innovation," arguing that the top U.S. drug makers spend 2.5 times as much on marketing and administration as they do on research. At least a third of the drugs marketed by industry leaders were discovered by universities or small biotech companies, writes Angell, but they're sold to the public at inflated prices. She cites Taxol, the cancer drug discovered by the National Institutes of Health, but sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $20,000 a year, reportedly 20 times the manufacturing cost. The company agreed to pay the NIH only 0.5 percent in royalties for the drug.
The majority of the new products the industry puts out, says Angell, are "me-too" drugs, which are almost identical to current treatments but "no better than drugs already on the market to treat the same condition." Around 75 percent of new drugs approved by the FDA are me-too drugs. They can be less effective than current drugs, but as long as they're more effective than a placebo, they can get the regulatory green light.
Finally, Angell attacks major pharmaceutical industry -- whose top ten companies make more in profits than the rest of the Fortune 500 combined -- for using "free market" rhetoric while opposing competition at all costs. She discusses Prilosec maker Astra-Zeneca, which filed multiple lawsuits against generic drug makers to prevent them from entering the market when the company's exclusive marketing rights expired. The company "obtained a patent on the idea of combining Prilosec with antibiotics, then argued that a generic drug would infringe on that patent because doctors might prescribe it with an antibiotic."
Angell, who is a doctor and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, wants to see the industry reformed. She recently sat down with MotherJones.com to talk about how to "ensure that we have access to good drugs at reasonable prices and that the reality of this industry is finally brought into line with its rhetoric."... """
From what I've read, more than 90% of drug industry R&D goes into "me too" clones of existing drugs with proven markets and likely ways to produce slight variants. The other 10% maybe genuinely new, but even there, most of the research behind them was done by academics on grants paid by the US government usually spanning decades of academic work. It's true that in the 10% case drug companies are paying for human trials (which are now costing in amounts approaching a billion dollars), but that isn't really R&D in the way most people think of it, and that cost could also be paid by the government (and even is, in some cases). It might be better if the functionality of *producing* drugs could be separated from the functionality of *researching* drugs. In any case, in general, high costs for today's drugs harms people today, whereas it is just speculation that future profit-driven research might help somebody someday. With that said, I have little doubt most people who work in most drug companies sincerely want to help people and see working for these companies as their best alternative. But it is still, overall, a broken health care system.
Consider: http://www.newint.org/issue165/testing.htm "Out of more than 100 drugs approved each year by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), only a fraction represent major therapeutic advances'. For example, in 1984, there were 142 new drug applications approved, of which 22 were 'new chemical entities' - that is, used new chemical molecules and were not variations on existing drugs. Out of those 22 new chemicals (mostly antibiotics, antidepressants and agents for heart disease) only two were judged to be 'major advances' by the FDA and eight 'modest advances'. Most of the other 12 were the so called 'me too' drugs by which a company makes its own version of an already marketed drug... To conclude: we have to have testing for the drugs we need. The colossal waste is in testing on apparently pointless new compounds. That's the problem."
By the way, for many of the conditions drugs make manageable, it is possible water-only fasting might be a better option for some: From: http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/fasting.pdf """ Throughout most of the 20th century, which witnessed a period of remarkable medical innovation in surgical techniques, radiation therapies, and new "miracle" drugs, the self-healing mechanisms that are unleashed during water-only fasting were largely unappreciated. However, as the century drew to a close, something extraordinary began to occur. After decades of collective awe of modern medicine and its purveyors, a strong undercurrent of disillusionment began to appear. There came the beginnings of a philosophical revolution that would lead health science in a promising new direction. This new direction centers on the realization that health and healing are best supported when the biological roots of our nature are understood and respected. This new philosophical approach is based on the awareness that health and healing are natural processes. As a result, the focus of attention has increasingly shifted away from the traditional medical emphasis on drugs and surgery toward an exploration of the circumstances and requirements necessary to unleash and enhance these natural processes. Fortunately, unlike health problems in the past--including such phenomena as water-born diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and epidemics of tuberculosis and pneumonia--that at one time were confusing puzzles, our present day epidemics of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer are not nearly so mysterious. It is becoming increasingly clear that the majority of present day health problems are the result of modern dietary excesses. Simply put, most of our health problems are the result of our getting too much of the wrong t
Here is a software analogy to vaccination, thinking of a vaccine like a software patch. These are the sorts of meta issues that are rarely discussed when focusing on pseudo-arguments about the results of specific studies.
Vaccinations are like software patches that are proprietary closed-source products, that companies make money off of selling, and that patch installation service providers use to drive business throughput for their other services. Much of the regulation of these patches is done by people who have a direct or indirect commercial stake in this industry and convincing people they need the patch.
Vaccinations are like software patches that are generally released with only testing against a small population of software environments; this is like Microsoft releasing a single patch for everyone which modifies *all* x86 PC software in the world (including everything on GNU/Linux) after having tested it on a few versions of Windows and looking at the performance afterwards of a few major applications over a few months or a couple years. Anything a few years down the road is considered not to be related to the patch and in any case would be hard to prove.
Vaccinations are like software patches that you can't back out -- ever.
Vaccinations are like software patches that change their code (formulation and quality control) year to year even if they are said to be to prevent the same problem, with claims for the "safe and effective" nature of previous patches being used to justify claims about new untested patches from this year's batch.
Vaccinations are like software patches that claim to be effective against last years trojan or worm or virus, ignoring the fact that trojans and worms and viruses mutate.
Vaccinations are like software patches that usually only work in a positive way for ten years or so.
Vaccination are like software patches that might be pushing some unknown limit of total patches that can be accepted and still have decent computing performance in the face of new demands on the system.
Vaccinations are like software patches that are built on a culture of patching security vulnerabilities without ever emphasizing basic security precautions like using encryption or administrator-level authentication. For example, extended breastfeeding through the toddler years promotes the general immunological wellbeing of a person for life: http://www.llli.org//NB/NBextended.html Thus, one might think infant formula should be prescription only (for rare special cases) since formula decreases "herd immunity", but formula is available everywhere without a prescription, showing a double standard here. Chances are about half of US slashdotters were raised entirely on formula and will create a lifetime infection risk for everyone around them as well as suffer from worse health. Yet, formula feeding is supposedly "a matter of personal choice" and was promoted by the medical care community in the past and continues to be heavily promoted among new parents by that industry. Similarly, good nutrition, enough sleep, avoiding bad stress but having enough good stress, having face-to-face friends, and similar things, promote wellness, but junk food, allnighters, programming death marches, and spending too much time on slashdot are all legal.:-)
There are a bunch more analogies one could make, thought they are more abstract, related to co-evolution or auto-immune disorders. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9115571
Anyway, the bigger picture is being missed here it seems to me. That is why it is so hard to assess risk versus reward. That is not to argue that any specific vaccine or schedule has any specific consequence, although administering HepB vaccine at birth to children of non-positive mothers certainly seems questionable to me.
Essentially, the Singularity is a mirror. It is in some ways just a mirror of our own choice of virtues or lack thereof. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues
LIke Harry Potter looking into the mirror or Erised, Ray Kurzweil looks into that mirror of the Singularity and sees himself: a very logically intelligent business person interested in accelerating technology by promoting artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights. Thus, he pushes for a singularity filled with competition and artificial scarcity, rather than one filled with cooperation and abundance for all. What's the danger in that? While we may not know enough yet to make a friendly AI with humane values, we certainly know enough to make some nasty dumb replicators and military robotics programmed to kill widely, plus we already have nuclear and bio weapons. As I say here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html "Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me?"
Kurzweil also doesn't understand ecology and evolution very well, in terms of making assumptions about the value of intelligence without seeing how it plays an adaptive role in only certain ecological niches.
More comments on those themes as emails I've sent to Ray Kurzweil, archived by someone else here: http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
Look at the ratios, and see the Fin whale ratio of brain to bodymass. It's tiny.
Bigger may be better up to a point, but it looks like a law of diminishing returns sets in.
One might posit some sort of inverse square law for the usefulness of increasing amounts of computational capacity to an organism, given perhaps exponentially increasing difficulty in creating more detailed or longer-term predictions of the world. This is an issue weather forecasters may wrestle with, in terms of facing chaotic behavior impacting predictability in weather systems. It's called "the Butterfly effect" where a small mistake or mismeasure may have increasingly big implications over time. So there is a need for constant remeasuring and recalibration of the models, which reduces the value of predictions and related computations. This is kind of like a game of chess where pieces were moved randomly by outside forces every once in a while, reducing the value in looking ahead too much.
Obviously, architecture can play a part in changes in intelligence too. But even Jupiter Brains might get dementia or turn uncommunicative.
Anyway, so this ratio of brain sizes and body mass may suggest the same thing. It's not that bigger is not better in some sense, it is just that it it only justifiable energetically up to a point.
Consider that a Right whale's testes may weigh over a two thousand pounds compared to that whale's fifteen pound or so brain, or about 100X bigger, whereas for humans the ratio is approximately reversed, the brain 100X larger. (Fin whales' testes are closer to 100 pounds, or 7X brain size, but still much larger than their brains.) So, you can see what nature is betting on when body size goes up.:-)
It's not like whale's could not easily have brains that were 10X bigger. Whales are social, and even communicate around the p
Also, a related essay I wrote:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html "So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
Gates' initiatives for small schools are probably just more of the same, to make digital slave laborers. Even the more radical reform in the news still puts the emphasis is still on making kids fit into the needs of business:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over" http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
At least Shuttleworth's initiatives are trying to empower kids, but that group too can't get past seeing schooling as the solution, instead of realizing it is a big part of the problem disempowering the next generation.
In twenty to thirty years computers will be about another million times faster, and we'll have better 3D printers and smarter dexterous seeing robots, and most humans just won't be employable in any sense we now understand. A previous related post by me to Slashdot on computing and education and the mindset of the class of 2029:
"Ignores the big picture on exponential computing http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279703&cid=20354965
John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year, in general on this: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm """
A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this intellectual proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient
-- Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History
Two Social Revolutions Become One
Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom y
I wrote about this at length here:
"Re: Do artifacts (even money) have politics? (German WWII example with Hans Posse) http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/62929d07d2c68be5 but this goes to show the unexpected creative sparks that can fly from these sorts of efforts.
From there: """ So, yesterday, I looked at probably thousands of thumbnails, just flipping through page after page of the uncategorized ones for over an hour, occasionally looking at enlarged ones. I saw smiling faces and people proud of their accomplishments in agriculture, construction, sports, child-rearing and so on. My parents are both from the Netherlands (Holland), but I undoubtedly have ancestors from Germany at some point given my last name, and I learned German in school as it was the closest thing offered to Dutch, so I could guess at some of the captions for the few I looked at. I kept seeing faces here or there which reminded me of relatives. My wife agreed this one looked a lot like me::-) "Dr. Hans Posse, 1910" http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2003-0709-500,_Dr._Hans_Posse.jpg "Scherl Bilderdienst Dr. Hans Posse, der neue Direktor der Dresdener Gemäldegalerie. 1910.... Scherl picture service Dr. Hans Posse, the new director of the Dresdener picture gallery. 1910."... But here is a picture of him standing next to Hitler I just found this moment by coincidence through Google as I tried to look up his bio:
"Posse (links [left]) mit Hitler" http://residence.aec.at/rax/kun_pol/UND/BIOS/posse.html Thought-provoking stuff to see someone who looks a lot like you standing next to Hitler... Especially if you *also* have relatives who perished in concentration camps...... As I flipped through those pictures, and knowing a little about history, I realized that WWII could not have happened without the manufacturing competence of the German people; they needed their tanks and submarines and synthetic fuel from coal plans to work well. They also needed effective logistics for their military plans, and so they needed intellectual competence too. But, the Germans would not have invaded other countries without some less positive world views too -- both a sense of superiority and a sense, from World War One, of previous unfair treatment. (Echoes of Iraq for the USA?) It's been said that intelligence is knowing how to do things, wisdom is knowing what is worth doing, and virtue is actually doing it. So, the Germans in WWII and the times leading up to it then had intelligence and a sort of hard-working virtue, but not a lot of good wisdom.... If the Germans had not been individually and collectively competent at industrial arts, WWII would not have happened. But if they had not had gone beyond pride into arrogance (thinking collectively they had a right to others land from some innate superiority), then it would not have happened either. Anyway, that's a lesson for US Americans to reflect on too, with all too many parallels to those times in some ways.... """
Not only that, but once we create ethical intelligent robots (who will have the equivalent of emotions in some ways), should we not then morn their deaths the same as the death of a human? Or more, as they are our "mind children"?
Anyway, a big assumption here is, what does it matter if an intelligent silicon being is destroyed? Maybe is will matter, and should matter.
Almost all these replies citing luck, talent, and hard work, and knowledge (all true), leave out a key aspect -- the way you can get or buy all these (or by having free *time* and access to *tools* can develop them), and that thing is access to capital (dollar-denominated ration units in our society). Bill Gates had a lot of ration units (capital) to give him free time and access to tools and learning because his family was wealthy and he was born with a big trust fund. See:
"How to be as Rich As Bill Gates" http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ "William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
Oh, and Bill Gates dumpster dived at a computer center in his formative years as well: http://danbricklin.com/log/2004_03_11.htm#paw "Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer? Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems. You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."
What he describes here sounds a lot like what the free and open source community of programmers does.:-) Not what Microsoft does. He had the guts to drop out of college (Harvard), true, but he also had the safety net of personal wealth already. Starting with wealth and others' information are key aspects of the Bil Gates story (and understanding our society), and it is unfortunate this is all not better known. It puts his early letter to hobbyists in a new perspective, where an already rich guy (from inheritance) claimed poorer hobbyists sharing knowledge and content were hurting this guy economically who already was very wealthy and had gotten a lot of what he knew from reading through others' discarded printouts. (That sharing was before copyright infringement was a felony, by the way, as the laws have been made stricter since to further protect people like Bill Gates.)
I don't know which is worse: * the ethical hyprocrisy of Gates' letter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists * the defense of Gates and the US economic system by "Millionaire Wannabees" who do not know of this history.
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's" http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47 "But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
Jane Jacobs made this point in her books on cities, that cities came first before agriculture. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs "" The Economy of Cities
The thesis of this book is that cities are the primary drivers of economic development.
Jacobs' main argument is that all economic growth derives from urban import replacement. Import replacement is when a city starts producing locally goods that it formerly imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s. Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.
In an interview with Bill Steigerwald in Reason Magazine (06/01), Jacobs said that if she is remembered for being a great intellectual she will be remembered not for her work concerning city planning, but for the discovery of import replacement. However, her ideas are similar to those that had begun to be advanced earlier about import substitution by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank.
The book also advances a new argument that cities preceded agriculture, rather than the reverse, which was archaeologists' previous belief. Archaeologists believed that cities required a food surplus to support specialist workers, thus requiring an existing agricultural economy. Jacobs claims that instead, cities already existed as permanent trading centers, and discovered agriculture through trade in wild animals and grains, and then disseminated agriculture to rural areas. """
I had a graduate student (also at Princeton, while chatting on a lawn by the Graduate College) tell me something like this twenty years ago -- that the corrective mechanisms for genetic information stop working as well when organisms (like bacteria) are stressed, leading to a greater mutation rate (which in turn can help deal with the stress via allowing a higher mutation rate).
It was unfortunate the GFDL licence was created, because the GPL was good enough for most textual works and certainly good enough for Wikipedia. (And plain MIT/X was also available.) It is unfortunate the FSF created a GPL-incompatible license with the GFDL. It's also unfortunate they do not fix this incompatability ASAP, since the line between code and content can get blurry fairly quickly sometimes. Some of these issues are at: http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License And then there are now endless versions of Creative Commons licenses to muddy the waters with incompatible versions. And then there is the ambiguity of "no commercial use" licenses.
Schools are efficient, but what they are efficient at doing is dumbing people down for 19th century factory work of a type which barely exists now (among other things schools do to make the average person part of a certain kind of repressive social machinery).
From the second link: "Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of control. You don't have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won't ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I'll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient."
None of the candidates have put this on the table directly. Even vouchers don't address this issue unless you get the money in your pocket for homeschooling.
It talks about moving beyond conventional economics altogether to a Linux-like post-scarcity paradigm, and what it would mean to re-envision an elite institution along those lines.
From the introduction: "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? "
Pandora costs the same as the OLPC adjusted for recent dollar devaluation (200 euros). I think it much more liekly future versions of Pandora will drive the price further down in quantities as a game console, given the other issues the OLPC project struggles with (I got two OLPC XO-1s through the buy one give one deal to help support that project and to look into developing software). And if not Pandora, we will see different systems like it (the referenced post had been inspired by the nos defunct Cybiko information toy).
Pandora comes with more educational software than the OLPC because if it runs Ubuntu, then presumably can run GNU/Linux software like GCompris without modifications and the whole of Edubuntu. There is almost no educational software converted to Sugar for the OLPC (sad but true) because of the extra work to sugarize GNU/Linux sofwtare and the uncertainty around Sugar and its work-in-progress nature. OLPC would have had more success running a simple window manager and making an API for GNU/Linux to support the connectivist Sugar ideals as addons.
The OLPC has essentially no special education-oriented infrastucture for deployment or support (sad, but true, if you read the project's criticisms). Pandora can take part in the entire infrastructure and support communities for GNU/Linux, whereas the OLPC with its unusual Sugar approach cannot (yes you can strip away Sugar from the OLPC, but then what is the point of the software side of that OLPC project?)
While the OLPC has some rugged harware innovations, including being more rugged than the average laptop, most of the actual places where low cost computing may be deployed in the near future are cities with power and some communicatiosn infrastructure, where it's ruggedness is not as essential. Also, the whole OLPC project suffers from cultural ignorance of a sort, since village life in rural areas has a different social dynamics and a few computers per village might make a lot mroe cultural sense and have less theft risk, and again they would not need to be as rugged if kept in a village building and not portable.
Pandora (or something game-oriented like it) on the other hand as its price drops may address the information needs of billions of city dwelling poor people across the planet.
"Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000 African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one shut down nuclear plant.) Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia -- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for a month cruising the area...) This is like a system I wanted to develop and deploy pre-Y2K just in case... But it still has much value in preparing for any potential (natural, political, economic, biological) disaster, as well as aiding the development of democracy. It's somewhat like the wearable crystsls described in The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix), although the one thing it lacks is easy self-repliaction... Developing and then deploying this sort of device is the sort of thing the UN or a major foundation should fund (if they were on the ball). But luckily, there is hope from toymakers!"
OLPC is on the ropes, and it took a couple more years than I predicted, but here are the toymakers coming through for us with Pandora!
Here is a satire about what our society would look like if the law was like what lawyers recommend for everyone else:
"Microslaw" http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html """ My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience applause].... """
He wrote that in 1994, and it was based on even earlier research, so that part may be out of date these days, even as the general crisis in science has grown worse. His theme also conflates US corporate imperial dominance, and ignores many high performing "US" scientists were imported from Nazi Germany (Einstein or von Braun) or also from the USSR later.
I'm not as pessimistic as Goodstein is, since I do see the world transcending eventually to an economy of abundance where all people have more time for doing science (or other creative things) as a hobby. See for example:
"TEDTalks : New insights on poverty and life around the world - Hans Rosling (2007)" http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html "Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing." Or:
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper." http://www.reprap.org/
"It takes quite a lot of effort to turn a naturally curious child into a mumbling, illiterate worker bee who lives to shop, but Americans are known for their can-do spirit."
John Taylor Gatto makes exactly this point, suggesting schools were designed specifically to destroy curiousity and initiative so as to make people obedient workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. See:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm And:
"The Underground History of American Education" http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm "The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real." And: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm "Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders." And: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
Someone can want to be a "scientist" starting in K-12, but he or she can still be discarded by the system in college or graduate school because you don't fit the expected profile of a scientist "diamond in the rough".
On people from other countries studying in the USA, you have an excellent point, but Goodstein didn't say it was impossible to recognize a peer by those artificial standards, just harder. And foreign students have already gone through K-12 and maybe college in their own countries. He isn't claiming any superiority of "white males", he is just pointing out a historical situation.
Actually, there is a much deeper problem with Goodstein's remarks in that he fails to acknowledge this deeper problem of scientific elites, which implies our selection of "scientists" and other professionals are actually fairly political:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives" http://www.disciplined-minds.com/ One reviewer: "I have been waiting a long time for someone to write this book, and Jeff Schmidt has done it. He exposes, in crystal-clear prose, the inevitably political nature of the professional in our society, and, most importantly, suggests a strategy for resistance. This is an extraordinary and valuable piece of writing."
From the Amazon blurb: "This book details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker, showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in today's corporate society can be remarkably liberating. Poignant examples from the world of work reveal the workplace as a battleground for the very identity of the individual. Schmidt contends that professional work is inherently political--that the unstated duty of professionals is to maintain strict ideological discipline. Career dissatisfaction evolves as workers lose control over the political component of their creative work."
Anyway, foreign students are usually in such constrained circumstances that they make near ideal slavish grad students who are easily exploited. Some may be exceptions of course, same as the issue with H1B visa holders. So, that is a reason professors may be more tolerant of some of their differences -- it's the cost of cheap labor.
From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.... I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result.... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
See also:
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html "... We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
I'm a little more optimistic that abundance for all will result in more free time for hobby research, but until then, Dr. Goodstein (Vice Provost of Caltech) outlines the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme and its consequences.
== what have funding policies in automotive intelligence wrought? ===
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off: * totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead * wit
Slashdot Mirror
This article just assumes games should be competitive. There are cooperative games. The Wii is pioneering more such cooperative games. Here is a general site on the topic of cooperative computer games:
http://www.co-optimus.com/
There are even cooperative board games:
http://www.familypastimes.com/
One great thing about cooperative games is that they make it easy for players of different skill levels to play together.
From Alfie Kohn's book, "No Contest: The Case Against Competition": ... In closely reasoned argument he shows that, while competition is deeply ingrained, it is also inherently destructive, especially where self-esteem is contingent on winning at the expense of others."
http://www.amazon.com/No-Contest-Case-Against-Competition/dp/0395631254
"Contending that competition in all areas -- school, family, sports and business -- is destructive, and that success so achieved is at the expense of another's failure, Kohn, a correspondent for USA Today, advocates a restructuring of our institutions to replace competition with cooperation. He persuasively demonstrates how the ingrained American myth that competition is the only normal and desirable way of life -- from Little Leagues to the presidency -- is counterproductive, personally and for the national economy, and how psychologically it poisons relationships, fosters anxiety and takes the fun out of work and play. He charges that competition is a learned phenomenon and denies that it builds character and self-esteem. Kohn's measures to encourage cooperation in lieu of competition include promoting noncompetitive games, eliminating scholastic grades and substitution of mutual security for national security.
So, there are other ways to have more fun.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cooperative+games
Wikipedia sometimes links to primary sources but by itself is not a great primary source on a controversial issue (and I am arguing this issue is in part controversial because it is part of the justification for the current social pyramid). For a parallel example, for decades Jane Jacobs was arguing cities existed *before* agriculture, but only now are most people coming to accept that, and that in fact, cities created agriculture in the form we know it now.
On the issues you raise of: "Having abundant foods had little to do with life expectancy. For thousands years: a person got bitten by a bad mosquito, died; a woman having trouble delivering labor, died; an infant caught a fever, died. None of them got a chance to develop aging diseases."
On the medical issues you list, one by one, each has been made worse by "civilization":
Consider:
"History of Malaria Parasite And Its Global Spread"
http://www.malariasite.com/MALARIA/history_parasite.htm
"End of the last glacial period and warmer global climate heralded the beginnings of agriculture about 10000 years ago. It is argued that the entry of agricultural practice into Africa was pivotal to the subsequent evolution and history of human malaria. The Neolithic agrarian revolution, which is believed to have begun about 8,000 years ago in the "Fertile Crescent," southern Turkey and northeastern Iraq, reached the western and Central Africa around 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. This led to the adaptations in the Anopheles vectors of human malaria. The human populations in sub-Saharan Africa changed from a low-density and mobile hunting and gathering life-style to communal living in settlements cleared in the tropical forest. This new, man-made environment led to an increase in the numbers and densities of humans on the one hand and generated numerous small water collections close to the human habitations on the other. This led to an increase in the mosquito population and the mosquitoes in turn had large, stable, and accessible sources of blood in the human population, leading to very high anthropophily and great efficiency of the vectors of African malaria. Even though the practice of agriculture had developed throughout the tropics and subtropics of Asia and the Middle East up to several thousand years before those in Africa, simultaneous animal domestication in Asia probably prevented the mosquitoes from developing exclusive anthropophilic habits. In most parts of the world, the anthropophilic index (the probability of a blood meal being on a human) of the vectors of malaria is much less than 50% and often less than 10 to 20%, but in sub-Saharan Africa, it is 80 to almost 100%. This is probably the most important single factor responsible for the stability and intensity of malaria transmission in tropical Africa today."
So, malaria in that sense is a recent cost of agriculture.
Women giving birth in traditional societies in traditional ways (squatting) in knowledeable communities do better than today's Westernized and out-of-shape women who give birth lying down attended by "professionals":
http://pregnancy.about.com/cs/laborbasics/a/squatting.htm
"The advantages of squatting have long been known, but in modern medicine has been ignored for positions that were more advantageous for the practitioner's view and the use of instruments such as forceps, stirrups and vacuum extractors. Benefits of squatting include:
* Shortens the second stage of labor (pushing phase)
* Decreases the need for forcep deliveries
* Reduces the need for episiotomy
* Shortens the depth of your birth canal
* Works with gravity
* Increases pelvic diameter by 10+% "
Traditional societi
Please cite your evidence for human lifespans several thousand years ago. I'll agree that during the past few centuries they were lower, but in a sense, generalizing past that is a form a propaganda to justify the current political regime.
Humanity used to live in relative abundance with a few people with limited wants living on a big planet.
"The Original Affluent Society" by Marshall Sahlins
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's - in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times."
Let us call this time "pre-scarcity". Because of the very success of hunter-gatherers, their populations grew, and they got harder to feed. That was the beginning of scarcity. In desperation, people turned to agriculture. But it had problems. Humanity had to suffer the resulting worse nutrition from less diversity of sources. Human skeletons actually were shorter from the advent of agriculture until only reaching hunter-gatherer stature about this century.
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/6812.html
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
You can see this in that human skeletons 10000 years ago were taller than all but for most people in the last 100 years. Medieval suits of armor show this too -- they are too short for most people of this generation.
The creation and spread of various diseases is also tied to humans living in densely packed cities and with livestock they are raising (see the book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel").
So, there has been recent progress, but only after a great setback that took 10000 years to recover from.
Populations grew even further and militaristic bureaucracies arose like hurricanes on a warming ocean.
As Marshall Sahlins suggests, then comes along "Modern Times":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Times_(film)
"Modern Times is a 1936 comedy film by Charlie Chaplin that has his famous Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin's view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization."
Let's call this time "scarcity" times. Those are what our recent ancestors lived through, and to an extent we are still living in now. All the things you have read about how certain things have gotten better from the 1800s and early industrialization are probably true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens
But,
Here is a more recent (2004) article suggesting it is only 75% of new drugs that are "me too":
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/09/truth-about-drug-companies
"""
The high price of prescription drugs has put -- and kept -- U.S. pharmaceutical companies in the news recently, but Dr. Marcia Angell argues that problems with the industry run even deeper. In her new book, The Truth About Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It (reviewed in the current issue of Mother Jones), the former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine contends that the industry has become a marketing machine that produces few innovative drugs and is dependent on monopoly rights and public-sponsored research.
Angell disputes the industry's reputation as an "engine of innovation," arguing that the top U.S. drug makers spend 2.5 times as much on marketing and administration as they do on research. At least a third of the drugs marketed by industry leaders were discovered by universities or small biotech companies, writes Angell, but they're sold to the public at inflated prices. She cites Taxol, the cancer drug discovered by the National Institutes of Health, but sold by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $20,000 a year, reportedly 20 times the manufacturing cost. The company agreed to pay the NIH only 0.5 percent in royalties for the drug.
The majority of the new products the industry puts out, says Angell, are "me-too" drugs, which are almost identical to current treatments but "no better than drugs already on the market to treat the same condition." Around 75 percent of new drugs approved by the FDA are me-too drugs. They can be less effective than current drugs, but as long as they're more effective than a placebo, they can get the regulatory green light.
Finally, Angell attacks major pharmaceutical industry -- whose top ten companies make more in profits than the rest of the Fortune 500 combined -- for using "free market" rhetoric while opposing competition at all costs. She discusses Prilosec maker Astra-Zeneca, which filed multiple lawsuits against generic drug makers to prevent them from entering the market when the company's exclusive marketing rights expired. The company "obtained a patent on the idea of combining Prilosec with antibiotics, then argued that a generic drug would infringe on that patent because doctors might prescribe it with an antibiotic."
Angell, who is a doctor and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, wants to see the industry reformed. She recently sat down with MotherJones.com to talk about how to "ensure that we have access to good drugs at reasonable prices and that the reality of this industry is finally brought into line with its rhetoric." ...
"""
From what I've read, more than 90% of drug industry R&D goes into "me too" clones of existing drugs with proven markets and likely ways to produce slight variants. The other 10% maybe genuinely new, but even there, most of the research behind them was done by academics on grants paid by the US government usually spanning decades of academic work. It's true that in the 10% case drug companies are paying for human trials (which are now costing in amounts approaching a billion dollars), but that isn't really R&D in the way most people think of it, and that cost could also be paid by the government (and even is, in some cases). It might be better if the functionality of *producing* drugs could be separated from the functionality of *researching* drugs. In any case, in general, high costs for today's drugs harms people today, whereas it is just speculation that future profit-driven research might help somebody someday. With that said, I have little doubt most people who work in most drug companies sincerely want to help people and see working for these companies as their best alternative. But it is still, overall, a broken health care system.
Consider: ... To conclude: we have to have testing for the drugs we need. The colossal waste is in testing on apparently pointless new compounds. That's the problem."
http://www.newint.org/issue165/testing.htm
"Out of more than 100 drugs approved each year by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), only a fraction represent major therapeutic advances'. For example, in 1984, there were 142 new drug applications approved, of which 22 were 'new chemical entities' - that is, used new chemical molecules and were not variations on existing drugs. Out of those 22 new chemicals (mostly antibiotics, antidepressants and agents for heart disease) only two were judged to be 'major advances' by the FDA and eight 'modest advances'. Most of the other 12 were the so called 'me too' drugs by which a company makes its own version of an already marketed drug
By the way, for many of the conditions drugs make manageable, it is possible water-only fasting might be a better option for some:
From:
http://www.healthpromoting.com/Articles/articles/fasting.pdf
"""
Throughout most of the 20th century, which witnessed a period of remarkable medical innovation in surgical techniques, radiation therapies, and new "miracle" drugs, the self-healing mechanisms that are unleashed during water-only fasting were largely unappreciated. However, as the century drew to a close, something extraordinary began to occur. After decades of collective awe of modern medicine and its purveyors, a strong undercurrent of disillusionment began to appear. There came the beginnings of a philosophical revolution that would lead health science in a promising new direction. This new direction centers on the realization that health and healing are best supported when the biological roots of our nature are understood and respected. This new philosophical approach is based on the awareness that health and healing are natural processes. As a result, the focus of attention has increasingly shifted away from the traditional medical emphasis on drugs and surgery toward an exploration of the circumstances and requirements necessary to unleash and enhance these natural processes. Fortunately, unlike health problems in the past--including such phenomena as water-born diseases, nutritional deficiencies, and epidemics of tuberculosis and pneumonia--that at one time were confusing puzzles, our present day epidemics of obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer are not nearly so mysterious. It is becoming increasingly clear that the majority of present day health problems are the result of modern dietary excesses. Simply put, most of our health problems are the result of our getting too much of the wrong t
Here is a software analogy to vaccination, thinking of a vaccine like a software patch. These are the sorts of meta issues that are rarely discussed when focusing on pseudo-arguments about the results of specific studies.
Vaccinations are like software patches that are proprietary closed-source products, that companies make money off of selling, and that patch installation service providers use to drive business throughput for their other services. Much of the regulation of these patches is done by people who have a direct or indirect commercial stake in this industry and convincing people they need the patch.
Vaccinations are like software patches that are generally released with only testing against a small population of software environments; this is like Microsoft releasing a single patch for everyone which modifies *all* x86 PC software in the world (including everything on GNU/Linux) after having tested it on a few versions of Windows and looking at the performance afterwards of a few major applications over a few months or a couple years. Anything a few years down the road is considered not to be related to the patch and in any case would be hard to prove.
Vaccinations are like software patches that you can't back out -- ever.
Vaccinations are like software patches that change their code (formulation and quality control) year to year even if they are said to be to prevent the same problem, with claims for the "safe and effective" nature of previous patches being used to justify claims about new untested patches from this year's batch.
Vaccinations are like software patches that claim to be effective against last years trojan or worm or virus, ignoring the fact that trojans and worms and viruses mutate.
Vaccinations are like software patches that usually only work in a positive way for ten years or so.
Vaccination are like software patches that might be pushing some unknown limit of total patches that can be accepted and still have decent computing performance in the face of new demands on the system.
Vaccinations are like software patches that are built on a culture of patching security vulnerabilities without ever emphasizing basic security precautions like using encryption or administrator-level authentication. For example, extended breastfeeding through the toddler years promotes the general immunological wellbeing of a person for life: :-)
http://www.llli.org//NB/NBextended.html
Thus, one might think infant formula should be prescription only (for rare special cases) since formula decreases "herd immunity", but formula is available everywhere without a prescription, showing a double standard here. Chances are about half of US slashdotters were raised entirely on formula and will create a lifetime infection risk for everyone around them as well as suffer from worse health. Yet, formula feeding is supposedly "a matter of personal choice" and was promoted by the medical care community in the past and continues to be heavily promoted among new parents by that industry. Similarly, good nutrition, enough sleep, avoiding bad stress but having enough good stress, having face-to-face friends, and similar things, promote wellness, but junk food, allnighters, programming death marches, and spending too much time on slashdot are all legal.
There are a bunch more analogies one could make, thought they are more abstract, related to co-evolution or auto-immune disorders.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9115571
Anyway, the bigger picture is being missed here it seems to me. That is why it is so hard to assess risk versus reward. That is not to argue that any specific vaccine or schedule has any specific consequence, although administering HepB vaccine at birth to children of non-positive mothers certainly seems questionable to me.
Essentially, the Singularity is a mirror. It is in some ways just a mirror of our own choice of virtues or lack thereof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues
LIke Harry Potter looking into the mirror or Erised, Ray Kurzweil looks into that mirror of the Singularity and sees himself: a very logically intelligent business person interested in accelerating technology by promoting artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights. Thus, he pushes for a singularity filled with competition and artificial scarcity, rather than one filled with cooperation and abundance for all. What's the danger in that? While we may not know enough yet to make a friendly AI with humane values, we certainly know enough to make some nasty dumb replicators and military robotics programmed to kill widely, plus we already have nuclear and bio weapons. As I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me?"
Kurzweil also doesn't understand ecology and evolution very well, in terms of making assumptions about the value of intelligence without seeing how it plays an adaptive role in only certain ecological niches.
More comments on those themes as emails I've sent to Ray Kurzweil, archived by someone else here:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/
What does this chart suggest about a law of diminishing returns for being more intelligent? :-)
http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm
Look at the ratios, and see the Fin whale ratio of brain to bodymass. It's tiny.
Bigger may be better up to a point, but it looks like a law of diminishing returns sets in.
One might posit some sort of inverse square law for the usefulness of increasing amounts of computational capacity to an organism, given perhaps exponentially increasing difficulty in creating more detailed or longer-term predictions of the world. This is an issue weather forecasters may wrestle with, in terms of facing chaotic behavior impacting predictability in weather systems. It's called "the Butterfly effect" where a small mistake or mismeasure may have increasingly big implications over time. So there is a need for constant remeasuring and recalibration of the models, which reduces the value of predictions and related computations. This is kind of like a game of chess where pieces were moved randomly by outside forces every once in a while, reducing the value in looking ahead too much.
Obviously, architecture can play a part in changes in intelligence too. But even Jupiter Brains might get dementia or turn uncommunicative.
Anyway, so this ratio of brain sizes and body mass may suggest the same thing. It's not that bigger is not better in some sense, it is just that it it only justifiable energetically up to a point.
Consider that a Right whale's testes may weigh over a two thousand pounds compared to that whale's fifteen pound or so brain, or about 100X bigger, whereas for humans the ratio is approximately reversed, the brain 100X larger. (Fin whales' testes are closer to 100 pounds, or 7X brain size, but still much larger than their brains.) So, you can see what nature is betting on when body size goes up. :-)
It's not like whale's could not easily have brains that were 10X bigger. Whales are social, and even communicate around the p
My comments almost three years ago on the Shuttleworth foundation also trying to reform schools, and applicable here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/26#comment-397
Also, a related essay I wrote:
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools.
Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving
compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the
information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch
this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory
schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process."
Gates' initiatives for small schools are probably just more of the same, to make digital slave laborers. Even the more radical reform in the news still puts the emphasis is still on making kids fit into the needs of business:
"To fix US schools, panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
At least Shuttleworth's initiatives are trying to empower kids, but that group too can't get past seeing schooling as the solution, instead of realizing it is a big part of the problem disempowering the next generation.
In twenty to thirty years computers will be about another million times faster, and we'll have better 3D printers and smarter dexterous seeing robots, and most humans just won't be employable in any sense we now understand. A previous related post by me to Slashdot on computing and education and the mindset of the class of 2029:
"Ignores the big picture on exponential computing
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279703&cid=20354965
Marshall Brain on that theme:
"Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A bigger generalization on that theme by me:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
John Taylor Gatto, a New York State Teacher of the Year, in general on this:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
A lower middle class which has received secondary or even university education without being given any corresponding outlet for its trained abilities was the backbone of the twentieth century Fascist Party in Italy and the National Socialist Party in Germany. The demoniac driving force which carried Mussolini and Hitler to power was generated out of this intellectual proletariat's exasperation at finding its painful efforts at self-improvement were not sufficient
-- Arnold Toynbee, MA Study of History
Two Social Revolutions Become One
Solve this problem and school will heal itself: children know that schooling is not fair, not honest, not driven by integrity. They know they are devalued in classes and grades, that the institution is indifferent to them as individuals. The rhetoric of caring contradicts what school procedure and content say, that many children have no tolerable future and most have a sharply proscribed one. The problem is structural. School has been built to serve a society of associations: corporations, institutions, and agencies. Kids know this instinctively. How should they feel about it? How should we?
As soon as you break free of the orbit of received wisdom y
I wrote about this at length here:
"Re: Do artifacts (even money) have politics? (German WWII example with Hans Posse)
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/62929d07d2c68be5
but this goes to show the unexpected creative sparks that can fly from these sorts of efforts.
From there: :-) ... Scherl picture service Dr. Hans Posse, the new ... ... ... ...
"""
So, yesterday, I looked at probably thousands of thumbnails, just flipping
through page after page of the uncategorized ones for over an hour,
occasionally looking at enlarged ones. I saw smiling faces and people proud
of their accomplishments in agriculture, construction, sports, child-rearing
and so on. My parents are both from the Netherlands (Holland), but I
undoubtedly have ancestors from Germany at some point given my last name,
and I learned German in school as it was the closest thing offered to Dutch,
so I could guess at some of the captions for the few I looked at.
I kept seeing faces here or there which reminded me of relatives. My wife
agreed this one looked a lot like me:
"Dr. Hans Posse, 1910"
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2003-0709-500,_Dr._Hans_Posse.jpg
"Scherl Bilderdienst Dr. Hans Posse, der neue Direktor der Dresdener
Gemäldegalerie. 1910.
director of the Dresdener picture gallery. 1910."
But here is a picture of him standing next to Hitler I just found this moment by coincidence through
Google as I tried to look up his bio:
"Posse (links [left]) mit Hitler"
http://residence.aec.at/rax/kun_pol/UND/BIOS/posse.html
Thought-provoking stuff to see someone who looks a lot like you standing
next to Hitler... Especially if you *also* have relatives who perished in
concentration camps...
As I flipped through those pictures, and knowing a little about history, I
realized that WWII could not have happened without the manufacturing
competence of the German people; they needed their tanks and submarines and
synthetic fuel from coal plans to work well. They also needed effective
logistics for their military plans, and so they needed intellectual
competence too. But, the Germans would not have invaded other countries
without some less positive world views too -- both a sense of superiority
and a sense, from World War One, of previous unfair treatment. (Echoes of
Iraq for the USA?) It's been said that intelligence is knowing how to do
things, wisdom is knowing what is worth doing, and virtue is actually doing
it. So, the Germans in WWII and the times leading up to it then had
intelligence and a sort of hard-working virtue, but not a lot of good wisdom.
If the Germans had not been individually and collectively competent at
industrial arts, WWII would not have happened. But if they had not had gone
beyond pride into arrogance (thinking collectively they had a right to
others land from some innate superiority), then it would not have happened
either. Anyway, that's a lesson for US Americans to reflect on too, with all
too many parallels to those times in some ways.
"""
Not only that, but once we create ethical intelligent robots (who will have the equivalent of emotions in some ways), should we not then morn their deaths the same as the death of a human? Or more, as they are our "mind children"?
Anyway, a big assumption here is, what does it matter if an intelligent silicon being is destroyed? Maybe is will matter, and should matter.
Almost all these replies citing luck, talent, and hard work, and knowledge (all true), leave out a key aspect -- the way you can get or buy all these (or by having free *time* and access to *tools* can develop them), and that thing is access to capital (dollar-denominated ration units in our society). Bill Gates had a lot of ration units (capital) to give him free time and access to tools and learning because his family was wealthy and he was born with a big trust fund. See:
"How to be as Rich As Bill Gates"
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."
Oh, and Bill Gates dumpster dived at a computer center in his formative years as well:
http://danbricklin.com/log/2004_03_11.htm#paw
"Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems. You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."
What he describes here sounds a lot like what the free and open source community of programmers does. :-) Not what Microsoft does. He had the guts to drop out of college (Harvard), true, but he also had the safety net of personal wealth already. Starting with wealth and others' information are key aspects of the Bil Gates story (and understanding our society), and it is unfortunate this is all not better known. It puts his early letter to hobbyists in a new perspective, where an already rich guy (from inheritance) claimed poorer hobbyists sharing knowledge and content were hurting this guy economically who already was very wealthy and had gotten a lot of what he knew from reading through others' discarded printouts. (That sharing was before copyright infringement was a felony, by the way, as the laws have been made stricter since to further protect people like Bill Gates.)
I don't know which is worse:
* the ethical hyprocrisy of Gates' letter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
* the defense of Gates and the US economic system by "Millionaire Wannabees" who do not know of this history.
"The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
Jane Jacobs made this point in her books on cities, that cities came first before agriculture. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs
""
The Economy of Cities
The thesis of this book is that cities are the primary drivers of economic development.
Jacobs' main argument is that all economic growth derives from urban import replacement. Import replacement is when a city starts producing locally goods that it formerly imported, e.g., Tokyo bicycle factories replacing Tokyo bicycle importers in the 1800s. Jacobs claims that import replacement builds up local infrastructure, skills, and production. Jacobs also claims that the increased produce is exported to other cities, giving those other cities a new opportunity to engage in import replacement, thus producing a positive cycle of growth.
In an interview with Bill Steigerwald in Reason Magazine (06/01), Jacobs said that if she is remembered for being a great intellectual she will be remembered not for her work concerning city planning, but for the discovery of import replacement. However, her ideas are similar to those that had begun to be advanced earlier about import substitution by scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank.
The book also advances a new argument that cities preceded agriculture, rather than the reverse, which was archaeologists' previous belief. Archaeologists believed that cities required a food surplus to support specialist workers, thus requiring an existing agricultural economy. Jacobs claims that instead, cities already existed as permanent trading centers, and discovered agriculture through trade in wild animals and grains, and then disseminated agriculture to rural areas.
"""
I had a graduate student (also at Princeton, while chatting on a lawn by the Graduate College) tell me something like this twenty years ago -- that the corrective mechanisms for genetic information stop working as well when organisms (like bacteria) are stressed, leading to a greater mutation rate (which in turn can help deal with the stress via allowing a higher mutation rate).
It was unfortunate the GFDL licence was created, because the GPL was good enough for most textual works and certainly good enough for Wikipedia. (And plain MIT/X was also available.) It is unfortunate the FSF created a GPL-incompatible license with the GFDL. It's also unfortunate they do not fix this incompatability ASAP, since the line between code and content can get blurry fairly quickly sometimes. Some of these issues are at:
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License
And then there are now endless versions of Creative Commons licenses to muddy the waters with incompatible versions.
And then there is the ambiguity of "no commercial use" licenses.
Well, Medicare is pretty efficient in terms of low administrative overhead (in part from the cost-effectiveness of buying in bulk with less paperwork).
http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/the_health_care_blog/2006/06/policy_why_medi.html
But I agree with you on Gatto, but for different reasons.
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling"
http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
Schools are efficient, but what they are efficient at doing is dumbing people down for 19th century factory work of a type which barely exists now (among other things schools do to make the average person part of a certain kind of repressive social machinery).
Links for those who are new to Gatto's writings:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
and:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
From the second link: "Ordinary people send their children to school to get smart, but what modern schooling teaches is dumbness. It's a religious idea gone out of control. You don't have to accept that, though, to realize this kind of economy would be jeopardized by too many smart people who understand too much. I won't ask you to take that on faith. Be patient. I'll let a famous American publisher explain to you the secret of our global financial success in just a little while. Be patient."
None of the candidates have put this on the table directly. Even vouchers don't address this issue unless you get the money in your pocket for homeschooling.
Here is a somewhat sarcastic essay on the Ivy League which relates indirectly to Andrew Lahde's comments:
"Post-Scarcity Princeton"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
It talks about moving beyond conventional economics altogether to a Linux-like post-scarcity paradigm, and what it would mean to re-envision an elite institution along those lines.
From the introduction: "Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg? "
Pandora costs the same as the OLPC adjusted for recent dollar devaluation (200 euros).
I think it much more liekly future versions of Pandora will drive the price further down in quantities as a game console, given the other issues the OLPC project struggles with (I got two OLPC XO-1s through the buy one give one deal to help support that project and to look into developing software). And if not Pandora, we will see different systems like it (the referenced post had been inspired by the nos defunct Cybiko information toy).
Pandora comes with more educational software than the OLPC because if it runs Ubuntu, then presumably can run GNU/Linux software like GCompris without modifications and the whole of Edubuntu. There is almost no educational software converted to Sugar for the OLPC (sad but true) because of the extra work to sugarize GNU/Linux sofwtare and the uncertainty around Sugar and its work-in-progress nature. OLPC would have had more success running a simple window manager and making an API for GNU/Linux to support the connectivist Sugar ideals as addons.
The OLPC has essentially no special education-oriented infrastucture for deployment or support (sad, but true, if you read the project's criticisms). Pandora can take part in the entire infrastructure and support communities for GNU/Linux, whereas the OLPC with its unusual Sugar approach cannot (yes you can strip away Sugar from the OLPC, but then what is the point of the software side of that OLPC project?)
While the OLPC has some rugged harware innovations, including being more rugged than the average laptop, most of the actual places where low cost computing may be deployed in the near future are cities with power and some communicatiosn infrastructure, where it's ruggedness is not as essential. Also, the whole OLPC project suffers from cultural ignorance of a sort, since village life in rural areas has a different social dynamics and a few computers per village might make a lot mroe cultural sense and have less theft risk, and again they would not need to be as rugged if kept in a village building and not portable.
Pandora (or something game-oriented like it) on the other hand as its price drops may address the information needs of billions of city dwelling poor people across the planet.
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0754.html
"Consider a couple of these souped up devices given to each village in
Africa. Anyone with $1 billion for true development aid to 500,000
African villages? (This is just the cost of one unfinished dam or one
shut down nuclear plant.)
Consider millions of these devices airdropped into Iraq and Yugoslavia
-- instead of more expensive cruise missiles! Anybody got $1 billion to
spend on ensuring democracy with a true defense against tyranny in those
places? (This is probably what the U.S. military's spends on gas/oil for
a month cruising the area...)
This is like a system I wanted to develop and deploy pre-Y2K just in
case...
But it still has much value in preparing for any potential (natural,
political, economic, biological) disaster, as well as aiding the
development of democracy.
It's somewhat like the wearable crystsls described in The Skills of
Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (available in his book The Golden Helix),
although the one thing it lacks is easy self-repliaction...
Developing and then deploying this sort of device is the sort of thing
the UN or a major foundation should fund (if they were on the ball).
But luckily, there is hope from toymakers!"
OLPC is on the ropes, and it took a couple more years than I predicted, but here are the toymakers coming through for us with Pandora!
Here is a satire about what our society would look like if the law was like what lawyers recommend for everyone else:
"Microslaw"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/microslaw.html
"""
My fellow Americans. There has been some recent talk of free law by the General Public Lawyers (the GPL) who we all know hold un-American views. I speak to you today from the Oval Office in the White House to assure you how much better off you are now that all law is proprietary. The value of proprietary law should be obvious. Software is essentially just a form of law governing how computers operate, and all software and media content has long been privatized to great economic success. Economic analysts have proven conclusively that if we hadn't passed laws banning all free software like GNU/Linux and OpenOffice after our economy began its current recession, which started, how many times must I remind everyone, only coincidentally with the shutdown of Napster, that we would be in far worse shape then we are today. RIAA has confidently assured me that if independent artists were allowed to release works without using their compensation system and royalty rates, music CD sales would be even lower than their recent inexplicably low levels. The MPAA has also detailed how historically the movie industry was nearly destroyed in the 1980s by the VCR until that too was banned and all so called fair use exemptions eliminated. So clearly, these successes with software, content, and hardware indicate the value of a similar approach to law.
There are many reasons for the value of proprietary law. You all know them since you have been taught them in school since kindergarten as part of your standardized education. They are reflected in our most fundamental beliefs, such as sharing denies the delight of payment and cookies can only be brought into the classroom if you bring enough to sell to everyone. But you are always free to eat them all yourself of course! [audience chuckles knowingly]. But I think it important to repeat such fundamental truths now as they form the core of all we hold dear in this great land.
First off, we all know our current set of laws requires a micropayment each time a U.S. law is discussed, referenced, or applied by any person anywhere in the world. This financial incentive has produced a large amount of new law over the last decade. This body of law is all based on a core legal code owned by that fine example of American corporate capitalism at its best, the MicroSlaw Corporation.
MicroSlaw's core code defines a legal operating standard or OS we can all rely on. While I know some GPL supporters may be painting a rosy view of free law to the general public, it is obvious that any so called free alternative to MicroSlaw's legal code fails at the start because it would require great costs for learning about new so-called free laws, plus additional costs to switch all legal forms and court procedures to the new so called free standard. So free laws are really more expensive, especially as we are talking here about free as in cost, not free as in freedom.
In any case, why would you want to pay public servants like those old time -- what were they called? -- Senators? Representatives? -- around $145K a year out of public funds just to make free laws? Laws are made far more efficiently, inexpensively and, I assure you, justly, by large corporations like MicroSlaw. Such organizations need the motivation of micropayments for application, discussion or reference of their laws to stay competitive. MicroSlaw needs to know who discusses what law and when they do so, each and every time, so they can charge fairly for their services and thus retain their financial freedom to innovate. And America is all about financial freedom, right! [Audience applause]. ...
"""
He wrote that in 1994, and it was based on even earlier research, so that part may be out of date these days, even as the general crisis in science has grown worse. His theme also conflates US corporate imperial dominance, and ignores many high performing "US" scientists were imported from Nazi Germany (Einstein or von Braun) or also from the USSR later.
I'm not as pessimistic as Goodstein is, since I do see the world transcending eventually to an economy of abundance where all people have more time for doing science (or other creative things) as a hobby. See for example:
"TEDTalks : New insights on poverty and life around the world - Hans Rosling (2007)"
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/hans_rosling_reveals_new_insights_on_poverty.html
"Researcher Hans Rosling uses his cool data tools to show how countries are pulling themselves out of poverty. He demos Dollar Street, comparing households of varying income levels worldwide. Then he does something really amazing."
Or:
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper."
http://www.reprap.org/
"It takes quite a lot of effort to turn a naturally curious child into a mumbling, illiterate worker bee who lives to shop, but Americans are known for their can-do spirit."
John Taylor Gatto makes exactly this point, suggesting schools were designed specifically to destroy curiousity and initiative so as to make people obedient workers, obedient soldiers, and compliant consumers. See:
"The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher" by John Taylor Gatto - 1991 New York State Teacher of the Year
http://hometown.aol.com/tma68/7lesson.htm
And:
"The Underground History of American Education"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real."
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm
"Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders."
And:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."
Someone can want to be a "scientist" starting in K-12, but he or she can still be discarded by the system in college or graduate school because you don't fit the expected profile of a scientist "diamond in the rough".
On people from other countries studying in the USA, you have an excellent point, but Goodstein didn't say it was impossible to recognize a peer by those artificial standards, just harder. And foreign students have already gone through K-12 and maybe college in their own countries. He isn't claiming any superiority of "white males", he is just pointing out a historical situation.
Actually, there is a much deeper problem with Goodstein's remarks in that he fails to acknowledge this deeper problem of scientific elites, which implies our selection of "scientists" and other professionals are actually fairly political:
"Disciplined Minds: A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System That Shapes Their Lives"
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
One reviewer: "I have been waiting a long time for someone to write this book, and Jeff Schmidt has done it. He exposes, in crystal-clear prose, the inevitably political nature of the professional in our society, and, most importantly, suggests a strategy for resistance. This is an extraordinary and valuable piece of writing."
From the Amazon blurb: "This book details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker, showing how an honest reassessment of what it means to be a professional in today's corporate society can be remarkably liberating. Poignant examples from the world of work reveal the workplace as a battleground for the very identity of the individual. Schmidt contends that professional work is inherently political--that the unstated duty of professionals is to maintain strict ideological discipline. Career dissatisfaction evolves as workers lose control over the political component of their creative work."
Anyway, foreign students are usually in such constrained circumstances that they make near ideal slavish grad students who are easily exploited. Some may be exceptions of course, same as the issue with H1B visa holders. So, that is a reason professors may be more tolerant of some of their differences -- it's the cost of cheap labor.
From: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html ... I would like to propose a different and more illuminating metaphor for American science education. It is more like a mining and sorting operation, designed to cast aside most of the mass of common human debris, but at the same time to discover and rescue diamonds in the rough, that are capable of being cleaned and cut and polished into glittering gems, just like us, the existing scientists. It takes only a little reflection to see how much more this model accounts for than the pipeline does. It accounts for exponential growth, since it takes scientists to identify prospective scientists. It accounts for the very real problem that women and minorities are woefully underrepresented among the scientists, because it is hard for us, white, male scientists to perceive that once they are cleaned and cut and polished, they will look like us. It accounts for the fact that science education is for the most part a dreary business, a burden to student and teacher alike at all levels of American education, until the magic moment when a teacher recognizes a potential peer, at which point it becomes exhilarating and successful. Above all, it resolves the paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. It explains why we have the best scientists and the most poorly educated students in the world. It is because our entire system of education is designed to produce precisely that result. ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
"In the meantime, the real crisis that is coming has started to produce a number of symptoms, some alarming and some merely curious. One of these is what I like to call The Paradox of Scientific Elites and Scientific Illiterates. The paradox is this: as a lingering result of the golden age, we still have the finest scientists in the world in the United States. But we also have the worst science education in the industrialized world. There seems to be little doubt that both of these seemingly contradictory observations are true. American scientists, trained in American graduate schools produce more Nobel Prizes, more scientific citations, more of just about anything you care to measure than any other country in the world; maybe more than the rest of the world combined. Yet, students in American schools consistently rank at the bottom of all those from advanced nations in tests of scientific knowledge, and furthermore, roughly 95% of the American public is consistently found to be scientifically illiterate by any rational standard. How can we possibly have arrived at such a result? How can our miserable system of education have produced such a brilliant community of scientists? That is what I mean by The Paradox of the Scientific Elites and the Scientific Illiterates.
See also: ... Let me finish by summarizing what I've been trying to tell you. We stand at an historic juncture in the history of science. The long era of exponential expansion ended decades ago, but we have not yet reconciled ourselves to that fact. The present social structure of science, by which I mean institutions, education, funding, publications and so on all evolved during the period of exponential expansion, before The Big Crunch. They are not suited to the unknown future we face. Today's scientific leaders, in the universities, government, industry and the scientific societies are mostly people who came of age during the golden era, 1950 - 1970. I am myself part of that generation. We think those were normal times and expect them to return. But we are wrong. Nothing like it will ever happen again. It is by no means certain that science will even survive, much less flourish, in the difficult times we face. Before it can survive, those of us who have gained so much from the era of scientific elites and scientific illiterates must learn to face reality, and admit that those days are gone forever. I think we have our work cut out for us."
"The Big Crunch" by David Goodstein
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
"... We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch. That is not meant to be an exhortation. It is meant simply to be a statement of a fact known to be true with mathematical certainty, if science is to survive at all. The new structure will come about by evolution rather than design, because, for one thing, neither I nor anyone else has the faintest idea of what it will turn out to be, and for another, even if we did know where we are going to end up, we scientists have never been very good at guiding our own destiny. Only this much is sure: the era of exponential expansion will be replaced by an era of constraint. Because it will be unplanned, the transition is likely to be messy and painful for the participants. In fact, as we have seen, it already is. Ignoring the pain for the moment, however, I would like to look ahead and speculate on some conditions that must be met if science is to have a future as well as a past.
I'm a little more optimistic that abundance for all will result in more free time for hobby research, but until then, Dr. Goodstein (Vice Provost of Caltech) outlines the collapse of the PhD pyramid scheme and its consequences.
I like what Brad wrote. Here is something on licensing and car software I wrote several years ago:
http://groups.google.com/group/virgle/msg/de1a99ede7e0e615
== what have funding policies in automotive intelligence wrought? ===
Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise
some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the
driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities,
which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors.
Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice
these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest
physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the
codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in
their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly
funded software and selling modified versions of such software as
proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of
paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter
how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such
self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban
planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means
of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the
work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially,
will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or
will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community
development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality
http://www.fsf.org/software/reliability.html
and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and
more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000
Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of
thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps
people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with
public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary
because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in
early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual.
It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best
to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are
talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to
disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong
here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already
for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly
proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more
complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex
environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much
faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our
lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally
avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive
intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every
American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the
automotive software engineers and their employers will do well
financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their
software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of
configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of
their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* wit