Re:Strawman based on bastardized belief system
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 1
It really makes you wonder what the non-populistized seventeen people later word of mouth versions of the original western religious texts were actually trying to say..
Going way off topic....I used to wonder that, but now I don't care. Because of the cultural assumption "Jesus is Lord", it seems arrogant or even a little risky to say "Jesus was full of shit". So people say that the teaching of Jesus was cool, but his disciples and later folllowers twisted everything. And maybe there's truth to that. But if its like everything else in our world, it had at least subtle flaws from the start, even if those flaws were exploited and expanded later. How to sort it all out? It doesn't matter. Just read what's left, if you're inclined to, and take what you can from it. If you learn something true and valuable, that's independent of whether what you learned is what the original writer really meant. Personally I found Gospel of Thomas to be a lot more worthwhile than the four in the Bible, but no doubt its full of half-truths and distortions also. If great truths have been 'lost', as they no doubt have been, we'll discover and derive them again when we're ready for them.
Other members of my family associate colors with sounds, but its not a very prominent part of their thought process. At least not in an obvious way.
I do not, probably because I have no "mind's eye" while awake - my visual imagination is almost completely driven by whatever is coming in through my eyes. On the flip side, while asleep I imagine very vividly and with a fair amount of control.
I agree, it sounds like there might be something mechanically funny with your eye, it might not even be your brain that's doing that.
Sounds like you and your wife might have interesting kids.
Some people claim to be able to see people's 'auras'. Maybe they're also seeing E&M fields.
Or maybe its confirmation bias, as suggested by geekoid. Or maybe they're lying for gain or attention, as so many are prone to do. Or maybe they're really seeing auras, whatever those are.
Scientists typically study things that can be measured and repeated reliably. If your senses do something that's unusual and difficult to demonstrate to others, there's a class of people that assumes you're probably delusional. Its different from their experience, therefore it must be unreal or unimportant. And of course a very large number of people are delusional. But I also know that there are very many real phenomena that aren't generally recognized or understood by scientists. So it does not surprise me at all to hear that some people can see E&M fields.
OK, I'll buy that. The AC post was still an overstatement though.
Incidentally, my current yard had about 10 feet of dirt removed before the house was built. The first couple of years there were no ants or worms, nothing. Much of the surface clay came from underneath sheets of rock that were dug up for the basement, which based on the fossils in them are about 450 million years old. (I don't know if the clay had been under the rocks for that long, or was carried down through cracks later, though based on the striking blue color of both clay and rocks there wasn't a lot of water moving stuff around, or else there would have been oxidized iron present.) After a couple of years worms, ants, and lots of other bugs showed up in large numbers. The lawn still isn't extremely healthy, though I'm not sure how much of that is because of the bad dirt and how much its because of all the buried rocks.
My comments on roundup were based on my experience using it as a farm hand, though my experience doesn't contradict your statement.
In any case, we're all in agreement about Monsanto. In my mind, their worst evil is the infertility of their seed. They have also been involved with disposing of toxic waste by reclassifying it as fertilizer, which is unregulated.
This is right, roundup does not prevent non-resistent plants from growing where it was applied. So yes, Monsanto is evil, but the grandparent AC claim is false, unless AC wants to log in and clarify.
Are you Chinese? If not, do you actually know very many Chinese people? Your world seems somehow theoretical.
There are far more than a "few more" rich people in China. A very large portion of the country is richer, even while a very large part is still impoverished.
Do you actually know what Chinese people want? Very few I've met think the way you do about human rights. To some extent that's their tragedy, for the reasons that you outline, but its not as if the system they live in has been imposed by an alien elite, and all you have to do is change the governing structure and everything will be miraculously better. China is deeply civilized in some ways, while also being deeply corrupt. Sadly, in a general sense people have pretty much what they deserve, and the whole society will have to continue to struggle to change itself in deep and difficult ways for things to get better. Just like everywhere else. Russia got rid of the communists, and Russia, while greatly changed, is also still a lot like it was in some ways, because its Russia. Other states in eastern Europe threw out their communists and are much less corrupt now, because it wasn't as much a part of their culture. China is China, and its not going to suddenly become like Sweden by changing the government. Its a struggle, and its their struggle, not ours. Its our business only insofar as we're involved by having contracted China to manufacture all of our stuff. But that doesn't mean that they share our goals.
I think you're distorting the picture a little bit. What you describe is true, and in the way that you describe, but not to quite that extent. You say that the majority of Chinese are becoming slaves. My wife's family consists of peasants, mixed with professionals who's parents were peasants. To some extent they are slaves, but they were slaves before, and in many ways its getting better. Moreover in a few ways they actually have more freedom than Americans. Money worship appears to be getting worse in China, but its getting worse in the US also. Things are bad in China, but I don't see how it can be said to be worse than during the Cultural Revolution.
Communism is unaccountable, unbalanced power, not in all ways different from an extreme corporate monopoly. I'm no fan of the AFL-CIO, but if you equate it with Maoism, you're either a knave or an idiot.
who said they worked 12 hour shifts with no days off.
The excuses about labor supply and demand, and how the factory is an improvement over a Chinese farm, are bullshit. If it was really like that, they could cut pay in half, use 4 shifts instead of 2 (or whatever the current scheme is), and give the workers an option of working double. Or some other such improvement. As it is, its just an abuse of power. As screwed up as organized labor has been in the US, this is what happens when you don't have it at all.
And yes, Apple is culpable, and so are all of us that own products by companies who use Foxconn. When a company is making profits, and its executives are earning large salaries and bonuses, the market isn't forcing them to do what they do. They can always scale back the size of their mansions a little bit.
The overwhelming majority of people are inclined to make stuff up and pretend its true. And there's no way to demonstrate to most people that scientists as a group are not like this also. Some people trust scientists as a matter of faith. A very few become subject matter experts and verify for themselves that the science is accurate. Many people fall somewhere in between. For the rest, skepticism is a fairly rational outlook, given the information they have.
For people to rationally trust scientists, they themselves would have to be honest. And that would be a fairly radical change.
It takes work and pain to face hard and unpleasant realities head-on.
Some people talk about integrity, it seems kind of cool, like being the hero in a Mel Gibson movie. But they just watch the movie, its too risky in real life. Most people act with personal integrity when its advantageous to themselves. But I have never met a person who declined to sell out when the "work and pain" came.
I think those are ugly. Makes me a little more sympathetic to the opponents now. I still say build them though.
The way we use oil and coal is insane. The stuff has been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years, and we're extracting it and burning it in a few hundred. A lot of it for uses that are at best frivolous. Even though wind power is a tiny, tiny step in another direction, at least its something.
By the way, for those of you who think the burial ground objection is astoundingly stupid....You might consider the possibility that you're too arrogant to grasp your own ignorance. There's a lot to nature that isn't captured by your model of it, which depends inordinately on what's easy to measure in a physics lab. By all means trample on the burial grounds and build the windmills, I agree. But it might be healthy to admit the possibility that there's a tradeoff, a sacrifice.
Based on what I've seen of how the system works, that sounds entirely plausible.
Of the people in my life who at first appeared to have been screwed over by the system, all eventually proved unwilling to face their problems honestly, and would mislead by leaving out important details when telling their stories. Things ended badly for at least one of these people, and I worry about the others.
I was completely innocent when I was arrested a few years ago, for alledgedly stealing something that the accusor valued at $60. It cost me $3500 and (indirectly) my job, though of course that's nothing compared to 5 years of relative freedom. I went for a jury trial, since 12 people seemed safer than trusting one judge, particularly if the judge was the same one that wrote the arrest warrant. Also, even if a jury is mostly stupid it only takes one guy to acquit, if he has the spine to stand up to the other 11. (Does anyone have any backbone any more?) Eventually, in my case, the prosecution just threw in the towel. Obviously I had a lot less at stake then you. I might still have fought it even with my whole life at stake, rather than plead guilty to something I didn't do. Though that would have depended on how strong the phoney case looked, and I would have had to take my wife and kids into account. As it was, I had evidence of my innocence.
For myself, I figure I deserved what happened in the sense that my government surveillance technology R&D job at the time was in my view considerably more immoral than what I was accused of doing. So I took it as impetus to try to find something better. It remains to be seen whether I'll have any success with that, since I live in Ohio and it seems most of the manufacturing economy has been shipped overseas. This month I'm not even working.
I would imagine you've got a pretty high hill to climb in that regard, since even without the felony conviction, just being 5 years behind in technology is almost a career death sentence. And, as I have found out in the past, once you've worked for a high salary people usually won't even hire you for low-wage jobs, since you don't fit the mold any more. I wish you the best.
It seems you dodged the question. Pleading guilty and being guilty are of course not at all the same concept. And if the actual facts were different in some details from the story you were convicted on, that's not the same as being innocent either. To illustrate, suppose that I got convicted for murder, then pretended that I got screwed because I used a different weapon than I was accused of using.
Of course its your own business what you did. Until you want to use your story to make a point about the corruption of the justice system, then people are going to want you to be straight with them.
I don't think a person deserves 5 years prison for blowing up a toilet. Maybe a few months.
I know law-and-order types who dishonestly squander hundreds of thousands of federal "research" dollars every year. Its stealing, but they pretend otherwise, and of course the state will never punish them for it. The law is there to protect the strong against the weak, not for justice.
At the same time, its bogus to claim that you deserve to get away with something because the evidence against you was weak. If you did it, then you're guilty. If the punishment does not fit the crime that's a separate issue.
In my experience, in EE journals it is fairly easy to find work that is essentially meaningless but spun so as to appear not to be. The situation is better in some fields and worse in others. Its not fraud in the sense of results being outright fabricated or plagarized. So people who are deeply invested in the system tend to justify it, where intent to deceive doesn't matter as long as it passes a sort of legalistic Clintonesque definition of honesty. Or they admit that its lying, but argue that its still better than what a lot of other people do for a living. Stealing work from more junior researchers within ones own group is also considered just fine, as long as its done in a way that's considered "standard" or "commonly accepted practice".
Depending to some degree on the niche that one is in, its possible to find funding for honest research, just more difficult. I also think that a bunch of honest people working in the same organization could accomplish a lot relative to their competitors, because of the inefficiencies of corruption. So the answer isn't to reject the system, but to make modest improvements by working in it the right way.
We engineers generally have no idea what's going on
One former coworker's theory is that lack of communication is how this type of manager maintains their position. "Knowing what's going on" is the only resource they have that sets them apart from the much lower paid people they stand upon, so they guard it jealously.
I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.
Except that 'getting stuff done' is not necessarily how they spend the other 38 hours. At a company I worked at recently, much of the remaining 38 hours was spent maneuvering for political advantage. The reason there are fewer meetings isn't necessarily because the management is more efficient, but because they're not bothering to manage. And as bad as micro-management is, every-man-for-himself doesn't work very well on most projects either.
AFAIK most CPU and GPU design still happens in the USA (AMD, Intel, nVidia) and Canada (Matrox, ATI... we used to have AdLib and Gravis for entry-level and kick-ass soundcards too).
Production of the hardware is another story.
Yes, and I agree its a good thing. That's a fairly narrow slice of the economy though. And getting into one of those places takes a very specific work history and skill set, or nepotism, neither of is within reach of most tech people who have worked in other areas.
As I see it, when people lie its generally if not always because they're trying to get something from someone else that the person would not freely give if they were not deceived. In other words, a lie is an attempt to trick another person into doing something which that person perceives to be wrong or against their own best interests. So almost all lies hurt people, even if the small ones don't hurt very much. And even though situations come up, usually due to past lying, where you've got two harmful alternatives and the lie isn't as bad as the other option.
Its true that this isn't the same as the habitual, almost perpetual lying that I was calling pathological though.
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It really makes you wonder what the non-populistized seventeen people later word of mouth versions of the original western religious texts were actually trying to say..
Going way off topic....I used to wonder that, but now I don't care. Because of the cultural assumption "Jesus is Lord", it seems arrogant or even a little risky to say "Jesus was full of shit". So people say that the teaching of Jesus was cool, but his disciples and later folllowers twisted everything. And maybe there's truth to that. But if its like everything else in our world, it had at least subtle flaws from the start, even if those flaws were exploited and expanded later. How to sort it all out? It doesn't matter. Just read what's left, if you're inclined to, and take what you can from it. If you learn something true and valuable, that's independent of whether what you learned is what the original writer really meant. Personally I found Gospel of Thomas to be a lot more worthwhile than the four in the Bible, but no doubt its full of half-truths and distortions also. If great truths have been 'lost', as they no doubt have been, we'll discover and derive them again when we're ready for them.
Under the guise of banning hysteria reporting, china bans anything that makes corrupt public officials look bad.
Other members of my family associate colors with sounds, but its not a very prominent part of their thought process. At least not in an obvious way.
I do not, probably because I have no "mind's eye" while awake - my visual imagination is almost completely driven by whatever is coming in through my eyes. On the flip side, while asleep I imagine very vividly and with a fair amount of control.
I agree, it sounds like there might be something mechanically funny with your eye, it might not even be your brain that's doing that.
Sounds like you and your wife might have interesting kids.
Some people claim to be able to see people's 'auras'. Maybe they're also seeing E&M fields.
Or maybe its confirmation bias, as suggested by geekoid. Or maybe they're lying for gain or attention, as so many are prone to do. Or maybe they're really seeing auras, whatever those are.
Scientists typically study things that can be measured and repeated reliably. If your senses do something that's unusual and difficult to demonstrate to others, there's a class of people that assumes you're probably delusional. Its different from their experience, therefore it must be unreal or unimportant. And of course a very large number of people are delusional. But I also know that there are very many real phenomena that aren't generally recognized or understood by scientists. So it does not surprise me at all to hear that some people can see E&M fields.
though I have never used either service. This tells me enough about both companies that I will never use either.
OK, I'll buy that. The AC post was still an overstatement though.
Incidentally, my current yard had about 10 feet of dirt removed before the house was built. The first couple of years there were no ants or worms, nothing. Much of the surface clay came from underneath sheets of rock that were dug up for the basement, which based on the fossils in them are about 450 million years old. (I don't know if the clay had been under the rocks for that long, or was carried down through cracks later, though based on the striking blue color of both clay and rocks there wasn't a lot of water moving stuff around, or else there would have been oxidized iron present.) After a couple of years worms, ants, and lots of other bugs showed up in large numbers. The lawn still isn't extremely healthy, though I'm not sure how much of that is because of the bad dirt and how much its because of all the buried rocks.
My comments on roundup were based on my experience using it as a farm hand, though my experience doesn't contradict your statement.
In any case, we're all in agreement about Monsanto. In my mind, their worst evil is the infertility of their seed. They have also been involved with disposing of toxic waste by reclassifying it as fertilizer, which is unregulated.
This is right, roundup does not prevent non-resistent plants from growing where it was applied. So yes, Monsanto is evil, but the grandparent AC claim is false, unless AC wants to log in and clarify.
Are you Chinese? If not, do you actually know very many Chinese people? Your world seems somehow theoretical.
There are far more than a "few more" rich people in China. A very large portion of the country is richer, even while a very large part is still impoverished.
Do you actually know what Chinese people want? Very few I've met think the way you do about human rights. To some extent that's their tragedy, for the reasons that you outline, but its not as if the system they live in has been imposed by an alien elite, and all you have to do is change the governing structure and everything will be miraculously better. China is deeply civilized in some ways, while also being deeply corrupt. Sadly, in a general sense people have pretty much what they deserve, and the whole society will have to continue to struggle to change itself in deep and difficult ways for things to get better. Just like everywhere else. Russia got rid of the communists, and Russia, while greatly changed, is also still a lot like it was in some ways, because its Russia. Other states in eastern Europe threw out their communists and are much less corrupt now, because it wasn't as much a part of their culture. China is China, and its not going to suddenly become like Sweden by changing the government. Its a struggle, and its their struggle, not ours. Its our business only insofar as we're involved by having contracted China to manufacture all of our stuff. But that doesn't mean that they share our goals.
That's how I see it anyway.
I think you're distorting the picture a little bit. What you describe is true, and in the way that you describe, but not to quite that extent. You say that the majority of Chinese are becoming slaves. My wife's family consists of peasants, mixed with professionals who's parents were peasants. To some extent they are slaves, but they were slaves before, and in many ways its getting better. Moreover in a few ways they actually have more freedom than Americans. Money worship appears to be getting worse in China, but its getting worse in the US also. Things are bad in China, but I don't see how it can be said to be worse than during the Cultural Revolution.
Communism is unaccountable, unbalanced power, not in all ways different from an extreme corporate monopoly. I'm no fan of the AFL-CIO, but if you equate it with Maoism, you're either a knave or an idiot.
who said they worked 12 hour shifts with no days off.
The excuses about labor supply and demand, and how the factory is an improvement over a Chinese farm, are bullshit. If it was really like that, they could cut pay in half, use 4 shifts instead of 2 (or whatever the current scheme is), and give the workers an option of working double. Or some other such improvement. As it is, its just an abuse of power. As screwed up as organized labor has been in the US, this is what happens when you don't have it at all.
And yes, Apple is culpable, and so are all of us that own products by companies who use Foxconn. When a company is making profits, and its executives are earning large salaries and bonuses, the market isn't forcing them to do what they do. They can always scale back the size of their mansions a little bit.
The overwhelming majority of people are inclined to make stuff up and pretend its true. And there's no way to demonstrate to most people that scientists as a group are not like this also. Some people trust scientists as a matter of faith. A very few become subject matter experts and verify for themselves that the science is accurate. Many people fall somewhere in between. For the rest, skepticism is a fairly rational outlook, given the information they have.
For people to rationally trust scientists, they themselves would have to be honest. And that would be a fairly radical change.
It takes work and pain to face hard and unpleasant realities head-on.
Some people talk about integrity, it seems kind of cool, like being the hero in a Mel Gibson movie. But they just watch the movie, its too risky in real life. Most people act with personal integrity when its advantageous to themselves. But I have never met a person who declined to sell out when the "work and pain" came.
I think those are ugly. Makes me a little more sympathetic to the opponents now. I still say build them though.
The way we use oil and coal is insane. The stuff has been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years, and we're extracting it and burning it in a few hundred. A lot of it for uses that are at best frivolous. Even though wind power is a tiny, tiny step in another direction, at least its something.
By the way, for those of you who think the burial ground objection is astoundingly stupid....You might consider the possibility that you're too arrogant to grasp your own ignorance. There's a lot to nature that isn't captured by your model of it, which depends inordinately on what's easy to measure in a physics lab. By all means trample on the burial grounds and build the windmills, I agree. But it might be healthy to admit the possibility that there's a tradeoff, a sacrifice.
I actually committed no crime.
Better?
Based on what I've seen of how the system works, that sounds entirely plausible.
Of the people in my life who at first appeared to have been screwed over by the system, all eventually proved unwilling to face their problems honestly, and would mislead by leaving out important details when telling their stories. Things ended badly for at least one of these people, and I worry about the others.
I was completely innocent when I was arrested a few years ago, for alledgedly stealing something that the accusor valued at $60. It cost me $3500 and (indirectly) my job, though of course that's nothing compared to 5 years of relative freedom. I went for a jury trial, since 12 people seemed safer than trusting one judge, particularly if the judge was the same one that wrote the arrest warrant. Also, even if a jury is mostly stupid it only takes one guy to acquit, if he has the spine to stand up to the other 11. (Does anyone have any backbone any more?) Eventually, in my case, the prosecution just threw in the towel. Obviously I had a lot less at stake then you. I might still have fought it even with my whole life at stake, rather than plead guilty to something I didn't do. Though that would have depended on how strong the phoney case looked, and I would have had to take my wife and kids into account. As it was, I had evidence of my innocence.
For myself, I figure I deserved what happened in the sense that my government surveillance technology R&D job at the time was in my view considerably more immoral than what I was accused of doing. So I took it as impetus to try to find something better. It remains to be seen whether I'll have any success with that, since I live in Ohio and it seems most of the manufacturing economy has been shipped overseas. This month I'm not even working.
I would imagine you've got a pretty high hill to climb in that regard, since even without the felony conviction, just being 5 years behind in technology is almost a career death sentence. And, as I have found out in the past, once you've worked for a high salary people usually won't even hire you for low-wage jobs, since you don't fit the mold any more. I wish you the best.
Pleading guilty and being guilty are of course not at all the same concept.
Or rather I should say that they are only partially the same concept, and pretty much everyone understands the difference.
It seems you dodged the question. Pleading guilty and being guilty are of course not at all the same concept. And if the actual facts were different in some details from the story you were convicted on, that's not the same as being innocent either. To illustrate, suppose that I got convicted for murder, then pretended that I got screwed because I used a different weapon than I was accused of using.
Of course its your own business what you did. Until you want to use your story to make a point about the corruption of the justice system, then people are going to want you to be straight with them.
So did you do it or not?
I don't think a person deserves 5 years prison for blowing up a toilet. Maybe a few months.
I know law-and-order types who dishonestly squander hundreds of thousands of federal "research" dollars every year. Its stealing, but they pretend otherwise, and of course the state will never punish them for it. The law is there to protect the strong against the weak, not for justice.
At the same time, its bogus to claim that you deserve to get away with something because the evidence against you was weak. If you did it, then you're guilty. If the punishment does not fit the crime that's a separate issue.
In my experience, in EE journals it is fairly easy to find work that is essentially meaningless but spun so as to appear not to be. The situation is better in some fields and worse in others. Its not fraud in the sense of results being outright fabricated or plagarized. So people who are deeply invested in the system tend to justify it, where intent to deceive doesn't matter as long as it passes a sort of legalistic Clintonesque definition of honesty. Or they admit that its lying, but argue that its still better than what a lot of other people do for a living. Stealing work from more junior researchers within ones own group is also considered just fine, as long as its done in a way that's considered "standard" or "commonly accepted practice".
Depending to some degree on the niche that one is in, its possible to find funding for honest research, just more difficult. I also think that a bunch of honest people working in the same organization could accomplish a lot relative to their competitors, because of the inefficiencies of corruption. So the answer isn't to reject the system, but to make modest improvements by working in it the right way.
That's my opinion anyway.
We engineers generally have no idea what's going on
One former coworker's theory is that lack of communication is how this type of manager maintains their position. "Knowing what's going on" is the only resource they have that sets them apart from the much lower paid people they stand upon, so they guard it jealously.
I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.
Except that 'getting stuff done' is not necessarily how they spend the other 38 hours. At a company I worked at recently, much of the remaining 38 hours was spent maneuvering for political advantage. The reason there are fewer meetings isn't necessarily because the management is more efficient, but because they're not bothering to manage. And as bad as micro-management is, every-man-for-himself doesn't work very well on most projects either.
photons have size and mass
Photons do not have mass, though this is somewhat a matter of semantics.
Tool. Lateralus and 10,000 days. And maybe A Perfect Circle. But I agree beyond that.
AFAIK most CPU and GPU design still happens in the USA (AMD, Intel, nVidia) and Canada (Matrox, ATI... we used to have AdLib and Gravis for entry-level and kick-ass soundcards too).
Production of the hardware is another story.
Yes, and I agree its a good thing. That's a fairly narrow slice of the economy though. And getting into one of those places takes a very specific work history and skill set, or nepotism, neither of is within reach of most tech people who have worked in other areas.
As I see it, when people lie its generally if not always because they're trying to get something from someone else that the person would not freely give if they were not deceived. In other words, a lie is an attempt to trick another person into doing something which that person perceives to be wrong or against their own best interests. So almost all lies hurt people, even if the small ones don't hurt very much. And even though situations come up, usually due to past lying, where you've got two harmful alternatives and the lie isn't as bad as the other option.
Its true that this isn't the same as the habitual, almost perpetual lying that I was calling pathological though.