I think this is a pretty good point. How much information is stored in the DNA and how much is stored in the warm organic medium that works with it?
It reminds me of Hofstadter's question about how much informatio is stored in the record and how much in the record player. That's a fairly simple example, but if you replace it with CD and CD Player, or even MP3 data stream and decoder, it becomes more clear.
Then you can take it a step further and wonder how much of the meaning of the audio is stored in the audio itself and how much is stored in the associations in the brain of the listener?
In any case, I think we may someday be able to get a fully functional mammoth-like creature out of the DNA we have by modeling the cellular environment of similar creatures. But I tend to think a strand of DNA in a vacuum is no more meaningful than a cell without DNA in a vacuum.
It's true. I was arm wrestling a friend. He wasn't a hulk or anything and I held my ground against him for several seconds before he slowly started to win. Then I gave it one last intense push to see if I could turn the tides... and my arm broke. Spiral fracture of the humerus. Not sure if stretching beforehand would have helped, but yes, you can damage your body with your own strength. That is, my physics understanding is that since our arms were barely moving at the time of the break, I probably could have done the same thing against a brick wall.
Yes, I got checked out for bone density afterwards and was healthy.
Here's a take on this that just occurred to me: time is money, yes? So forced taxes is not that much different than forced service. So from the perspective of "where does the government get off saying I have to XYZ", it's not totally unprecedented. I can see an argument that if you do community service you're lessening the financial load on the government in some way and thus can pay fewer taxes.
In the end, I don't really know if it's a good idea or not, but I don't think it's crazy. Truly forcing it would be a bad thing as you'd get rebellious behavior from some that would undermine things. But strong incentives might actually get the people who are at least willing to do something positive, for both the community and themselves.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much what Schwarzenegger did. And oddly by sticking to such important principles he has seemingly come out alright. We'll see if he gets re-elected, though. My point stands: if you think it's important you can stick to your convictions. Maybe you'll go down in flames but perhaps that's better than saying "okay, let's do something awful".
Doesn't the president have veto power over the budget? If they really don't want to approve that spending they don't have to. Governor Arnold just went through a bitter battle in California using his veto power to force passage of a decent balanced budget. It was painful to watch and it cost him some friends, but he pulled it off in the end. That is financial leadership.
Sorry, but while you're right that the Dems don't get a pat on the back for great spending policy, Reagan had the final say and he went along with it. So did Bush and Bush.
I took a low dollar estimate to be sure I wasn't exaggerating. In any case, it is definitely money we didn't have, which is why the debt has skyrocketed. And yes, you can say that about any of the other 6.7% slices. However you'll need to do a separate cost/benefit analysis on those to determine which slice you think should have been skipped instead. My opinion, obviously, is that the war probably had about the lowest cost/benefit ratio of those slices. And from a purely logistical perspective, the war is probably the only one we could have actually chosen to skip without immediate consequences since the rest were ongoing projects. (Note that once we were in, I understand we had to keep going.)
Saddam killed a hell of a lot of people. I'm seeing 300,000 over ~24 years. So 12,500 year or roughly 4000 a year less than have died in the war years so far.
That's a little misleading though, because most of that (240,000) took place from 86 to 91. Going into Iraq back then made a hell of a lot more sense. My only criticism is that we might have gone in sooner.
Even if we assume all the remaining deaths under Saddam occurred after 91 (which is not the case) then only 5500 people were dying per year, or roughly 1/3 of the war death rate. It'll be a while before we break even. We'll just have to see where the death rate goes over the next decade.
By the way, the 100K number is not rounded up, includes only Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, and it's fairly conservative because only deaths reported in multiple news sources are counted.
I don't see how I exaggerated the costs. Claiming I did indicates a pretty dramatic slant to your assessment. It's pretty well established that the war cost at least 100K lives, over $500 billion which we didn't have (so feel free to add in interest), a serious setback in social stability for both Iraq and the US, as well as some other nations to varying degrees. Are you saying any of that is untrue? Or that it doesn't matter? I'm truly puzzled by your claim that I am exaggerating the costs.
As to pretending I know all the benefits would disappear, I made no such claim. I said that some of the benefits were unknowns and that we'll have to see -- you're the one claiming you know the benefits will work out. I even agreed that some benefits are likely to come through, but that even in that case I felt they were not worth the costs stated above. We can disagree about that, but by no means is it fair to say that by my standards "nothing is ever worth it".
Based on our discussion, I think it would be a lot more valid for me to say to you "everything is worth doing if you underestimate the costs and pretend you know all the benefits will hold".
And a word about hindsight: I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning on the grounds that I didn't see a reasonable cost/benefit picture. No hindsight is involved.
Thanks for the reply, but I feel that's pretty speculative and debatable list.
I hope a democracy blossoms over there, but I'd be pretty surprised if in 10 years it's a meaningfully more stable or cohesive nation. I agree Saddam was evil, but from a practical sense it is as of yet unclear whether we'll be able to set up a government that does much better. Our track record for such things is not good, in any case. We'll see how it goes -- though we don't know how Iraq would have progressed on its own in the next 10 years anyway.
The sanctions could have been lifted at any time without so much destruction. If we knew that they were only harming the people then what was the point?
The Iran and Lybia claims sort of cancel each other out: one nation gave up it's nuclear program, at least one other intensified it's nuclear program. We broadcast the idea that the US will attack any nation that doesn't have nuclear capabilities even if that nation is cooperating with the UN. Not a great precedent in my book.
I don't know -- I'm sure you have other points and there are probably some legitimate benefits. However it seems the cost was far too high to have been worth it.
I feel that the pressure put on Iraq before the invasion was good, and it successfully got Saddam to allow inspections. That was a major political win for the US and for Bush. He could have parlayed that into some great statesmanship and peaceful progress, if that had been his real goal. However he took the other path: an absolutely enormous cost and a handful of minor benefits. It still seems like it was pretty foolish to me.
It's disturbing to me is that a lot of people seem to relatively pleased.
That all sounds fair enough except for one thing... what did we actually "win"?
I mean, what was the benefit of this and was it worth the cost? I don't see how anything is better today than it was six years ago in Iraq. It sure sounds great to say "we won", but all we seem to have done is cleaned up a mess we mostly created ourselves. It just turns my stomach a bit to hear the word "win" applied to the death of 100,000 people, the pain and suffering of countless others, the ruined infrastructure, the financial ruin of our country, etc.
Saddam was a very bad man. Maybe it would have been worth removing him from power twenty years ago when he started gassing his people, but he stopped. I feel I'm a pragmatist and I've yet to see evidence that the day-to-day Iraqi life is better post-war than pre-war.
Oh, and anyone who claims that there was a serious safety concern for the US from either military or terrorist action sourcing from Iraq is ill informed.
So we may have met some goals, but I don't really see what was won.
Dead on. I've seen this happen several times, and yes they do often rise up the chain of command. This is because they are willing to talk smack about the existing system to non-technical people. The existing system (i.e. a real, working one) is going to always have some flaws when compared to their fantasy-hypothetical system. If the person seizes on this politically, non-techies or inexperienced techies will jump on it and the smack-talker can amass a lot of power.
I've yet to see it end well. They build their new system and it almost always crashes and burns at worst, or ends up equally flawed in a different way at best. And that's after much time and money has been spent on the transition to "utopia".
Hearing this guy talk, I no longer wonder why Twitter's tech performs so poorly. He sounds like the kind of arrogant fool who always screws these things up.
I don't think he was a troll; I thought it was a very interesting point. And I think that "lower self esteem" can unfortunately be correlated with skin color and sexuality as well, so your argument doesn't hold up. Just because society looks down on something doesn't make it a disease.
Really, why do you say baldness a disease? It's just a change in the body's self regulation over time. Balding does not apparently have a significant negative effect from an evolutionary standpoint or it wouldn't be so common. It's just another variation in the human animal. There are many non-disease changes that our bodies go through from birth to death. Do you think puberty is a disease? That also is a change in our makeup that can lead to self esteem issues and even severe psychological problems.
I think the original poster's point very much stands.
And yes, I'm balding:)
Don't take this wrong
on
Loebner Talks AI
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm fascinated by AI and our attempts to understand the workings of the mind. But these days, whenever I think about it, I end up feeling that a much more fundamental problem would be to figure out how to make use of the human minds we've already got that are going to waste. Some two hundred minds are born every minute -- each one a piece of raw computing power that puts our best technology to shame. Yet we haven't really figured out how to teach many of them properly, or how to get the most benefit out of them for themselves and for society.
If we create Artificial Intelligence, what would we even do with it? We've hardly figured out how to use Natural Intelligence:/
I don't mean to imply some kind of dilemma, AI research should of course go on. I'm just more fascinated with the idea of getting all this hardware we already have put to good use. Seems there's very little advancement going on in that field. It would certainly end up applying to AI anyways, when that time comes.
A time when just about every economic, social, and educational indicator was much lower than today, yet people complained less.
Yep, it's true. And those times were basically before liberalism and social programs that conservatives rail against. Those policies that, as you have said, raised just about every economic, social, and educational indicator. I'm sure you see what I'm getting at: the liberal social programs that conservatives seem to dislike are very highly correlated with the rise of the modern successful America that they love.
I've never heard a really coherent explanation as to why we shouldn't appreciate some of the progress enabled by these liberal policies, instead of wishing to go back to when the world was more or less socially stagnant for hundreds of years.
I've seen plenty of launch videos before, but watching this and hearing them cheer when the stages separate... well, it warmed my heart. It's a beautiful example of bright people getting together to do something that people thought was unreasonable my many. That is one very small organization to break free from the surface of our little planet. Congrats to them.
I know it's fun to cling to beliefs, and in fact people generally get pleasurable stimulation from rejecting ideas that contradict their beliefs, but you owe it to yourself to take a more inquisitive stance. You might like to turn that back around on me, but in fact I used to deny evolution as you do, and I took the time to research it with an open mind and eventually got it. How often do you update your beliefs based on new information? Unless it happens regularly you can pretty well be assured you're wrong about a lot of things, since nobody is always right from the get go.
I have heard the micro-vs-macro distinction before, and it's a crock. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Once you accept micro-evolution and understand the age of the earth, it all falls into place and makes a lot more sense than any other explanation. In fact, your belief that the world's species could have differentiated from a large boat in just the past 4300 years or so puts far more power in the hands of natural selection than even I would be willing to give it. You may want to do some comparisons on the the number of distinct genera in the world, their locations, and how much space would be required to house them.
And to be clear: the existence of macro-evolution has absolutely nothing to do with faith in God. You can believe in God and macro-evolution. Most people I know do.
Christ, my wife's heritage (Korean history) goes back further than the the flood. It's just ridiculous the level of factual denial one must go through to take an absolute interpretation of the bible.
Keep your faith, and like many of the first scientists, let observation, data, and experiment inform your knowledge of "the mind of God". That is what the exploration of science is all about.
You know what's a riot about the conflict between evolution and intelligent design? If you got to the creationism museum sometime, and have the intestinal fortitude to actually read through their description of the past 6000 years, you'll come across a very interesting bit.
Since it is quite obvious that all the diversity of life could not have fit on Noah's Ark, they are required to explain the upwards of 2 million different species we see around us. Their explanation? Speciation through natural selection. I'm serious. They don't call it evolution and they hand wave some of the details, but they basically say that evolution took place after Noah's Ark (in only a few thousand years!!!) to explain the contradiction between the size of the ark and the diversity of life on earth.
It's insanity, I tell you. Insanity.
Yep, it's a theory. A very good one that explains a whole lot. Just as solid a theory as anything else you mentioned. And we've observed evolution: just check out antibiotic resistant bacteria. No evolutionary biologist was surprised at what happened there, though everyone else was. Evolution predicted exactly that outcome. Why do you think?
Yeah, I think the whole mantra that war is good for the economy is bullshit. It creates a short term boom because of increased productivity (scared patriots work hard) but in the long run you end up with huge debt and little produced. I mean, you build a bridge or a highway system or schools, there's some measurable addition to society. You drop all that money to destroy someone else's country, you don't really get much for your money.
If you have to defend yourself, fine. But war is wasteful, plain and simple. It's almost the very definition of waste.
I support your idea of diverting most of that money (after reasonable self defense) into directly productive projects.
I think you're missing my point. The gun laws in California don't prevent gang members from getting guns, so for all intents and purposes they live with complete gun freedom. And the main problem there is not that the gang members are shooting honest citizens who don't have guns, it's that they're shooting other gang members who do have guns. That is: people with guns are shooting other people who they know have guns because they don't care. It's not a deterrent for them. Either they think they can get away with it or they think they're dead anyways so it doesn't matter to them.
If the honest citizens in LA had more guns, it is doubtful it would make any improvement because the gang members have already demonstrated they are not afraid of people with guns: they are not afraid of each other.
Of course one could say that since the gang members can still get them then we might as well not bother trying to restrict them at all. While I don't think it's as simple as that, at least that wouldn't be claiming that adding more guns are going to solve such a complex problem.
The second amendment does not mean no further discussion is needed. The constitution is open for discussion and has been variously interpreted and modified since its creation. Guns are not allowed in court (except for officers) and there are plenty of other places where we've collectively determined that it's better off not to allow guns.
I actually spent this very afternoon shooting a 9mm SIG handgun and a semi-auto Romanian AK-47 out in the Nevada desert. I don't dislike guns, or think they are always dangerous. However they aren't candy either, and some degree of practical regulation in public places is reasonable. Whether the specific laws in each area beneficial or harmful is open for debate.
More guns means less crime in some areas. It means more crime in other areas. Generally speaking I support gun rights, but I wish people who do would admit that in very socially messed up places, giving more people guns does not improve things. If it did, then the gangs in LA would be at peace, right?
Guns as a deterrent depends on people valuing their lives, accepting mortality, but believing they can live longer if they're careful. If you're young enough, tough enough, dumb enough, or your life is shitty enough, that might not be the case, and thus you end up amplifying the mess by giving everyone a license to kill.
Guns don't cause violence, but they don't uniformly solve it either. And in some places they can exasperate it. When gun control people and gun rights people can agree on these facts, maybe a productive discussion can begin.
That is very cool, but does anyone need to do any of those things in the programs that are being created and used today? I'm talking websites, media players, and video games? Haskell may be the coolest thing in the world but maybe not many people need or want the coolest thing in the world. This is always the problem with arguing "but it's better!": things generally only need to be good enough.
If you don't believe me, look at the human race. Do you think that high intelligence or great beauty are driving evolution forward? Or is it "good enough" people who reproduce a lot?
I'm not saying the general tendency towards "good enough" is a good thing, or that anyone should stop doing cool stuff with Haskell, but I'm not terribly surprised it hasn't caught on.
Unfortunately, not according to recent precedent. "Executive privilege" has been invoked so many times now that people don't even expect to know what's going on.
Also, not that you were saying otherwise, but the hacking of her account was very wrong.
I agree it's critical to sort which people you interact with, but if you're using strict language as a key indicator, I'm going to guess you're doing a poor job sorting.
Do you not socialize with people who use casual language constructs practically to improve rapport with others? Do you not socialize with any creative people who find the natural evolution of language to be fun and interesting? Do you not socialize with any people who learned English as a second (or third) language because their grammar is imprecise?
I understand that there is some correlation between poor speakers and people who are not worth socializing with, but it's not so strong that I would use it as a key indicator. There are far too many great people whom I would have excluded from my life in that case. I'd say that your prejudice in this area may be a better indicator that you're someone not worth socializing with.
Antibiotics aren't a human invention, they're a human discovery
True, I was just referring to the idea that we changed the environment (i.e. our body) by the introduction of a foreign substance (antibiotics) from another environment. The human body on antibiotics is a new environment for bacteria to adapt to, which many of them have done.
somebody should have realised that indiscriminately exposing vast numbers of them on a continuous basis over several decades wasn't a very bright thing to do
I've heard this before, but I don't see what other options we had. There should have been no surprise that the critters eventually adapted. But if we didn't use antibiotics we would have just let people die, which is no better than people dying in the case of resistant strains now.
Not sure how that would have been a smarter move. I highly doubt that being more stricter with antibiotic use would have significantly delayed adaptation. It was always just buying time until we could develop something else.
If you're right that invasive bacteria will be able to outlast us in this war of attrition, then we're screwed anyways and always were screwed whether we used antibiotics or not. However, I doubt that's the case. I think the war will ebb and flow for the foreseeable future both with the adaptation of our immune system and our discoveries of different means of antibiotic action.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a pretty good point. How much information is stored in the DNA and how much is stored in the warm organic medium that works with it?
It reminds me of Hofstadter's question about how much informatio is stored in the record and how much in the record player. That's a fairly simple example, but if you replace it with CD and CD Player, or even MP3 data stream and decoder, it becomes more clear.
Then you can take it a step further and wonder how much of the meaning of the audio is stored in the audio itself and how much is stored in the associations in the brain of the listener?
In any case, I think we may someday be able to get a fully functional mammoth-like creature out of the DNA we have by modeling the cellular environment of similar creatures. But I tend to think a strand of DNA in a vacuum is no more meaningful than a cell without DNA in a vacuum.
Cheers.
It's true. I was arm wrestling a friend. He wasn't a hulk or anything and I held my ground against him for several seconds before he slowly started to win. Then I gave it one last intense push to see if I could turn the tides... and my arm broke. Spiral fracture of the humerus. Not sure if stretching beforehand would have helped, but yes, you can damage your body with your own strength. That is, my physics understanding is that since our arms were barely moving at the time of the break, I probably could have done the same thing against a brick wall.
Yes, I got checked out for bone density afterwards and was healthy.
He buys me a beer whenever we hang out :)
Here's a take on this that just occurred to me: time is money, yes? So forced taxes is not that much different than forced service. So from the perspective of "where does the government get off saying I have to XYZ", it's not totally unprecedented. I can see an argument that if you do community service you're lessening the financial load on the government in some way and thus can pay fewer taxes.
In the end, I don't really know if it's a good idea or not, but I don't think it's crazy. Truly forcing it would be a bad thing as you'd get rebellious behavior from some that would undermine things. But strong incentives might actually get the people who are at least willing to do something positive, for both the community and themselves.
Cheers.
Yeah, I think that's pretty much what Schwarzenegger did. And oddly by sticking to such important principles he has seemingly come out alright. We'll see if he gets re-elected, though. My point stands: if you think it's important you can stick to your convictions. Maybe you'll go down in flames but perhaps that's better than saying "okay, let's do something awful".
Cheers.
Doesn't the president have veto power over the budget? If they really don't want to approve that spending they don't have to. Governor Arnold just went through a bitter battle in California using his veto power to force passage of a decent balanced budget. It was painful to watch and it cost him some friends, but he pulled it off in the end. That is financial leadership.
Sorry, but while you're right that the Dems don't get a pat on the back for great spending policy, Reagan had the final say and he went along with it. So did Bush and Bush.
Cheers.
I took a low dollar estimate to be sure I wasn't exaggerating. In any case, it is definitely money we didn't have, which is why the debt has skyrocketed. And yes, you can say that about any of the other 6.7% slices. However you'll need to do a separate cost/benefit analysis on those to determine which slice you think should have been skipped instead. My opinion, obviously, is that the war probably had about the lowest cost/benefit ratio of those slices. And from a purely logistical perspective, the war is probably the only one we could have actually chosen to skip without immediate consequences since the rest were ongoing projects. (Note that once we were in, I understand we had to keep going.)
Saddam killed a hell of a lot of people. I'm seeing 300,000 over ~24 years. So 12,500 year or roughly 4000 a year less than have died in the war years so far.
That's a little misleading though, because most of that (240,000) took place from 86 to 91. Going into Iraq back then made a hell of a lot more sense. My only criticism is that we might have gone in sooner.
Even if we assume all the remaining deaths under Saddam occurred after 91 (which is not the case) then only 5500 people were dying per year, or roughly 1/3 of the war death rate. It'll be a while before we break even. We'll just have to see where the death rate goes over the next decade.
By the way, the 100K number is not rounded up, includes only Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, and it's fairly conservative because only deaths reported in multiple news sources are counted.
Cheers.
I don't see how I exaggerated the costs. Claiming I did indicates a pretty dramatic slant to your assessment. It's pretty well established that the war cost at least 100K lives, over $500 billion which we didn't have (so feel free to add in interest), a serious setback in social stability for both Iraq and the US, as well as some other nations to varying degrees. Are you saying any of that is untrue? Or that it doesn't matter? I'm truly puzzled by your claim that I am exaggerating the costs.
As to pretending I know all the benefits would disappear, I made no such claim. I said that some of the benefits were unknowns and that we'll have to see -- you're the one claiming you know the benefits will work out. I even agreed that some benefits are likely to come through, but that even in that case I felt they were not worth the costs stated above. We can disagree about that, but by no means is it fair to say that by my standards "nothing is ever worth it".
Based on our discussion, I think it would be a lot more valid for me to say to you "everything is worth doing if you underestimate the costs and pretend you know all the benefits will hold".
And a word about hindsight: I opposed the Iraq war from the beginning on the grounds that I didn't see a reasonable cost/benefit picture. No hindsight is involved.
Cheers.
Painfully bad last minute edit on the last sentence. Try this:
"It's disturbing to me that a lot of people seem to be relatively pleased."
Thanks for the reply, but I feel that's pretty speculative and debatable list.
I hope a democracy blossoms over there, but I'd be pretty surprised if in 10 years it's a meaningfully more stable or cohesive nation. I agree Saddam was evil, but from a practical sense it is as of yet unclear whether we'll be able to set up a government that does much better. Our track record for such things is not good, in any case. We'll see how it goes -- though we don't know how Iraq would have progressed on its own in the next 10 years anyway.
The sanctions could have been lifted at any time without so much destruction. If we knew that they were only harming the people then what was the point?
The Iran and Lybia claims sort of cancel each other out: one nation gave up it's nuclear program, at least one other intensified it's nuclear program. We broadcast the idea that the US will attack any nation that doesn't have nuclear capabilities even if that nation is cooperating with the UN. Not a great precedent in my book.
I don't know -- I'm sure you have other points and there are probably some legitimate benefits. However it seems the cost was far too high to have been worth it.
I feel that the pressure put on Iraq before the invasion was good, and it successfully got Saddam to allow inspections. That was a major political win for the US and for Bush. He could have parlayed that into some great statesmanship and peaceful progress, if that had been his real goal. However he took the other path: an absolutely enormous cost and a handful of minor benefits. It still seems like it was pretty foolish to me.
It's disturbing to me is that a lot of people seem to relatively pleased.
Cheers.
That all sounds fair enough except for one thing... what did we actually "win"?
I mean, what was the benefit of this and was it worth the cost? I don't see how anything is better today than it was six years ago in Iraq. It sure sounds great to say "we won", but all we seem to have done is cleaned up a mess we mostly created ourselves. It just turns my stomach a bit to hear the word "win" applied to the death of 100,000 people, the pain and suffering of countless others, the ruined infrastructure, the financial ruin of our country, etc.
Saddam was a very bad man. Maybe it would have been worth removing him from power twenty years ago when he started gassing his people, but he stopped. I feel I'm a pragmatist and I've yet to see evidence that the day-to-day Iraqi life is better post-war than pre-war.
Oh, and anyone who claims that there was a serious safety concern for the US from either military or terrorist action sourcing from Iraq is ill informed.
So we may have met some goals, but I don't really see what was won.
Dead on. I've seen this happen several times, and yes they do often rise up the chain of command. This is because they are willing to talk smack about the existing system to non-technical people. The existing system (i.e. a real, working one) is going to always have some flaws when compared to their fantasy-hypothetical system. If the person seizes on this politically, non-techies or inexperienced techies will jump on it and the smack-talker can amass a lot of power.
I've yet to see it end well. They build their new system and it almost always crashes and burns at worst, or ends up equally flawed in a different way at best. And that's after much time and money has been spent on the transition to "utopia".
Hearing this guy talk, I no longer wonder why Twitter's tech performs so poorly. He sounds like the kind of arrogant fool who always screws these things up.
I don't think he was a troll; I thought it was a very interesting point. And I think that "lower self esteem" can unfortunately be correlated with skin color and sexuality as well, so your argument doesn't hold up. Just because society looks down on something doesn't make it a disease.
Really, why do you say baldness a disease? It's just a change in the body's self regulation over time. Balding does not apparently have a significant negative effect from an evolutionary standpoint or it wouldn't be so common. It's just another variation in the human animal. There are many non-disease changes that our bodies go through from birth to death. Do you think puberty is a disease? That also is a change in our makeup that can lead to self esteem issues and even severe psychological problems.
I think the original poster's point very much stands.
And yes, I'm balding :)
I'm fascinated by AI and our attempts to understand the workings of the mind. But these days, whenever I think about it, I end up feeling that a much more fundamental problem would be to figure out how to make use of the human minds we've already got that are going to waste. Some two hundred minds are born every minute -- each one a piece of raw computing power that puts our best technology to shame. Yet we haven't really figured out how to teach many of them properly, or how to get the most benefit out of them for themselves and for society.
If we create Artificial Intelligence, what would we even do with it? We've hardly figured out how to use Natural Intelligence :/
I don't mean to imply some kind of dilemma, AI research should of course go on. I'm just more fascinated with the idea of getting all this hardware we already have put to good use. Seems there's very little advancement going on in that field. It would certainly end up applying to AI anyways, when that time comes.
Cheers.
Overall I think you make some valid points but:
A time when just about every economic, social, and educational indicator was much lower than today, yet people complained less.
Yep, it's true. And those times were basically before liberalism and social programs that conservatives rail against. Those policies that, as you have said, raised just about every economic, social, and educational indicator. I'm sure you see what I'm getting at: the liberal social programs that conservatives seem to dislike are very highly correlated with the rise of the modern successful America that they love.
I've never heard a really coherent explanation as to why we shouldn't appreciate some of the progress enabled by these liberal policies, instead of wishing to go back to when the world was more or less socially stagnant for hundreds of years.
Cheers.
I've seen plenty of launch videos before, but watching this and hearing them cheer when the stages separate... well, it warmed my heart. It's a beautiful example of bright people getting together to do something that people thought was unreasonable my many. That is one very small organization to break free from the surface of our little planet. Congrats to them.
I know it's fun to cling to beliefs, and in fact people generally get pleasurable stimulation from rejecting ideas that contradict their beliefs, but you owe it to yourself to take a more inquisitive stance. You might like to turn that back around on me, but in fact I used to deny evolution as you do, and I took the time to research it with an open mind and eventually got it. How often do you update your beliefs based on new information? Unless it happens regularly you can pretty well be assured you're wrong about a lot of things, since nobody is always right from the get go.
I have heard the micro-vs-macro distinction before, and it's a crock. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Once you accept micro-evolution and understand the age of the earth, it all falls into place and makes a lot more sense than any other explanation. In fact, your belief that the world's species could have differentiated from a large boat in just the past 4300 years or so puts far more power in the hands of natural selection than even I would be willing to give it. You may want to do some comparisons on the the number of distinct genera in the world, their locations, and how much space would be required to house them.
And to be clear: the existence of macro-evolution has absolutely nothing to do with faith in God. You can believe in God and macro-evolution. Most people I know do.
Christ, my wife's heritage (Korean history) goes back further than the the flood. It's just ridiculous the level of factual denial one must go through to take an absolute interpretation of the bible.
Keep your faith, and like many of the first scientists, let observation, data, and experiment inform your knowledge of "the mind of God". That is what the exploration of science is all about.
Cheers.
Evolution is a theory.
You know what's a riot about the conflict between evolution and intelligent design? If you got to the creationism museum sometime, and have the intestinal fortitude to actually read through their description of the past 6000 years, you'll come across a very interesting bit.
Since it is quite obvious that all the diversity of life could not have fit on Noah's Ark, they are required to explain the upwards of 2 million different species we see around us. Their explanation? Speciation through natural selection. I'm serious. They don't call it evolution and they hand wave some of the details, but they basically say that evolution took place after Noah's Ark (in only a few thousand years!!!) to explain the contradiction between the size of the ark and the diversity of life on earth.
It's insanity, I tell you. Insanity.
Yep, it's a theory. A very good one that explains a whole lot. Just as solid a theory as anything else you mentioned. And we've observed evolution: just check out antibiotic resistant bacteria. No evolutionary biologist was surprised at what happened there, though everyone else was. Evolution predicted exactly that outcome. Why do you think?
Cheers.
Yeah, I think the whole mantra that war is good for the economy is bullshit. It creates a short term boom because of increased productivity (scared patriots work hard) but in the long run you end up with huge debt and little produced. I mean, you build a bridge or a highway system or schools, there's some measurable addition to society. You drop all that money to destroy someone else's country, you don't really get much for your money.
If you have to defend yourself, fine. But war is wasteful, plain and simple. It's almost the very definition of waste.
I support your idea of diverting most of that money (after reasonable self defense) into directly productive projects.
Cheers.
I think you're missing my point. The gun laws in California don't prevent gang members from getting guns, so for all intents and purposes they live with complete gun freedom. And the main problem there is not that the gang members are shooting honest citizens who don't have guns, it's that they're shooting other gang members who do have guns. That is: people with guns are shooting other people who they know have guns because they don't care. It's not a deterrent for them. Either they think they can get away with it or they think they're dead anyways so it doesn't matter to them.
If the honest citizens in LA had more guns, it is doubtful it would make any improvement because the gang members have already demonstrated they are not afraid of people with guns: they are not afraid of each other.
Of course one could say that since the gang members can still get them then we might as well not bother trying to restrict them at all. While I don't think it's as simple as that, at least that wouldn't be claiming that adding more guns are going to solve such a complex problem.
The second amendment does not mean no further discussion is needed. The constitution is open for discussion and has been variously interpreted and modified since its creation. Guns are not allowed in court (except for officers) and there are plenty of other places where we've collectively determined that it's better off not to allow guns.
I actually spent this very afternoon shooting a 9mm SIG handgun and a semi-auto Romanian AK-47 out in the Nevada desert. I don't dislike guns, or think they are always dangerous. However they aren't candy either, and some degree of practical regulation in public places is reasonable. Whether the specific laws in each area beneficial or harmful is open for debate.
Cheers
More guns means less crime in some areas. It means more crime in other areas. Generally speaking I support gun rights, but I wish people who do would admit that in very socially messed up places, giving more people guns does not improve things. If it did, then the gangs in LA would be at peace, right?
Guns as a deterrent depends on people valuing their lives, accepting mortality, but believing they can live longer if they're careful. If you're young enough, tough enough, dumb enough, or your life is shitty enough, that might not be the case, and thus you end up amplifying the mess by giving everyone a license to kill.
Guns don't cause violence, but they don't uniformly solve it either. And in some places they can exasperate it. When gun control people and gun rights people can agree on these facts, maybe a productive discussion can begin.
Cheers.
That is very cool, but does anyone need to do any of those things in the programs that are being created and used today? I'm talking websites, media players, and video games? Haskell may be the coolest thing in the world but maybe not many people need or want the coolest thing in the world. This is always the problem with arguing "but it's better!": things generally only need to be good enough.
If you don't believe me, look at the human race. Do you think that high intelligence or great beauty are driving evolution forward? Or is it "good enough" people who reproduce a lot?
I'm not saying the general tendency towards "good enough" is a good thing, or that anyone should stop doing cool stuff with Haskell, but I'm not terribly surprised it hasn't caught on.
Cheers.
I agree with your sentiment fully.
it MUST BE MADE PUBLIC upon lawful order.
Unfortunately, not according to recent precedent. "Executive privilege" has been invoked so many times now that people don't even expect to know what's going on.
Also, not that you were saying otherwise, but the hacking of her account was very wrong.
Cheers.
Your honesty amuses me. I take back my claim that you might not be worth socializing with :)
I agree it's critical to sort which people you interact with, but if you're using strict language as a key indicator, I'm going to guess you're doing a poor job sorting.
Do you not socialize with people who use casual language constructs practically to improve rapport with others? Do you not socialize with any creative people who find the natural evolution of language to be fun and interesting? Do you not socialize with any people who learned English as a second (or third) language because their grammar is imprecise?
I understand that there is some correlation between poor speakers and people who are not worth socializing with, but it's not so strong that I would use it as a key indicator. There are far too many great people whom I would have excluded from my life in that case. I'd say that your prejudice in this area may be a better indicator that you're someone not worth socializing with.
Cheers.
I hear what you're saying. Just a couple things:
Antibiotics aren't a human invention, they're a human discovery
True, I was just referring to the idea that we changed the environment (i.e. our body) by the introduction of a foreign substance (antibiotics) from another environment. The human body on antibiotics is a new environment for bacteria to adapt to, which many of them have done.
somebody should have realised that indiscriminately exposing vast numbers of them on a continuous basis over several decades wasn't a very bright thing to do
I've heard this before, but I don't see what other options we had. There should have been no surprise that the critters eventually adapted. But if we didn't use antibiotics we would have just let people die, which is no better than people dying in the case of resistant strains now.
Not sure how that would have been a smarter move. I highly doubt that being more stricter with antibiotic use would have significantly delayed adaptation. It was always just buying time until we could develop something else.
If you're right that invasive bacteria will be able to outlast us in this war of attrition, then we're screwed anyways and always were screwed whether we used antibiotics or not. However, I doubt that's the case. I think the war will ebb and flow for the foreseeable future both with the adaptation of our immune system and our discoveries of different means of antibiotic action.
Cheers.