While many of your points are correct and the person you are replying to is a bit of an ass, let's not forget that these cuts occurred under Bush. See for example http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0502-aaas.html. Part of the logic here seemed to almost be "I don't believe that climate change is a problem or is occurring and if I cut your funding you won't be able to show that it is bad." Or something very close to that. This particular problem really can be blamed on the Bush admin.
I know two of the people who were in Spellbound as kids (Emily Stagg and Harry Altman), and I've a met a third. This makes me wonder if this is evidence the set of high-achievers in US society is a) much smaller than one might think and b) determined at a surprisingly early age. I know, tiny anecdotal evidence but still I wonder...
The numbers given there are roughly accurate, so I'm not sure what point you are making about 2% as opposed to 3.7%. The basic point stands that the theist fraction of US scientists doesn't look the US general pop but much closer to the general world population. I agree that your point about scientists in the US coming from other countries is likely strongly impacting these results. As to why one would expect the majority of scientists to be atheists, I have no idea, but it is very clear that even with her data and the spin, the fraction of scientists which are atheists is much higher than the general population, even of the world population. Moreover, the fraction which are theists is much lower than the general fraction of the population that is theistic. Trying to make a big deal about the fact that one doesn't have a majority who are atheists is totally missing the point.
This is a sample of scientists in the US. Moreover, the claim that evangelicals are small fraction of the Christian population is simply not the case either in the US or globally. About a quarter of the US self-identify as evangelical and about a 1 our of 15 people worldwide is evangelical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism. And again, the striking aspect about the evangelicals is that the proportion is lower than what one would expect. By her survey, 28% of US scientists believe in God. But only 2% are evangelical. That means that fraction expected by a rough proportion of US theists is about about 3 times less common than one would expect. In contrast, the proportion closely resembles that in the global population. Based on this data and other related data and patterns, I'd expect that if you performed the same studies on a global sample you'd find that that the fraction of scientists which are evangelical would be much lower than 1 in 15.
Ecklund is spinning the data, possibly to fit her pet hypothesis. For example, she claims that about half of scientists are "traditionally religious" but by her own data, 34% are atheists, 30% are strong agnostics, and 8% are believe in a higher power which they explicitly don't believe is "God." Given that, it is very hard to claim that half the scientific population is traditionally religious when three quarters aren't even theists. There are also some odd choices she makes in her definition of scientists. So for example, she includes all the social sciences but not mathematicians (something which I philosophically agree with but find sociologically suspect). There's an excellent analysis of her data by Jason Rosenhouse of her data at http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2010/05/scientists_and_religion.php. The most striking thing about the data, regardless of how Ecklund wants to spin it as showing scientists are religious, is how much less religious scientists are than the general population. Atheism is much more common among scientists than among the general population, as is agnosticism. Moreover, what religions are common if one looks at the theistic breakdown is very different. Evangelical Christianity for example is a much smaller percentage then one would get from a representative sample of theists.
The kid's been attached to it for 9 months, and the last 2 minutes make _THAT_ much difference?
The cord is then under very different circumstances. At that point it is no longer bathed in a protective moistening medium and it is no longer getting nearly as much oxygen. Cutting the cord further reduces the oxygen level and gives it more surface area to dry out.
You don't always know when someone happens to have a camera and you don't realize it. The problem is that even if one wouldn't mind having a picture of one in that situation, the easy access of Facebook makes the situation much worse, especially when people who would be moral enough not to blackmail (i.e. most humans) are still inconsiderate enough to not realize that you don't want the picture of you up on their bloody public profile. It is thus easier to have fun and have the Facebook profile than have less fun and still incur some risk. Having the profile solves this much better than not having it.
If you aren't on Facebook you can't keep track of friends putting up junk involving you. It is possible on Facebook to tag or make comments about people who are not members. Thus for example, say a friend takes a picture of a few people drunk and you are one of the people in the picture. The next day, if they put the picture up and tag people in it, you can untag yourself and drop them a note. If you aren't on Facebook, they could include your name and you won't know. This risk is especially severe for people around college age. And there are enough people around that one can't simply trust all of them not to be inconsiderate idiots. Thus, as long as lots of people are on Facebook, one has a direct incentive to stay there.
That's stupid at multiple levels. There are a lot of jobs where there are differences in ratios of who has the jobs. But that doesn't mean we have to use language that absolutely reflects on those, especially as those can change from location or setting. This sort of study isn't a point about using specifically the word firefighter (and to think it is is borderline idiotic). The upshot is that these words do have subtle impact on how people think. That applies to many different settings. It simply happens to be that this sort of example is one that it is easy to test for. You can do the same thing with other words where there isn't nearly as much the same disparity in who has the professions and you get the same result. Focusing so much on firefighters is utterly missing the point.
In Chinese culture, 8 is considered a very lucky number. People have bid very large amounts of money to have license plates with just 8 on them. See for example http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-07/02/content_8345712.htm
But this number is all 8s except for a single 0. Maybe it is only lucky in China?
This will have an interesting impact on webmasters. If someone clicks through from a secure Google search to your webpage, the referral data is not given. That means that the person who runs the website will not only not see what the search term was they won't even see that it came from a Google search. I'm not sure how that will impact people. But if enough people use secure search, it may cause people to have to do a lot of guesswork about how much traffic they are getting from Google searches.
I don't have a citation for this study in particular, having heard about this in a cog sci class. Google searching doesn't turn it up directly (the signal to noise ratio for gender language issues is really poor since almost everyone just cases on ideological grounds). However, I can give citations for two other studies with similar results: The first is "Children's understanding of sexist language" Hyde, Janet S. Developmental Psychology. Vol 20(4), Jul 1984, 697-706. The second is "Automatic Stereotyping" Mahzarin R. Banaji and Curtis D. Hardin, 1996, Association for Psychological Science.
No one is requiring anyone's political beliefs to mess with kids' minds. You are utterly missing the point and seem to be claiming that psychological studies are somehow evil if they use clever ways to see how children are primed by words. The point of this sort of study is that it shows that language use can have subtle impacts on how people think. In those studies, even when you change the wording, pictures of males are still much more likely to be drawn than females. The point that I am making, is that language use can impact how people think, even in subtle ways, so it makes sense to try to use language that distorts that as little as possible.
Um, what? You seem to be claiming that it is manipulative to use the term "firefighter." If so, please explain how this is at all manipulative. The point is that subtle cues exist for making people think about sex and gender. This is an example where we can demonstrate such a cue in a controlled setting. Because you know, science likes to do that. There's no largescale manipulation here. Simply an observation that children are more gender neutral when they are not primed with gendered words.
I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.
You are missing the point. Sometimes the kids draw an obviously female or obviously male individual. The ratio of that changes when one uses "firefighter" as opposed to "fireman." This occurs for a variety of similar examples (police officer v. policeman for example). So the use of the man ending substantially alters thinking about sex and gender at a very subtle level.
Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!
Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of evidence that small differences in wording can have a lot of impact. For example, if little children are asked to draw a picture of a "firefighter" they will be more likely to draw a female than if they are asked to draw a picture of a "fireman." So even if "man" can be used to mean person, subtle human irrationality still has an impact.
How long until Richard Dawkins will be sainted? 2510?
Considering that being a saint means that the Church is very sure the person got to heaven, my guess is that isn't going to happen. There are only two scenarios which I can imagine would alter this. 1) Dawkins could have a complete change of heart and publicly convert to Catholicism. 2) The Catholic Church could change its doctrines to some form of universal salvation and declare that all dead people to be saints or close enough for it to include Dawkins. Neither of these seems like a likely scenario, with 2 being marginally more likely than 1.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and all the other important figures during this time period were doing. For example, a lot of people don't realize that the system constructed by Copernicus still had epicycles. It was more aesthetically pleasing and slightly simpler mathematically than the Ptolemaic system but it wasn't actually more accurate. It wasn't until Kepler came around that a system that was genuinely superior in both simplicity and accurate. Also, people seem to forget that a major reason for Copernicus' work was that the Church wanted a more accurate astronomical system because they needed it to calculate the dates for Easter and other issues. And the Roman Catholic Church didn't even take a negative stance to heliocentrism until many years after Copernicus. Martin Luther and some of the other early Protestants reacted negatively far years before the Church did. The actual history is much more complicated than the standard narratives make it out to be. There are two excellent books on this topic. The first is Thomas Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution" which presents the history pretty well although it gets filtered slightly through Kuhn's philosophy. The second is Alan Hirschfield's "Parallax" which takes a broader outlook over a much longer time period but with less detail on the period directly after Copernicus. Both books are very good reads.
Simply put, no. The word wasn't at all common before Kuhn. He used it in a very narrow form and popularized it. You will note that very often when people do use the word paradigm they talk about "paradigm shifts" and other terms which come directly from Kuhn's work. They are attempting to use the popular association without understanding the technical meaning. If one is using the word in another setting then there's almost always a simpler word that will do.
From a perspective of having an informed populace, this is probably a good thing. A major aspect of local TV is local TV news which is just awful. Full of emotional strings, whether fear over the latest thing kids are doing, or heartwarming stories about a local cat, they have nothing substantial. And it shows. See for example this study http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/319.pdf which shows that people in the US who get their news regularly from local TV are less informed than any other group of people excepting the people who have no regular news source.
I think he's incorrect in three respects: 1) He underestimates the level within people in different paradigms can talk to each other (for example, he tried to argue at one point that someone in a Newtonian paradigm can't really talk to someone in a relativistic paradigm) 2) He underestimates the degree to which people can during crisis choose one paradigm or another based on objective considerations (such as based on simplicity, ability to account for evidence, degree of consistency with other stable paradigms in related fields, etc.) 3) He underestimates the degree to which genuine progress can occur. (In the postscrip to the later editions of Structure he argues that he's been misinterpreted and that he believes in some limited forms of scientific progress. But I think even the level given in that postscript is an underestimate). He especially fails to acknowledge that in the long-arc eventually new paradigms become finer approximations for predicting actual behavior of reality. Discussing these issues in detail would require a lot more than a short slashdot comment.
Paradigm is a valid word. It is just painfully misused and overused. The word first came into wide use after Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." In that book he argues that different branches of science go through successive paradigms which encompass their general framework for understanding their matter of study. The vast majority of science then occurs within these consensus attitudes. People now use paradigm in such a general way as to be close to meaningless. For example, people talk about technological paradigms which makes no sense in a Kuhnian framework. Similarly, people talk about paradigms in the humanities while Kuhn spent quite a bit of effort explaining and showing how the humanities don't form paradigms and undergo paradigm shifts in the same way at all, in that consensus never occurs for any overarching explanatory structure. Don't blame the word paradigm. Blame the people who use it as a buzzword.
Also, while I'm at it, I strongly recommend that any interested Slashdotter read Kuhn's book. He's an excellent writer who makes a strong case. I think he's incorrect but it is a very enjoyable read and one get's to learn a lot of neat historical facts that are often overlooked or not discussed in standard pop explanations of the history of science. He also wrote "The Copernican Revolution" which is also very readable and provides a very different view of the switch from geocentrism to heliocentrism then that which is often presented.
Slashdot Mirror
While many of your points are correct and the person you are replying to is a bit of an ass, let's not forget that these cuts occurred under Bush. See for example http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0502-aaas.html. Part of the logic here seemed to almost be "I don't believe that climate change is a problem or is occurring and if I cut your funding you won't be able to show that it is bad." Or something very close to that. This particular problem really can be blamed on the Bush admin.
I know two of the people who were in Spellbound as kids (Emily Stagg and Harry Altman), and I've a met a third. This makes me wonder if this is evidence the set of high-achievers in US society is a) much smaller than one might think and b) determined at a surprisingly early age. I know, tiny anecdotal evidence but still I wonder...
The numbers given there are roughly accurate, so I'm not sure what point you are making about 2% as opposed to 3.7%. The basic point stands that the theist fraction of US scientists doesn't look the US general pop but much closer to the general world population. I agree that your point about scientists in the US coming from other countries is likely strongly impacting these results. As to why one would expect the majority of scientists to be atheists, I have no idea, but it is very clear that even with her data and the spin, the fraction of scientists which are atheists is much higher than the general population, even of the world population. Moreover, the fraction which are theists is much lower than the general fraction of the population that is theistic. Trying to make a big deal about the fact that one doesn't have a majority who are atheists is totally missing the point.
This is a sample of scientists in the US. Moreover, the claim that evangelicals are small fraction of the Christian population is simply not the case either in the US or globally. About a quarter of the US self-identify as evangelical and about a 1 our of 15 people worldwide is evangelical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelicalism. And again, the striking aspect about the evangelicals is that the proportion is lower than what one would expect. By her survey, 28% of US scientists believe in God. But only 2% are evangelical. That means that fraction expected by a rough proportion of US theists is about about 3 times less common than one would expect. In contrast, the proportion closely resembles that in the global population. Based on this data and other related data and patterns, I'd expect that if you performed the same studies on a global sample you'd find that that the fraction of scientists which are evangelical would be much lower than 1 in 15.
Ecklund is spinning the data, possibly to fit her pet hypothesis. For example, she claims that about half of scientists are "traditionally religious" but by her own data, 34% are atheists, 30% are strong agnostics, and 8% are believe in a higher power which they explicitly don't believe is "God." Given that, it is very hard to claim that half the scientific population is traditionally religious when three quarters aren't even theists. There are also some odd choices she makes in her definition of scientists. So for example, she includes all the social sciences but not mathematicians (something which I philosophically agree with but find sociologically suspect). There's an excellent analysis of her data by Jason Rosenhouse of her data at http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2010/05/scientists_and_religion.php. The most striking thing about the data, regardless of how Ecklund wants to spin it as showing scientists are religious, is how much less religious scientists are than the general population. Atheism is much more common among scientists than among the general population, as is agnosticism. Moreover, what religions are common if one looks at the theistic breakdown is very different. Evangelical Christianity for example is a much smaller percentage then one would get from a representative sample of theists.
Before you accuse other people of ignorance it might help to do a little research. By many estimates this spill is much larger than the Exxon Valdez spill. See for example http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100527/us_nm/us_oil_rig_flowrate.
Atlantis will be on standby for the remaining shuttle missions as a rescue vehicle. Atlantis may yet fly again, but we should all hope it does not.
The kid's been attached to it for 9 months, and the last 2 minutes make _THAT_ much difference?
The cord is then under very different circumstances. At that point it is no longer bathed in a protective moistening medium and it is no longer getting nearly as much oxygen. Cutting the cord further reduces the oxygen level and gives it more surface area to dry out.
You don't always know when someone happens to have a camera and you don't realize it. The problem is that even if one wouldn't mind having a picture of one in that situation, the easy access of Facebook makes the situation much worse, especially when people who would be moral enough not to blackmail (i.e. most humans) are still inconsiderate enough to not realize that you don't want the picture of you up on their bloody public profile. It is thus easier to have fun and have the Facebook profile than have less fun and still incur some risk. Having the profile solves this much better than not having it.
If you aren't on Facebook you can't keep track of friends putting up junk involving you. It is possible on Facebook to tag or make comments about people who are not members. Thus for example, say a friend takes a picture of a few people drunk and you are one of the people in the picture. The next day, if they put the picture up and tag people in it, you can untag yourself and drop them a note. If you aren't on Facebook, they could include your name and you won't know. This risk is especially severe for people around college age. And there are enough people around that one can't simply trust all of them not to be inconsiderate idiots. Thus, as long as lots of people are on Facebook, one has a direct incentive to stay there.
That's stupid at multiple levels. There are a lot of jobs where there are differences in ratios of who has the jobs. But that doesn't mean we have to use language that absolutely reflects on those, especially as those can change from location or setting. This sort of study isn't a point about using specifically the word firefighter (and to think it is is borderline idiotic). The upshot is that these words do have subtle impact on how people think. That applies to many different settings. It simply happens to be that this sort of example is one that it is easy to test for. You can do the same thing with other words where there isn't nearly as much the same disparity in who has the professions and you get the same result. Focusing so much on firefighters is utterly missing the point.
In Chinese culture, 8 is considered a very lucky number. People have bid very large amounts of money to have license plates with just 8 on them. See for example http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2009-07/02/content_8345712.htm But this number is all 8s except for a single 0. Maybe it is only lucky in China?
This will have an interesting impact on webmasters. If someone clicks through from a secure Google search to your webpage, the referral data is not given. That means that the person who runs the website will not only not see what the search term was they won't even see that it came from a Google search. I'm not sure how that will impact people. But if enough people use secure search, it may cause people to have to do a lot of guesswork about how much traffic they are getting from Google searches.
I don't have a citation for this study in particular, having heard about this in a cog sci class. Google searching doesn't turn it up directly (the signal to noise ratio for gender language issues is really poor since almost everyone just cases on ideological grounds). However, I can give citations for two other studies with similar results: The first is "Children's understanding of sexist language" Hyde, Janet S. Developmental Psychology. Vol 20(4), Jul 1984, 697-706. The second is "Automatic Stereotyping" Mahzarin R. Banaji and Curtis D. Hardin, 1996, Association for Psychological Science.
No one is requiring anyone's political beliefs to mess with kids' minds. You are utterly missing the point and seem to be claiming that psychological studies are somehow evil if they use clever ways to see how children are primed by words. The point of this sort of study is that it shows that language use can have subtle impacts on how people think. In those studies, even when you change the wording, pictures of males are still much more likely to be drawn than females. The point that I am making, is that language use can impact how people think, even in subtle ways, so it makes sense to try to use language that distorts that as little as possible.
Um, what? You seem to be claiming that it is manipulative to use the term "firefighter." If so, please explain how this is at all manipulative. The point is that subtle cues exist for making people think about sex and gender. This is an example where we can demonstrate such a cue in a controlled setting. Because you know, science likes to do that. There's no largescale manipulation here. Simply an observation that children are more gender neutral when they are not primed with gendered words.
I would say the irrational thing is to draw a female fireman, whatever the reason.
You are missing the point. Sometimes the kids draw an obviously female or obviously male individual. The ratio of that changes when one uses "firefighter" as opposed to "fireman." This occurs for a variety of similar examples (police officer v. policeman for example). So the use of the man ending substantially alters thinking about sex and gender at a very subtle level.
Look, there's nothing wrong with "man". It referred to "human" long before it referred to "male human". Just live with it: the word is man-hours!
Unfortunately, there's a fair bit of evidence that small differences in wording can have a lot of impact. For example, if little children are asked to draw a picture of a "firefighter" they will be more likely to draw a female than if they are asked to draw a picture of a "fireman." So even if "man" can be used to mean person, subtle human irrationality still has an impact.
How long until Richard Dawkins will be sainted? 2510?
Considering that being a saint means that the Church is very sure the person got to heaven, my guess is that isn't going to happen. There are only two scenarios which I can imagine would alter this. 1) Dawkins could have a complete change of heart and publicly convert to Catholicism. 2) The Catholic Church could change its doctrines to some form of universal salvation and declare that all dead people to be saints or close enough for it to include Dawkins. Neither of these seems like a likely scenario, with 2 being marginally more likely than 1.
Neptune and Uranus were not discovered until after Copernicus. So it makes sense to not include them on the stone.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and all the other important figures during this time period were doing. For example, a lot of people don't realize that the system constructed by Copernicus still had epicycles. It was more aesthetically pleasing and slightly simpler mathematically than the Ptolemaic system but it wasn't actually more accurate. It wasn't until Kepler came around that a system that was genuinely superior in both simplicity and accurate. Also, people seem to forget that a major reason for Copernicus' work was that the Church wanted a more accurate astronomical system because they needed it to calculate the dates for Easter and other issues. And the Roman Catholic Church didn't even take a negative stance to heliocentrism until many years after Copernicus. Martin Luther and some of the other early Protestants reacted negatively far years before the Church did. The actual history is much more complicated than the standard narratives make it out to be. There are two excellent books on this topic. The first is Thomas Kuhn's "The Copernican Revolution" which presents the history pretty well although it gets filtered slightly through Kuhn's philosophy. The second is Alan Hirschfield's "Parallax" which takes a broader outlook over a much longer time period but with less detail on the period directly after Copernicus. Both books are very good reads.
Simply put, no. The word wasn't at all common before Kuhn. He used it in a very narrow form and popularized it. You will note that very often when people do use the word paradigm they talk about "paradigm shifts" and other terms which come directly from Kuhn's work. They are attempting to use the popular association without understanding the technical meaning. If one is using the word in another setting then there's almost always a simpler word that will do.
From a perspective of having an informed populace, this is probably a good thing. A major aspect of local TV is local TV news which is just awful. Full of emotional strings, whether fear over the latest thing kids are doing, or heartwarming stories about a local cat, they have nothing substantial. And it shows. See for example this study http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/319.pdf which shows that people in the US who get their news regularly from local TV are less informed than any other group of people excepting the people who have no regular news source.
I think he's incorrect in three respects: 1) He underestimates the level within people in different paradigms can talk to each other (for example, he tried to argue at one point that someone in a Newtonian paradigm can't really talk to someone in a relativistic paradigm) 2) He underestimates the degree to which people can during crisis choose one paradigm or another based on objective considerations (such as based on simplicity, ability to account for evidence, degree of consistency with other stable paradigms in related fields, etc.) 3) He underestimates the degree to which genuine progress can occur. (In the postscrip to the later editions of Structure he argues that he's been misinterpreted and that he believes in some limited forms of scientific progress. But I think even the level given in that postscript is an underestimate). He especially fails to acknowledge that in the long-arc eventually new paradigms become finer approximations for predicting actual behavior of reality. Discussing these issues in detail would require a lot more than a short slashdot comment.
Paradigm is a valid word. It is just painfully misused and overused. The word first came into wide use after Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." In that book he argues that different branches of science go through successive paradigms which encompass their general framework for understanding their matter of study. The vast majority of science then occurs within these consensus attitudes. People now use paradigm in such a general way as to be close to meaningless. For example, people talk about technological paradigms which makes no sense in a Kuhnian framework. Similarly, people talk about paradigms in the humanities while Kuhn spent quite a bit of effort explaining and showing how the humanities don't form paradigms and undergo paradigm shifts in the same way at all, in that consensus never occurs for any overarching explanatory structure. Don't blame the word paradigm. Blame the people who use it as a buzzword.
Also, while I'm at it, I strongly recommend that any interested Slashdotter read Kuhn's book. He's an excellent writer who makes a strong case. I think he's incorrect but it is a very enjoyable read and one get's to learn a lot of neat historical facts that are often overlooked or not discussed in standard pop explanations of the history of science. He also wrote "The Copernican Revolution" which is also very readable and provides a very different view of the switch from geocentrism to heliocentrism then that which is often presented.