http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run_(film) "To track this, the humans are implanted at birth with a Lifeclock crystal in the palm of their hand that changes colors as they approach their "Last Day". To maintain order, the computer has assigned Sandmen (officially known as DS agents, de facto executioners), who pursue and terminate Runners (those who try to avoid Carrousel)."
Breastfeeding to age 2+ has been shown to reduce disease (WHO). Eating a great vegetable-heavy diet based mostly on vegetables, fruits, and beans has been shown to reduce disease (Dr. Joel Fuhrman). Getting enough sunlight or supplements to get vitamin D has been shown to reduce disease (Dr. John Cannell). Having a less stressed-out household, have all been shown to reduce disease (Dr. Andrew Weil). Exercise has been shown to reduce disease. Some of these have actually been shown to be more effective than immunization for some diseases (like vitamin D and the flu in some studies), Hardly any US American families do any of these things to a significant degree.
For an example of what I'm talking about, see: http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ChildBookReviews.aspx "Dr. Fuhrman has the solution for your frequently ill child. Backed up by a multitude of scientific studies, he explains how eating particular foods and how avoiding others can have a significant impact on your child's resistance to dangerous infections, their intelligence and success in school. For example, a change in dietary habits can have a dramatic effect on reducing the occurrences of illness like ear infections, asthma and allergies. The right foods introduced early in life can increase your child's IQ. Dr. Fuhrman presents the fascinating science which demonstrates that the current epidemic of adult cancers and other diseases are closely linked to what we eat. In the first quarter of our life, he explains that eating right in childhood is the most powerful weapon against the growing cancer epidemic. Also, he reveals how the seeds for future auto-immune diseases are sown in childhood, and how by eating right today, children can be healthy tomorrow."
So, are parents who do not maximize their children's and their own health not equally culpable? Or are parents who do not get their children to do such things even more evil, because while vaccines have demonstrable risks (and some questionably science behind some of them full of conflicts-of-interest), most of these more basic approaches to healthy living do not have significant associated risks (except maybe some forms of exercise) and all are based on fairly solid science.
Also, it seems sending a kid to school or sending a kid to a doctor's waiting room is one of the fastest ways to get a kid exposed to pathogens. That is something else to consider for those parents who choose to not to have personal physicians or who choose not to homeschool. Where is the moral outrage for parents who choose to send their children to schools and thus participate in spreading disease? Or where is the moral outrage for people who take unnecessary car trips (including to schools) and create traffic hazards? And so on, for all sorts of things people do that can create risks for others (including making the world a more depressing place by too much competition and greed).
The posts to this story frequently show an extreme moral outrage about parents who for whatever reason do the cost-benefit analysis and say a specific vaccination does not make sense for their child (as if parenting wasn't hard enough already involving many sacrifices and tough judgement calls). Yet, given the sad state of health for most people in the USA always getting colds and flus and so many being obese, the hypocrisy and ignorance in these posts is mind-boggling for anyone who knows something about how to ensure good health like through the above approaches. See, for more details: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
I wish people posting here would apply even 10% of their moral outrage about vaccination to those who eat poorly or make risky lifestyle choices and thus become disease carriers. I'd suspect that outrage would apply to most people posting on slashdot (including most of the outraged people).
An essay I wrote on that from 2001: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
If university policies do not permit this, then universities should change their policies or other organizations could be supported.
You might find of interest: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html "Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up."
"When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?"
Despite having been in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution, I can entertain the possibility that this world may have been a simulation only running for about 6000 virtual years for some purpose by a creator (or creators) of it and that there may have been extensive design involved with creating that (including either falsifying the fossil record or having run the universe from scratch only once and then running the last 6000 years multiple times from a checkpoint save file like with VirtualBox). See also: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Anyway, science is so often not so cut and dried. A big issue is that, as Einstein said, science can tell you what is, but it can't tell you what you should value or prioritize or assume or study. http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Similarly, there are huge areas of real human experience like consciousness that science has little practical to say about and which can lead to "materialistic scientism" which denies that which it cannot prove (rather that just not having a firm opinion), like Charles Tart talks about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G67CqHPXJDE
Still, I would readily agree that when a lot of money is riding on denying externalities, it may be beneficial for certain financial interests to discourage or confuse any kind of rational thinking based on seemingly sound premises. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
I think many people in the USA look around and realize materialism has not actually brought that much more happiness in many ways (compared to community, not that they have to be exclusive), so maybe that rational observation leads to other blowback towards the scientific and technical professions? Even if a lot of that is really about politics of science and technology?
In the case of global warming, there are other problems involved. Global warming is a "tragedy of the commons" type problem, and our US society has trouble dealing with problems like that (including systematic risk). Also, the approaches towards dealing with global warming are often very negative. Why not deal with global warming by investing in research in hot or cold fusion energy, solar panels, or space habitats, in an optimistic way, rather that link that to some kind of green doomsterism as many do? Maybe people cor
From an essay I wrote about a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
According to the article: "The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago".
While I agree it's a terrific response technically, It's incredible to now see hot fusion scientists from MIT blaming their problems on cold fusion in the 1980s when the scandle is more about what MIT did unprofessionally to discredit cold fusion / LENR; see: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf "The events of 1989-1992 are past history, but one must learn from the past or be condemned to repeat it. I hope that MIT students will also study the wrongs that have been done by MIT faculty and staff, which perverted the process of science in this area. Ironically, those very faculty and staff who so loudly pontificated about the alleged unethical actions of cold fusion researchers Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons are themselves most culpable. They launched distortions about cold fusion that have gained such wide currency."
Yet, some at MIT are finally moving beyond the shame: http://cleantechauthority.com/lenr-resurrected-by-mit-the-early-detractors/ "The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looks to be one of the first academic institutions to validate the claims that cold fusion is real. Cold fusion is now more commonly called Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reactions (LENR), partly to avoid the stigma the term "cold fusion" evokes. And in a strange twist of fate, MIT -- who was one of the most aggressive detractors of cold fusion in the 1990s -- is now leading the charge in resurrecting the technologies it once vilified.
Dr. Swarts and Prof Hagelstein of MIT publicly demonstrated how a device can not only run itself indefinitely, but their experiment also produced ten times the energy output that was input. They ran the experiment for two days to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology using a NANOR by Jet Energy. The device, as of this publishing, has been running for five days straight."
Of course, even if LENR does not pan out, we'll have dirt cheap solar long before 2050, too, with widespread consumer-level grid parity in just a few more years, and then probably a stampede of research dollars into solar afterwards (making use of the fusion plant in the sky): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
That said, I agree with the people at MIT that basic research and applied research should be funded much more lavishly. I think it would be quite reasonable to spend a hundred billion dollars on fusion research just because it is a neat thing and especially would have value in space exploration (assuming other things were also funded at that level like solar panels and LENR and so on).
Although even a vast increase in funds won't really resolve the competition problem in academia given the exponential growth of PhDs; see what this physicist has to say: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
We need a basic income, a bigger gift economy, better local subsistence, and more participatory planning at all levels of government so researchers would truly have more financial freedom to pursue basic research of all sorts.
To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
Overall, you make some great points about social dynamics and changing the system vs. changing your place in the system. That is all very insightful. It is also true that young men tend to focus more on competition (making it in the system) and older men on cooperation (making the system keep working) - and our youth-oriented US culture tends to celebrate the competition side publicly more. I'd have to agree that, in general, someone overall much above average in abilities that are currently in demand is individually usually better off investing their personal efforts in changing their place in the system in the short term (rather than trying to change the system) as far as access to resources that they can then use for personal ends (like to have a prosperous family) -- especially when they are young (part of this is also female preference and standing out). In the short term, narrow selfishness often pays off (and even sometimes in the long term, too).
That is pretty undeniable -- although there are a few caveats even then. Not all women want the same thing in a man (contrast with the Haudenosaunee culture and the women's choice of Tadodaho, like someone more compassionate and philosophical like Leon Shenandoah). There is also the issue of what values are you teaching you kids who will care for you in your old age. There is the issue of what friends you keep and how likely they may be to stab you in the back if they are also extreme social climbers. Too many "pleasure trap" rich foods (or drugs) are bad for the health. There also seems to be a law of diminishing returns to more stuff, beyond which doing good deeds and giving gifts and so on is probably going to bring you more overall happiness; see: http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/1519221/Researchers-Say-Happiness-Costs-75k
Probably there is even a law of diminishing or even negative returns to more "social power", although we could debate that.
There is also a sense in which many people who engage in a certain kind of economic race are statistically being "chumps" according to this: http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/ "And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
Trying to change the system (at least as an individual) can for most people be a guarantee of heartbreak, loneliness, poverty, having few kids, and so on. Not that nature probably really cares about the suffering if one person succeeds though. A salmon may lay a thousand eggs to see just one survive to adulthood.
And in general, some people are seeing the value of increased cooperation, even in the USA: "No contest: the case against competition" http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm "Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of
"Yeah. I didn't bother posting anonymously, because I doubt it makes a difference at this point."
We don't have much time before the internet could just be used as a tool for a widespread crackdown. As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.
As I suggest here, the most viable strategy at this point is probably just communicating in the clear about making this a better world for everyone with an intent to help these various agencies eavesdropping to transcend to a new paradigm of abundance thinking: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html "This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful...."
To summarize why that is the case, consider, from this other essay I wrote: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html "Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
So, until the NSA transcends to this new abudance-oriented paradigm, this new Utah data center is just $2 billion dollars worth of irony.
But, it may overall just be more easily explained by ignorance. Or possibly because what plutocratic management is so often about is not encouraging high absolute levels of productivity or creativity in a society but in getting productivity and creativity focused on narrowly defined business objectives -- objectives that benefit those who already socially have control of a lot of resources and claim rents from them? So, even if absolute productivity is lower with "carrot and stick", it is productivity those who claim rents can benefit from... Of course, that explanation would not sit well with the high priests of unfettered capitalism or their most devout followers: http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/ http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/
Also on the theme of women being too smart and self-respecting for a career in science these days: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science "What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility.... Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog: "A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?"... What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory...."
A "basic income" for all might help in correcting this situation.
The paper itself is an great review, but as they say at the end: "In a more general setting, even with the combined tools of Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science at our disposal it would seem that further progress will be no cakewalk." So, you make good points in those regards.
For example, one thing the paper does not seem to consider in my cursory skimming of it (which Deborah Stone talks about in "Policy Paradox") is if the number of entities changes during the course of the cake cutting and distribution. And also it is possible that the availability of other cakes may change during that time, too (like with the invention of cold fusion or LENR cheap energy devices). So, if the cake is the Earth, but there are future generations, and also new inventions to be discovered, and we might someday move into space, then how do we "divide" it now? And how does an entity, whether human or animal or plant or other, be deemed to have a right to a share?
As Albert Einstein said, reflecting your points: http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm "For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
What we need is a basic income for all (or similar things), which would allow those with intellectual aspirations to live their lives at a graduate student level without senior academics having such life-and-death control over whether other thinkers can lead a life of thought. Likewise, those who wanted a life in the arts or a life raising children could focus on those things. Our society has become so materially wealthy by everything we have learned over the millennia that we no longer need to live by the old scarcity myths that there is not enough to go around for everyone to have a reasonable good life materially even if few choose to be materially productive) given modern industry, robotics, AI, cheap communications, youtube educational videos, etc.) And beyond that, we've even got at least another good 1000 years of exponential growth possible if we expand into space in the local solar system and build space habitats.
In my time hanging out in Hans Moravec's mobile robotics lab at CMU in the mid 1980s, Hans said much the same thing. He suggested that good research had to involve a lot of failures, and that is why so many of the straight A students you might think would be best at it are actually temperamentally unsuited for a career in research. He suggested people who have some experience dealing with many early failures early in life were more likely to have the persistence needed for a career in research.
Of course, research these days is so problematical for other reasons too, sadly, so many people won;t even get a chance to step up to the plate in an academic sense: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
Or Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes": http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
The carrying capacity of the local solar system with known or easily forseeable technology is probably on the order of quadrillions of humans living in many millions of Earth's worth of space habitats.
See, to complement "Know Thyself", see also "A Newer Way Of Thinking": http://www.anwot.org/
The big issue is we are trying to apply scarcity-based economic thinking to the technologies of abundance. So we demand that people work for the right to consume, but then we make them compete against firms introducing robots. This was a problem seen as far back as 1964: http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm "The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
A basic income, improved gift economy, better technologies for local subsistence, and internet-empowered planning at all levels could help increase our collective carrying capacity and quality of life.
Maybe we should build our theaters out of brick and other materials that don't burn?
My point in general being that the more precarious a society lets itself become in various ways, perhaps the more worried it becomes about free speech?
See also, for the natural way to get such soil: http://www.kidsgeo.com/geology-for-kids/0052-volcanoes-and-plant-life.php "While it is true that the immediate effect of volcanoes on plant life is death, the long term effect is very positive. Magma from the Earth’s core contains a rich source of nutrients that plants need to survive. Each time a volcano erupts, it brings these nutrients with it. When volcanoes explode, spreading ash around a large area, this ash acts as a fertilizer, enriching the soil. It is no surprise that the soil near volcanoes is among the richest and most fertile on Earth."
We can reproduce that effect by simply grinding up appropriate rocks: http://www.remineralize.org/ "Remineralize the Earth is a nonprofit organization assisting the worldwide movement of remineralizing soils with finely ground rock dust, sea minerals and other natural and sustainable means to increase the growth, health, and nutrient value of all plant life. Adding minerals and trace elements is vital to the creation of fertile soils, healthy crops and forests, and is a key strategy to stabilize the climate."
See the pictures there for what vegetables are supposed to look like when raised on truly fertile soil.
I agree with you though that much energy that could go into solving problems gets ironically dissipated in fighting -- often just over the problems that energy otherwise could solve if applied imaginatively. See also the section on "What Are The Limits on Food Production?" In "The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment" by Julian Simon: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
"The Americans, Russians (formerly Soviets), Chinese, British, French and Indians are all rational actors who realize the dangers of retaliatory strikes."
Have you ever experienced computer hardware or software doing anything unexpected?
Engineered plagues are probably a bigger total risk in some ways, and if they happened, as our infrastructure failed, we'd probably also see nuclear meltdown of unmanaged reactors plus nuclear weapons use in the emerging chaos. How quickly can a country descend into chaos from seeming normality?
But getting back to the article, this finding really does provide people with a lot to think about as far as the likelihood of other life in the galaxy -- or the galaxy simulation?:-)
Considering how irrational our species is in so many ways, like planning on using nuclear energy to fight over oil fields (how ironically dumb is that?), is it really no surprise if no one is much interested in Earthlings (except as an idle amusement)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art 'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'
"The horror of them, though -- consider the amount of money our citizens have spent on inferior medical treatments, which have negative side-effects up to and including death, when if we had not passed unconstitutional laws and enforced them as if they were constitutional (i.e., that is conspiracy), we would be more healthy as a society and thus would be better able to out-compete other countries."
Sadly all too true... I probably posted this before, but its worth reposting: "A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum" http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
Thanks for the recommendation of "The Diamond Cutter". One thing the Dali Lama says, when US Christian-raised people say they want to become Buddhist is that there are a lot of bad Buddhists out there, and they should think hard about growing within their own religious roots. The thing about reason is it is so useful for justifying what we want to do anyway.:-) So, there is a very wealthy Buddhist who presumably justifies the great wealth desparitiy somehow? http://www.amazon.com/The-Diamond-Cutter-Strategies-Managing/dp/0385497903
What you outline about seeing the other person's perspective a good strategy for developing empathy. I've heard people say that empathy is like a muscle; the more you use it, the more you develop that ability. You might like Dale Carnegie stuff that develops that theme, if you haven't seen it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People
I've been trying that with thankfulness, trying before I go to sleep each night to make a list of all the things I'm thankful for (like things I'd still want to be there in the morning). An "attitude of gratitude" helps in having a healthier life.
Yeah, I think you are right about the "inverse rat park" thing from prohibition laws; interesting point. Kind of like a "positive feedback" loop making society worse and worse... Hard to break out of those...
A while ago (sorry, no link) I read an essay about someone going on about environmental destruction, nuclear waste, the depletion of fish stocks, maybe mass unemployment, and so on, and saying, if space aliens were doing this to the Earth, what would we be doing? It was a good metaphorical question, even if I did not agree with his proposed solution.
Yeah, I love all those RSA animate talks. TED seems to have started something similar, but without a political edge: http://education.ted.com/
I like a lot of what Ron Paul says, but I think he misses the big picture on ongoing socio-economic changes that are making many paid jobs go away (bringing us back to the robotics theme). But that's all a very complex issue, how to get the most people safely from where we are now to a prosperous healthy future for all (or at least almost all)... None of the major candidates are even in the ballpark on any of that... The ones closest to that in some ways (some Greens and a basic income?) often come encumbered with a very anti-technology and even anti-people bias or (like Ron Paul might suggest) too much overt big unaccountable government in people's daily lives to be healthy (a point many conservatives make that has some truth to it). We need both good social policy and good technical policy IMHO (or "good government" regardless of the size). Realistically, it seems like we are still many years away from mainstream politics being about such themes. I just hope we can survive everything to come before then with a culture of denial. Clearly the failed drug war (lasting decades) shows how bad policies can get entrenched and last for a very long time in all denial of t
Slashdot Mirror
Other health ideas along those lines: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan's_Run_(film)
"To track this, the humans are implanted at birth with a Lifeclock crystal in the palm of their hand that changes colors as they approach their "Last Day". To maintain order, the computer has assigned Sandmen (officially known as DS agents, de facto executioners), who pursue and terminate Runners (those who try to avoid Carrousel)."
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2782637&cid=39697029
Breastfeeding to age 2+ has been shown to reduce disease (WHO). Eating a great vegetable-heavy diet based mostly on vegetables, fruits, and beans has been shown to reduce disease (Dr. Joel Fuhrman). Getting enough sunlight or supplements to get vitamin D has been shown to reduce disease (Dr. John Cannell). Having a less stressed-out household, have all been shown to reduce disease (Dr. Andrew Weil). Exercise has been shown to reduce disease. Some of these have actually been shown to be more effective than immunization for some diseases (like vitamin D and the flu in some studies), Hardly any US American families do any of these things to a significant degree.
For an example of what I'm talking about, see:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/shop/ChildBookReviews.aspx
"Dr. Fuhrman has the solution for your frequently ill child. Backed up by a multitude of scientific studies, he explains how eating particular foods and how avoiding others can have a significant impact on your child's resistance to dangerous infections, their intelligence and success in school. For example, a change in dietary habits can have a dramatic effect on reducing the occurrences of illness like ear infections, asthma and allergies. The right foods introduced early in life can increase your child's IQ. Dr. Fuhrman presents the fascinating science which demonstrates that the current epidemic of adult cancers and other diseases are closely linked to what we eat. In the first quarter of our life, he explains that eating right in childhood is the most powerful weapon against the growing cancer epidemic. Also, he reveals how the seeds for future auto-immune diseases are sown in childhood, and how by eating right today, children can be healthy tomorrow."
So, are parents who do not maximize their children's and their own health not equally culpable? Or are parents who do not get their children to do such things even more evil, because while vaccines have demonstrable risks (and some questionably science behind some of them full of conflicts-of-interest), most of these more basic approaches to healthy living do not have significant associated risks (except maybe some forms of exercise) and all are based on fairly solid science.
Also, it seems sending a kid to school or sending a kid to a doctor's waiting room is one of the fastest ways to get a kid exposed to pathogens. That is something else to consider for those parents who choose to not to have personal physicians or who choose not to homeschool. Where is the moral outrage for parents who choose to send their children to schools and thus participate in spreading disease? Or where is the moral outrage for people who take unnecessary car trips (including to schools) and create traffic hazards? And so on, for all sorts of things people do that can create risks for others (including making the world a more depressing place by too much competition and greed).
The posts to this story frequently show an extreme moral outrage about parents who for whatever reason do the cost-benefit analysis and say a specific vaccination does not make sense for their child (as if parenting wasn't hard enough already involving many sacrifices and tough judgement calls). Yet, given the sad state of health for most people in the USA always getting colds and flus and so many being obese, the hypocrisy and ignorance in these posts is mind-boggling for anyone who knows something about how to ensure good health like through the above approaches. See, for more details:
http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
I wish people posting here would apply even 10% of their moral outrage about vaccination to those who eat poorly or make risky lifestyle choices and thus become disease carriers. I'd suspect that outrage would apply to most people posting on slashdot (including most of the outraged people).
But I don't think we'll see th
An essay I wrote on that from 2001: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
If university policies do not permit this, then universities should change their policies or other organizations could be supported.
You might find of interest: http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science_freshstart.html
"Based on these findings, it seems likely that everyday people don't opt for social change in good part because they don't see any plausible way to accomplish their goals, and haven't heard any plans from anyone else that make sense to them. But why don't they just say "the hell with it" and head to the barricades? Why aren't they "fed up?" The answer is not in their false consciousness or a mere resigned acquiescence, as many leftists seem to believe, but in a very different set of factors. On the one hand, for all the injustices average Americans experience and perceive, there are many positive aspects to everyday life that make a regular day-to-day existence more attractive than a general strike or a commitment to building a revolutionary party. They have loved ones they like to be with, they have hobbies and sports they enjoy, and they have forms of entertainment they like to watch. In fact, many of them also report in surveys that they enjoy their jobs even though the jobs don't pay enough or have decent benefits. (And as of late 2005, 93% of individuals earning over $50,000 a year describe themselves as "doing well.") They also understand that they have some hard-won democratic rights and freedoms inherited from the past that are much more than people in many other countries have. They don't want to see those positive aspects messed up."
Science is not a panacea; see: http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
"When we have a nontrivial portion of the population who does not believe that humanity resulted from evolution by natural selection, and that the universe is less than ten thousand years old, did we really expect people to accept science that something bad is going to happen if they do not change their behavior?"
Despite having been in a PhD program in Ecology and Evolution, I can entertain the possibility that this world may have been a simulation only running for about 6000 virtual years for some purpose by a creator (or creators) of it and that there may have been extensive design involved with creating that (including either falsifying the fossil record or having run the universe from scratch only once and then running the last 6000 years multiple times from a checkpoint save file like with VirtualBox). See also: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
On a practical basis, the theory of evolution probably gets us further in understanding and succeeding in the world (like understanding how insects become resistant to pesticides, or how antibiotic-resistent bacteria emerge). Although maybe not always? :-)
http://evolution-of-religion.com/
http://science.slashdot.org/story/12/04/13/211201/magical-thinking-is-good-for-you
Anyway, science is so often not so cut and dried. A big issue is that, as Einstein said, science can tell you what is, but it can't tell you what you should value or prioritize or assume or study.
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
Similarly, there are huge areas of real human experience like consciousness that science has little practical to say about and which can lead to "materialistic scientism" which denies that which it cannot prove (rather that just not having a firm opinion), like Charles Tart talks about:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G67CqHPXJDE
Still, I would readily agree that when a lot of money is riding on denying externalities, it may be beneficial for certain financial interests to discourage or confuse any kind of rational thinking based on seemingly sound premises.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
I just read someone's sig elsewhere ("Shannow") that said "Figuring things out for yourself is the only real freedom that you have.". Sounds like a lot of truth to me, even if other scientists say (and I also agree) arguing may have evolved as a collective process to get closer to useful truths:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/researcher-responds-to-arguments-over-his-theory-of-arguing/
I think many people in the USA look around and realize materialism has not actually brought that much more happiness in many ways (compared to community, not that they have to be exclusive), so maybe that rational observation leads to other blowback towards the scientific and technical professions? Even if a lot of that is really about politics of science and technology?
In the case of global warming, there are other problems involved. Global warming is a "tragedy of the commons" type problem, and our US society has trouble dealing with problems like that (including systematic risk). Also, the approaches towards dealing with global warming are often very negative. Why not deal with global warming by investing in research in hot or cold fusion energy, solar panels, or space habitats, in an optimistic way, rather that link that to some kind of green doomsterism as many do? Maybe people cor
From an essay I wrote about a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
According to the article: "The (hot) fusion community is still living with the aftermath of the cold fusion scandal from a quarter century ago".
While I agree it's a terrific response technically, It's incredible to now see hot fusion scientists from MIT blaming their problems on cold fusion in the 1980s when the scandle is more about what MIT did unprofessionally to discredit cold fusion / LENR; see: http://www.infinite-energy.com/images/pdfs/mitcfreport.pdf
"The events of 1989-1992 are past history, but one must learn from the past or be condemned to repeat it. I hope that MIT students will also study the wrongs that have been done by MIT faculty and staff, which perverted the process of science in this area. Ironically, those very faculty and staff who so loudly pontificated about the alleged unethical actions of cold fusion researchers Drs. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons are themselves most culpable. They launched distortions about cold fusion that have gained such wide currency."
To explain why PhDs may think and act this way, read this book:
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
Just search on Widom-Larsen, LENR, and so on.
http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379
Yet, some at MIT are finally moving beyond the shame:
http://cleantechauthority.com/lenr-resurrected-by-mit-the-early-detractors/
"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) looks to be one of the first academic institutions to validate the claims that cold fusion is real. Cold fusion is now more commonly called Low-Energy-Nuclear-Reactions (LENR), partly to avoid the stigma the term "cold fusion" evokes. And in a strange twist of fate, MIT -- who was one of the most aggressive detractors of cold fusion in the 1990s -- is now leading the charge in resurrecting the technologies it once vilified.
Dr. Swarts and Prof Hagelstein of MIT publicly demonstrated how a device can not only run itself indefinitely, but their experiment also produced ten times the energy output that was input. They ran the experiment for two days to demonstrate the effectiveness of the technology using a NANOR by Jet Energy. The device, as of this publishing, has been running for five days straight."
Of course, even if LENR does not pan out, we'll have dirt cheap solar long before 2050, too, with widespread consumer-level grid parity in just a few more years, and then probably a stampede of research dollars into solar afterwards (making use of the fusion plant in the sky):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
That said, I agree with the people at MIT that basic research and applied research should be funded much more lavishly. I think it would be quite reasonable to spend a hundred billion dollars on fusion research just because it is a neat thing and especially would have value in space exploration (assuming other things were also funded at that level like solar panels and LENR and so on).
Although even a vast increase in funds won't really resolve the competition problem in academia given the exponential growth of PhDs; see what this physicist has to say:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
We need a basic income, a bigger gift economy, better local subsistence, and more participatory planning at all levels of government so researchers would truly have more financial freedom to pursue basic research of all sorts.
To start with the bottom line: the very computers that make the new NSA facilities possible mean that the NSA's formal purpose is essentially soon to be at an end. Nothing you or I say here will reverse that trend. The only issue is how soon the NSA as a whole recognizes that fact, and then how people there choose to deal with that reality.
Overall, you make some great points about social dynamics and changing the system vs. changing your place in the system. That is all very insightful. It is also true that young men tend to focus more on competition (making it in the system) and older men on cooperation (making the system keep working) - and our youth-oriented US culture tends to celebrate the competition side publicly more. I'd have to agree that, in general, someone overall much above average in abilities that are currently in demand is individually usually better off investing their personal efforts in changing their place in the system in the short term (rather than trying to change the system) as far as access to resources that they can then use for personal ends (like to have a prosperous family) -- especially when they are young (part of this is also female preference and standing out). In the short term, narrow selfishness often pays off (and even sometimes in the long term, too).
That is pretty undeniable -- although there are a few caveats even then. Not all women want the same thing in a man (contrast with the Haudenosaunee culture and the women's choice of Tadodaho, like someone more compassionate and philosophical like Leon Shenandoah). There is also the issue of what values are you teaching you kids who will care for you in your old age. There is the issue of what friends you keep and how likely they may be to stab you in the back if they are also extreme social climbers. Too many "pleasure trap" rich foods (or drugs) are bad for the health. There also seems to be a law of diminishing returns to more stuff, beyond which doing good deeds and giving gifts and so on is probably going to bring you more overall happiness; see:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/09/07/1519221/Researchers-Say-Happiness-Costs-75k
Probably there is even a law of diminishing or even negative returns to more "social power", although we could debate that.
There is also a sense in which many people who engage in a certain kind of economic race are statistically being "chumps" according to this:
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/
"And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."
Trying to change the system (at least as an individual) can for most people be a guarantee of heartbreak, loneliness, poverty, having few kids, and so on. Not that nature probably really cares about the suffering if one person succeeds though. A salmon may lay a thousand eggs to see just one survive to adulthood.
Ultimately, we may well see a newer type of economy simply because the old one is just looking so ugly these days and dysfunctional these days, although some say that has been true for a century:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-Rest-Us-Debunking-Science/dp/1595581014
And in general, some people are seeing the value of increased cooperation, even in the USA:
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.share-international.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
"Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of
"Yeah. I didn't bother posting anonymously, because I doubt it makes a difference at this point."
We don't have much time before the internet could just be used as a tool for a widespread crackdown. As Bucky Fuller said, whether it will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end.
As I suggest here, the most viable strategy at this point is probably just communicating in the clear about making this a better world for everyone with an intent to help these various agencies eavesdropping to transcend to a new paradigm of abundance thinking: ..."
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-dealing-with-social-hurricanes.html
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful.
To summarize why that is the case, consider, from this other essay I wrote: ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
So, until the NSA transcends to this new abudance-oriented paradigm, this new Utah data center is just $2 billion dollars worth of irony.
Thanks for the reply. One can wonder sometimes if there are other factors like ideology or a current relative distribution of power that some people think more important than either happiness or material productivity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-4Hv9pDicA
http://web.archive.org/web/20110425153540/http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
But, it may overall just be more easily explained by ignorance. Or possibly because what plutocratic management is so often about is not encouraging high absolute levels of productivity or creativity in a society but in getting productivity and creativity focused on narrowly defined business objectives -- objectives that benefit those who already socially have control of a lot of resources and claim rents from them? So, even if absolute productivity is lower with "carrot and stick", it is productivity those who claim rents can benefit from... Of course, that explanation would not sit well with the high priests of unfettered capitalism or their most devout followers:
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/402
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/03/the-market-as-god/6397/
http://conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47/
Also on the theme of women being too smart and self-respecting for a career in science these days: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science ... Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog: "A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year post-doc job?" ... What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations" directory. ..."
"What about personal experience? The women that I know who have the IQ, education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being fired. With their extra income, they invest in child care resources and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while continuing to ascend in their careers. The women I know who are university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless. By the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility.
A "basic income" for all might help in correcting this situation.
While within academia there may be scarcity relative to the numebr of PhDs produced and resources allocated: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
as a global society there is more and more abundance:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
by Deborah Stone explores "fairness": http://www.amazon.com/Policy-Paradox-Political-Decision-Revised/dp/0393976254
The paper itself is an great review, but as they say at the end: "In a more general setting, even with the combined tools of Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science at our disposal it would seem that further progress will be no cakewalk." So, you make good points in those regards.
For example, one thing the paper does not seem to consider in my cursory skimming of it (which Deborah Stone talks about in "Policy Paradox") is if the number of entities changes during the course of the cake cutting and distribution. And also it is possible that the availability of other cakes may change during that time, too (like with the invention of cold fusion or LENR cheap energy devices). So, if the cake is the Earth, but there are future generations, and also new inventions to be discovered, and we might someday move into space, then how do we "divide" it now? And how does an entity, whether human or animal or plant or other, be deemed to have a right to a share?
As Albert Einstein said, reflecting your points:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/einstein/einsci.htm
"For the scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other. The aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capabIe, and you will certainly not suspect me of wishing to belittle the achievements and the heroic efforts of man in this sphere. Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations. Objective knowledge provides us with powerful instruments for the achievements of certain ends, but the ultimate goal itself and the longing to reach it must come from another source. And it is hardly necessary to argue for the view that our existence and our activity acquire meaning only by the setting up of such a goal and of corresponding values. The knowledge of truth as such is wonderful, but it is so little capable of acting as a guide that it cannot prove even the justification and the value of the aspiration toward that very knowledge of truth. Here we face, therefore, the limits of the purely rational conception of our existence.
But it must not be assumed that intelligent thinking can play no part in the formation of the goal and of ethical judgments. When someone realizes that for the achievement of an end certain means would be useful, the means itself becomes thereby an end. Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelation of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they cannot be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer: they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and aspirations and judgments of the individuals; they are there, that is, as something living, without its being necessary to find justification for their existence. They come into being not through demonstration but through revelation, through the medium of powerful personalities. One must not attempt to justify them, but rather to sense their nature simply and clearly. "
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
in US academia is part of the reason for that.
See also: http://disciplined-minds.com/
Lots more links: http://p2pfoundation.net/backups/p2p_research-archives/2009-October/005379.html
What we need is a basic income for all (or similar things), which would allow those with intellectual aspirations to live their lives at a graduate student level without senior academics having such life-and-death control over whether other thinkers can lead a life of thought. Likewise, those who wanted a life in the arts or a life raising children could focus on those things. Our society has become so materially wealthy by everything we have learned over the millennia that we no longer need to live by the old scarcity myths that there is not enough to go around for everyone to have a reasonable good life materially even if few choose to be materially productive) given modern industry, robotics, AI, cheap communications, youtube educational videos, etc.) And beyond that, we've even got at least another good 1000 years of exponential growth possible if we expand into space in the local solar system and build space habitats.
In my time hanging out in Hans Moravec's mobile robotics lab at CMU in the mid 1980s, Hans said much the same thing. He suggested that good research had to involve a lot of failures, and that is why so many of the straight A students you might think would be best at it are actually temperamentally unsuited for a career in research. He suggested people who have some experience dealing with many early failures early in life were more likely to have the persistence needed for a career in research.
Of course, research these days is so problematical for other reasons too, sadly, so many people won;t even get a chance to step up to the plate in an academic sense:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
So I guess they need to persist in other ways.
"Carrot AND stick."
Depends on the context, see Dan Pink on motivation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Or Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and Other Bribes":
http://www.alfiekohn.org/books/pbr.htm
"The world is full."
Carrying capacity is a function of technology and lifestyle (which are in turn functions of imagination and ethics):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
The carrying capacity of the local solar system with known or easily forseeable technology is probably on the order of quadrillions of humans living in many millions of Earth's worth of space habitats.
See, to complement "Know Thyself", see also "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://www.anwot.org/
The big issue is we are trying to apply scarcity-based economic thinking to the technologies of abundance. So we demand that people work for the right to consume, but then we make them compete against firms introducing robots. This was a problem seen as far back as 1964:
http://educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism for distributing effective demand -- for granting the right to consume -- now acts as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated productive system."
A basic income, improved gift economy, better technologies for local subsistence, and internet-empowered planning at all levels could help increase our collective carrying capacity and quality of life.
See also:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"yelling fire in a crowded theater."
Maybe we should build our theaters out of brick and other materials that don't burn?
My point in general being that the more precarious a society lets itself become in various ways, perhaps the more worried it becomes about free speech?
See my comment here: http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2753171&cid=39536735
To be fertile, soil also needs micronutrients held by the clay and organic matter; see:
"Towards Holistic Agriculture: A Scientific Approach" by R.W. Widdowson
http://www.amazon.com/Towards-Holistic-Agriculture-Scientific-Approach/dp/0080342116
You can also see ideas about high nutrient gardening here:
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/
See also, for the natural way to get such soil:
http://www.kidsgeo.com/geology-for-kids/0052-volcanoes-and-plant-life.php
"While it is true that the immediate effect of volcanoes on plant life is death, the long term effect is very positive. Magma from the Earth’s core contains a rich source of nutrients that plants need to survive. Each time a volcano erupts, it brings these nutrients with it. When volcanoes explode, spreading ash around a large area, this ash acts as a fertilizer, enriching the soil. It is no surprise that the soil near volcanoes is among the richest and most fertile on Earth."
We can reproduce that effect by simply grinding up appropriate rocks:
http://www.remineralize.org/
"Remineralize the Earth is a nonprofit organization assisting the worldwide movement of remineralizing soils with finely ground rock dust, sea minerals and other natural and sustainable means to increase the growth, health, and nutrient value of all plant life. Adding minerals and trace elements is vital to the creation of fertile soils, healthy crops and forests, and is a key strategy to stabilize the climate."
See the pictures there for what vegetables are supposed to look like when raised on truly fertile soil.
I agree with you though that much energy that could go into solving problems gets ironically dissipated in fighting -- often just over the problems that energy otherwise could solve if applied imaginatively. See also the section on "What Are The Limits on Food Production?" In "The Ultimate Resource II: People, Materials, and Environment" by Julian Simon:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
An important reason Africa is such a mess politically is from the legacy of European colonization though (although that is not the only reason):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonisation_of_Africa
"The Americans, Russians (formerly Soviets), Chinese, British, French and Indians are all rational actors who realize the dangers of retaliatory strikes."
Have you ever experienced computer hardware or software doing anything unexpected?
Remember, your life depends on 1970s-era Soviet engineering that the USA tried to sabotage. Better hope the Ruskies were good engineers back then. :-)
"Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine"
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all
Engineered plagues are probably a bigger total risk in some ways, and if they happened, as our infrastructure failed, we'd probably also see nuclear meltdown of unmanaged reactors plus nuclear weapons use in the emerging chaos. How quickly can a country descend into chaos from seeming normality?
But getting back to the article, this finding really does provide people with a lot to think about as far as the likelihood of other life in the galaxy -- or the galaxy simulation? :-)
Considering how irrational our species is in so many ways, like planning on using nuclear energy to fight over oil fields (how ironically dumb is that?), is it really no surprise if no one is much interested in Earthlings (except as an idle amusement)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_State_of_the_Art
'Also while I'd been away, the ship had sent a request on a postcard to the BBC's World Service, asking for 'Mr David Bowie's "Space Oddity" for the good ship Arbitrary and all who sail in her.' (This from a machine that could have swamped Earth's entire electro-magnetic spectrum with whatever the hell it wanted from somewhere beyond Betelgeuse.) It didn't get the request played. The ship thought this was hilarious.'
Fill your main input buffer with lots of vegetables and you may see the other buffers shrink. :-)
Thanks for the reply. Glad you liked the links.
"The horror of them, though -- consider the amount of money our citizens have spent on inferior medical treatments, which have negative side-effects up to and including death, when if we had not passed unconstitutional laws and enforced them as if they were constitutional (i.e., that is conspiracy), we would be more healthy as a society and thus would be better able to out-compete other countries."
Sadly all too true... I probably posted this before, but its worth reposting:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
Thanks for the recommendation of "The Diamond Cutter". One thing the Dali Lama says, when US Christian-raised people say they want to become Buddhist is that there are a lot of bad Buddhists out there, and they should think hard about growing within their own religious roots. The thing about reason is it is so useful for justifying what we want to do anyway. :-) So, there is a very wealthy Buddhist who presumably justifies the great wealth desparitiy somehow?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Diamond-Cutter-Strategies-Managing/dp/0385497903
What you outline about seeing the other person's perspective a good strategy for developing empathy. I've heard people say that empathy is like a muscle; the more you use it, the more you develop that ability. You might like Dale Carnegie stuff that develops that theme, if you haven't seen it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Win_Friends_and_Influence_People
I've been trying that with thankfulness, trying before I go to sleep each night to make a list of all the things I'm thankful for (like things I'd still want to be there in the morning). An "attitude of gratitude" helps in having a healthier life.
Yeah, I think you are right about the "inverse rat park" thing from prohibition laws; interesting point. Kind of like a "positive feedback" loop making society worse and worse... Hard to break out of those...
A while ago (sorry, no link) I read an essay about someone going on about environmental destruction, nuclear waste, the depletion of fish stocks, maybe mass unemployment, and so on, and saying, if space aliens were doing this to the Earth, what would we be doing? It was a good metaphorical question, even if I did not agree with his proposed solution.
Yeah, I love all those RSA animate talks. TED seems to have started something similar, but without a political edge:
http://education.ted.com/
I like a lot of what Ron Paul says, but I think he misses the big picture on ongoing socio-economic changes that are making many paid jobs go away (bringing us back to the robotics theme). But that's all a very complex issue, how to get the most people safely from where we are now to a prosperous healthy future for all (or at least almost all)... None of the major candidates are even in the ballpark on any of that... The ones closest to that in some ways (some Greens and a basic income?) often come encumbered with a very anti-technology and even anti-people bias or (like Ron Paul might suggest) too much overt big unaccountable government in people's daily lives to be healthy (a point many conservatives make that has some truth to it). We need both good social policy and good technical policy IMHO (or "good government" regardless of the size). Realistically, it seems like we are still many years away from mainstream politics being about such themes. I just hope we can survive everything to come before then with a culture of denial. Clearly the failed drug war (lasting decades) shows how bad policies can get entrenched and last for a very long time in all denial of t