The problem with Politifact, and in fact much of political reporting, is the cult of false equivalency. If they consistently portray politicians as liars and others as truth-tellers, then they'll be accused of partisanship and lose credibility. So the effect of this is that political figures who are regularly liars and only occasionally speak the truth end up looking no more dishonest than political figures who usually tell the truth but occasionally slip up.
I'm not sure how true this is. Michelle Bachmann's Politifact profile for example ahref=http://www.politifact.com/personalities/michele-bachmann/rel=url2html-11562http://www.politifact.com/personalities/michele-bachmann/>. Of the statements they've evaluated by her, more than half fall into the "false" or "pants on fire" category (of 53, 19 are "false" and 12 are "pants on fire"). Obama in contrast has around 17% in those two categories. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/, and Romney has 27% http://www.politifact.com/personalities/mitt-romney/. One can definitely see here different degrees of care with the facts, with most of the people really divorced from reality being people like Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh who manage to have more than half their evaluated statements as simply false. (One interesting exception is Jon Stewart who is on the left and has more than half his evaluated statements as false, but they've only evaluated three statements in total http://www.politifact.com/personalities/jon-stewart/ which says small sample size).
The point about small companies is valid, but there's probably not that much malicious hacking directed at small companies. If the companies are that small, there's not that much payoff to the hackers.
Confirmation bias certainly exists throughout the political spectrum. However, it does seem that political partisanship has made it worst in the right end of the political spectrum than the left end. In particular, the more educated self-identified conservatives are, the more they doubt climate change is real. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503, but the reverse occurs for nuclear power and liberals, or vaccines and liberals, the more educated they are, the more likely they are to agree with the scientific consensus despite the views associated with their end of the political spectrum that run against it. This breaks down pretty badly outside the US though http://www.esds.ac.uk/doc/5357/mrdoc/pdf/5357userguide.pdf. Similarly, there's some evidence that conservatives respond more poorly than liberals to data that undermines their ideological claims (there was a Slashdot article that linked to this but I can't unfortunately find it right now). The upshot is that while there's definite political tribalism and confirmation bias throughout the political spectrum, at present there seem to be cultural issues that are making the problem more extreme among self-identified conservatives, although why is not at all clear.
No, I understand them just fine thank you. It is possible that I misjudged how my statement would be interpreted. I didn't expect it to be read quite so literally. The point is that theoretical research is comparatively cheap compared to building new particle accelerators, which your earlier statement specifically talked about building. You are talking about costs that are at least an order of magnitude smaller. And what would you have those PhDs and grad students do in the meantime? To be ready to actually look at the right theory and be up to date, it helps to have them explore everything. The theoreticians who aren't thinking stopped being theoreticians and go do other jobs, sometimes not even physics related, and so you lose those minds when you really do need to think about things. And even the wrong theories often lead to interesting insights or interesting math.
The difference isn't where funding will go. This will impact what the theoreticians are doing for a year or two if it doesn't end up getting confirmed. The primary cost in that context will be for chalk and erasers.
The existence of some wars isn't a counterexample to the general claim. No one is claiming that drafts make everyone pacifists, but that the population becomes less supportive of war. In
Why? As far as I can tell this would be a good thing. If everyone in an army is making decisions then they aren't as likely to engage in risky behavior or unnecessary violence. The analogy is to how many have argued that the US has become more warlike as it has lost its draft, so that people favoring war are no longer in any serious risk of being called up. Nothing in the summary seems that negative, and a brief skim of TFA doesn't seem to indicate much actually negative as far as I can tell.
But the programmer still needs to decide what policies to give the AI. And as we can make more and more complicated driving AI, what our options will be to program them will become more broad. The ethical issues will be an issue.
Actually, grand juries are on circumstance where secrecy makes sense. Grand juries don't convict people, they are responsible for deciding if there's sufficient evidence of a crime to go ahead with the prosecution. Keeping such hearing secret means that people are more willing to give information they might not want to give in open court if it is personally embarrassing or if it has a negative aspect to people they don't want to piss off. It also means that a prosecutor can't just use the threat of bringing someone in front of a jury where they'll air all the person's dirty laundry. Overall, the secrecy of grand juries helps the little guy.
Once these driving machines become marginally functional, the questions will matter. If they fail as badly as you envision then aren't ready for actual implementation yet. But when they are implemented in real life, this will matter.
There's some evidence that people do drive more unsafely when they have better safety equipment, but the data strongly suggests that that's a tiny change in the overall impact of safety equipment. Look at for example the total number of automobile deaths yearly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year. The number of deaths has been dropping since the 1960s on a clear downward trend even as the total number of cars and drivers has gone up. The data for most of Europe looks similar.
There's a whole class of philsophical problems about when to save one life v. n lives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem. One very awkward thing about this is that advanced emergency driving systems may need to address questions that we are fundamentally uncomfortable answering or discussing. Should a system for example protect the life of the people in a car as opposed to the life of people in a nearby car that they might crash into? Which gets higher priority. Does the number of people in each car matter? Exactly what the cars do in the few seconds leading up to a crash could alter this. Essentially this sort of thing may force us to examine difficult ethical problems.
The Democrat running against Lamar Smith is Candace Duval- http://www.candaceduval.com/ while John Henry-Liberty is running as a libertarian- http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/John-Henry_Liberty. I don't unfortunately see any website that Henry-Liberty has set up, but the Duval has a donation button on her website. So the best thing to do to make clear one isn't happy with Lamar Smith is to donate to Duval's campaign. I'm donating right now. Fuck Lamar Smith.
My understanding is that one is only required to give the source if one is distributing the product to other people. As long as the individual keeps the software for themselves, there's no requirement to make the source available.
There wasn't much real trailblazing done by SETI@Home. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPS was a distributed computing system two years before SETI@Home. It is however, true that SETI@Home did popularize distributed contributing in general a lot more than prior projects had done, and was a major cause for the creation of BOINC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing which is now used for many distributed computing projects. But trailblazing seems like an overstatement.
The US electric grid is a product of history much more than planning with bits tacked on or merged as short-term goals dictated without much in the way of long-term planning. (There are actually three main US grids, one for the East, one for the West and one for Texas). Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote an excellent book, "Beforee the Lights Go Out," which is about the grid and related issues that discusses this and how it creates a lot of these problems and what we can do about it. I highly recommend it.
Yeah, like he bowed and kissed ass for Gaddafi. Seemed more like kicking ass than kissing ass. (And just so we don't get into a flamewar over this, this observation is independent of any issues regarding the legality of our intervention into Libya).
True, but having that small a population of a large animal survive would be extremely unlikely based on our understanding of basic genetics and issues of inbreeding and minimal stable populations. So there argument seems to implicitly be that if a small population survived, then it makes sense to conclude that the extinction event occurred much sooner than 65 million years ago. Phrased that way that wouldn't be an unreasonable argument if there were actual, substantial evidence that Nessie was real and was a dinosaur.
Children are a clearly distinct category, and so should't be personally responsible. But in fact, people who create problems with grills, campfires and lit cigarettes, or who have children that start fires, are generally liable for either criminal or civil penalties depending on the exact problem. The people in question here aren't being held liable the way the way someone else would be precisely because guns are treated differently.
Is this the point where vigilante justice makes sense? When people have done something so obviously bad and destructive and the government is unable to punish the people I have to wonder if it is time for people to take justice into their own hands. It might still be possible to find them guilty in a civil court, or to get them for a federal rather than state offense, but it seems unlikely that that's going to happen.
However, the more rational part of me understands that one of the triumphs of civilization and one of the things that lets us survive as a society is that we let these sorts of things go rather than engage in the type of behavior that can harm others or result in further damage and chaos. When societies are willing to consider vigilantism the societies suffer. And the two shooters did try to put out the blaze and tried to call 911 when they couldn't. A precedent of punishing such people might cause them to be more inclined not to report such incidents in the future. Actually, that last argument is extremely weak since under that logic all sorts of people should not be prosecuted who we do successfully prosecute and in an emergency situation dumb people like this aren't that likely to think through the long-term consequences of the phonecall. (If they couldn't think through the consequences of their actions in the first place they aren't going to now.)
At some level the most annoying thing is that their names aren't being revealed. There's unacceptable vigilantism and there's the simple embarrassment of having their names and faces plastered over the media. Even if outright vigilantism is not a good thing, I don't see why they don't deserve the minimum media knowledge especially so other people, like their employers, can know what absolute inconsiderate idiots they are dealing with. As far as I can tell though, none of the articles mention their names.
You should probably read up on Chaumette et al. then. Or just take a course on the history of the French Revolution. Many of the major proponents were not in favor of separation of church and state but rather wanted an avowedly atheist government. (Heck just read the earlier linked Wikipedia articles if you don't have enough time.)
Given that pretty close to no one in the West wants a Marxist sort of national atheism, I fail to see how your point is at all relevant. And you've completely ignored the problem of the genetic fallacy simply dismissing it as "a matter of perspective"- which doesn't make any sense. Fallacies aren't a matter of perspective. Something is or is not logically valid, and in this case, who came up with an idea doesn't matter.
Marx's work was mostly based on Hegel's works (ironically as is much of the foundation of the USA.).
What? Hegel was born in 1770. He was 6 years old when the revolution started. He was 17 when the Constitution was adopted. His first book doesn't come out until 1801. In what universe was Hegel influential on the foundation of the US?
I do not agree with that statement. You need to consider state sponsored violence when making that assumption, and that is obviously not in your equation for you to make such a statement.
Actually it is. You really should read Pinker's book. The percentage of people who die violent deaths has been going down even including deaths from wars. In fact, war in general has become much less common even by very broad notions of war. You have things like the Anglo-Dutch wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Dutch_Wars which almost no one remembers. There hasn't been a war between major powers in about 60 years.
That ignores that Iran is helping prop up the Syrian government, and that Iran has been one of the chief funders of Hezbollah and other organizations which have repeatedly attacked Israel. Moreover, comparing small countries to large countries when it comes to foreign policy is not generally representative- large countries have much more wide-ranging interests and have much more ability to project power in the pursuit of those interests. So to really do very badly on foreign policy you need to be large.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Politifact, and in fact much of political reporting, is the cult of false equivalency. If they consistently portray politicians as liars and others as truth-tellers, then they'll be accused of partisanship and lose credibility. So the effect of this is that political figures who are regularly liars and only occasionally speak the truth end up looking no more dishonest than political figures who usually tell the truth but occasionally slip up.
I'm not sure how true this is. Michelle Bachmann's Politifact profile for example ahref=http://www.politifact.com/personalities/michele-bachmann/rel=url2html-11562http://www.politifact.com/personalities/michele-bachmann/>. Of the statements they've evaluated by her, more than half fall into the "false" or "pants on fire" category (of 53, 19 are "false" and 12 are "pants on fire"). Obama in contrast has around 17% in those two categories. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/barack-obama/, and Romney has 27% http://www.politifact.com/personalities/mitt-romney/. One can definitely see here different degrees of care with the facts, with most of the people really divorced from reality being people like Bachmann and Rush Limbaugh who manage to have more than half their evaluated statements as simply false. (One interesting exception is Jon Stewart who is on the left and has more than half his evaluated statements as false, but they've only evaluated three statements in total http://www.politifact.com/personalities/jon-stewart/ which says small sample size).
The point about small companies is valid, but there's probably not that much malicious hacking directed at small companies. If the companies are that small, there's not that much payoff to the hackers.
Confirmation bias certainly exists throughout the political spectrum. However, it does seem that political partisanship has made it worst in the right end of the political spectrum than the left end. In particular, the more educated self-identified conservatives are, the more they doubt climate change is real. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503&http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1871503, but the reverse occurs for nuclear power and liberals, or vaccines and liberals, the more educated they are, the more likely they are to agree with the scientific consensus despite the views associated with their end of the political spectrum that run against it. This breaks down pretty badly outside the US though http://www.esds.ac.uk/doc/5357/mrdoc/pdf/5357userguide.pdf. Similarly, there's some evidence that conservatives respond more poorly than liberals to data that undermines their ideological claims (there was a Slashdot article that linked to this but I can't unfortunately find it right now). The upshot is that while there's definite political tribalism and confirmation bias throughout the political spectrum, at present there seem to be cultural issues that are making the problem more extreme among self-identified conservatives, although why is not at all clear.
No, I understand them just fine thank you. It is possible that I misjudged how my statement would be interpreted. I didn't expect it to be read quite so literally. The point is that theoretical research is comparatively cheap compared to building new particle accelerators, which your earlier statement specifically talked about building. You are talking about costs that are at least an order of magnitude smaller. And what would you have those PhDs and grad students do in the meantime? To be ready to actually look at the right theory and be up to date, it helps to have them explore everything. The theoreticians who aren't thinking stopped being theoreticians and go do other jobs, sometimes not even physics related, and so you lose those minds when you really do need to think about things. And even the wrong theories often lead to interesting insights or interesting math.
The difference isn't where funding will go. This will impact what the theoreticians are doing for a year or two if it doesn't end up getting confirmed. The primary cost in that context will be for chalk and erasers.
The existence of some wars isn't a counterexample to the general claim. No one is claiming that drafts make everyone pacifists, but that the population becomes less supportive of war. In
What's wrong with saving images in a publicly frequented location? It isn't like he was sneaking into someone's house.
Let's hope resistance isn't futile.
Why? As far as I can tell this would be a good thing. If everyone in an army is making decisions then they aren't as likely to engage in risky behavior or unnecessary violence. The analogy is to how many have argued that the US has become more warlike as it has lost its draft, so that people favoring war are no longer in any serious risk of being called up. Nothing in the summary seems that negative, and a brief skim of TFA doesn't seem to indicate much actually negative as far as I can tell.
But the programmer still needs to decide what policies to give the AI. And as we can make more and more complicated driving AI, what our options will be to program them will become more broad. The ethical issues will be an issue.
Actually, grand juries are on circumstance where secrecy makes sense. Grand juries don't convict people, they are responsible for deciding if there's sufficient evidence of a crime to go ahead with the prosecution. Keeping such hearing secret means that people are more willing to give information they might not want to give in open court if it is personally embarrassing or if it has a negative aspect to people they don't want to piss off. It also means that a prosecutor can't just use the threat of bringing someone in front of a jury where they'll air all the person's dirty laundry. Overall, the secrecy of grand juries helps the little guy.
Once these driving machines become marginally functional, the questions will matter. If they fail as badly as you envision then aren't ready for actual implementation yet. But when they are implemented in real life, this will matter.
There's some evidence that people do drive more unsafely when they have better safety equipment, but the data strongly suggests that that's a tiny change in the overall impact of safety equipment. Look at for example the total number of automobile deaths yearly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year. The number of deaths has been dropping since the 1960s on a clear downward trend even as the total number of cars and drivers has gone up. The data for most of Europe looks similar.
There's a whole class of philsophical problems about when to save one life v. n lives http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem. One very awkward thing about this is that advanced emergency driving systems may need to address questions that we are fundamentally uncomfortable answering or discussing. Should a system for example protect the life of the people in a car as opposed to the life of people in a nearby car that they might crash into? Which gets higher priority. Does the number of people in each car matter? Exactly what the cars do in the few seconds leading up to a crash could alter this. Essentially this sort of thing may force us to examine difficult ethical problems.
The Democrat running against Lamar Smith is Candace Duval- http://www.candaceduval.com/ while John Henry-Liberty is running as a libertarian- http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/John-Henry_Liberty. I don't unfortunately see any website that Henry-Liberty has set up, but the Duval has a donation button on her website. So the best thing to do to make clear one isn't happy with Lamar Smith is to donate to Duval's campaign. I'm donating right now. Fuck Lamar Smith.
My understanding is that one is only required to give the source if one is distributing the product to other people. As long as the individual keeps the software for themselves, there's no requirement to make the source available.
The prior use was research so I'm not sure I follow your point. The Mersenne prime hunt is research for example.
There wasn't much real trailblazing done by SETI@Home. The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPS was a distributed computing system two years before SETI@Home. It is however, true that SETI@Home did popularize distributed contributing in general a lot more than prior projects had done, and was a major cause for the creation of BOINC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Open_Infrastructure_for_Network_Computing which is now used for many distributed computing projects. But trailblazing seems like an overstatement.
The US electric grid is a product of history much more than planning with bits tacked on or merged as short-term goals dictated without much in the way of long-term planning. (There are actually three main US grids, one for the East, one for the West and one for Texas). Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote an excellent book, "Beforee the Lights Go Out," which is about the grid and related issues that discusses this and how it creates a lot of these problems and what we can do about it. I highly recommend it.
Yeah, like he bowed and kissed ass for Gaddafi. Seemed more like kicking ass than kissing ass. (And just so we don't get into a flamewar over this, this observation is independent of any issues regarding the legality of our intervention into Libya).
True, but having that small a population of a large animal survive would be extremely unlikely based on our understanding of basic genetics and issues of inbreeding and minimal stable populations. So there argument seems to implicitly be that if a small population survived, then it makes sense to conclude that the extinction event occurred much sooner than 65 million years ago. Phrased that way that wouldn't be an unreasonable argument if there were actual, substantial evidence that Nessie was real and was a dinosaur.
Children are a clearly distinct category, and so should't be personally responsible. But in fact, people who create problems with grills, campfires and lit cigarettes, or who have children that start fires, are generally liable for either criminal or civil penalties depending on the exact problem. The people in question here aren't being held liable the way the way someone else would be precisely because guns are treated differently.
Is this the point where vigilante justice makes sense? When people have done something so obviously bad and destructive and the government is unable to punish the people I have to wonder if it is time for people to take justice into their own hands. It might still be possible to find them guilty in a civil court, or to get them for a federal rather than state offense, but it seems unlikely that that's going to happen.
However, the more rational part of me understands that one of the triumphs of civilization and one of the things that lets us survive as a society is that we let these sorts of things go rather than engage in the type of behavior that can harm others or result in further damage and chaos. When societies are willing to consider vigilantism the societies suffer. And the two shooters did try to put out the blaze and tried to call 911 when they couldn't. A precedent of punishing such people might cause them to be more inclined not to report such incidents in the future. Actually, that last argument is extremely weak since under that logic all sorts of people should not be prosecuted who we do successfully prosecute and in an emergency situation dumb people like this aren't that likely to think through the long-term consequences of the phonecall. (If they couldn't think through the consequences of their actions in the first place they aren't going to now.)
At some level the most annoying thing is that their names aren't being revealed. There's unacceptable vigilantism and there's the simple embarrassment of having their names and faces plastered over the media. Even if outright vigilantism is not a good thing, I don't see why they don't deserve the minimum media knowledge especially so other people, like their employers, can know what absolute inconsiderate idiots they are dealing with. As far as I can tell though, none of the articles mention their names.
Hmm, you are correct. Looking over http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_relations#Khomeini_era_.281979.E2.80.9389.29 it seems that although Iran has repeatedly funded attacks on Israel through Hezbollah and other organizations, they've never formally declared war. Given a complete non-recognition though, that's to a large extent a formality.
You should probably read up on Chaumette et al. then. Or just take a course on the history of the French Revolution. Many of the major proponents were not in favor of separation of church and state but rather wanted an avowedly atheist government. (Heck just read the earlier linked Wikipedia articles if you don't have enough time.)
Given that pretty close to no one in the West wants a Marxist sort of national atheism, I fail to see how your point is at all relevant. And you've completely ignored the problem of the genetic fallacy simply dismissing it as "a matter of perspective"- which doesn't make any sense. Fallacies aren't a matter of perspective. Something is or is not logically valid, and in this case, who came up with an idea doesn't matter.
Marx's work was mostly based on Hegel's works (ironically as is much of the foundation of the USA.).
What? Hegel was born in 1770. He was 6 years old when the revolution started. He was 17 when the Constitution was adopted. His first book doesn't come out until 1801. In what universe was Hegel influential on the foundation of the US?
I do not agree with that statement. You need to consider state sponsored violence when making that assumption, and that is obviously not in your equation for you to make such a statement.
Actually it is. You really should read Pinker's book. The percentage of people who die violent deaths has been going down even including deaths from wars. In fact, war in general has become much less common even by very broad notions of war. You have things like the Anglo-Dutch wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Dutch_Wars which almost no one remembers. There hasn't been a war between major powers in about 60 years.
That ignores that Iran is helping prop up the Syrian government, and that Iran has been one of the chief funders of Hezbollah and other organizations which have repeatedly attacked Israel. Moreover, comparing small countries to large countries when it comes to foreign policy is not generally representative- large countries have much more wide-ranging interests and have much more ability to project power in the pursuit of those interests. So to really do very badly on foreign policy you need to be large.