we need real scientists investigating "hauntings," not 2 fat plumbers from Boston, or 3 fay dudes with Sony Handycams.
Some reasons this doesn't happen, as I see it:
Most PhD's are motivated largely by a desire to make their name professionally. For example, Feynman developed a quantum electrodynamics formulation: he could claim responsibility for that, and he was one of an elite group who were even qualified to understand it properly. But to demonstrate paranormal phenomena, the best chance is to start with someone who is relatively good at producing such phenomena. And then the scientist isn't really the star any more, he's more along for the ride, making observations about something that he can neither claim credit for or even understand.
Why would anyone fund such a study? Ideas like "the public good" are never enough, it has to benefit the career of a wealthy investor or government program manager who provides the funds. But it would be very hard to patent and control psychism, there's no potential personal benefit to outweigh the high risk of ridicule and failure. Even if funds were somehow available, it would be a very bad gamble for a scientist, even a scientist who knew that the phenomena in question are real. And by natural section, scientists are those who have a knack for avoiding bad research gambles, the others were not able to continue as scientists. Its not necessary simply to win a grant, there has to be a high probability path for winning repeated grants, otherwise it just doesn't work as a line of research.
Though this thought would make Michael Shermer's head explode, there is an element of collective destiny or providence involved. If proving a phenomena isn't favored by the current state and direction of human development, its not going to happen. And its not clear to me that it would be beneficial to push for it to happen. Look at the mess we've made with a simple idea like money. Or more recently, look what's been done with the internet. The internet seems to me to be like what you would do if you didn't have real ESP, and its been turned into a vehicle for corporate and government control of information. If everyone knew that psychism was real, there would be a proliferation of destructive cults and other con games. And all the people who benefit from control of conventional technology would be opposed to that, so the weight of their thought and effort is against it for that reason also. I'm not saying that I think that proof of paranormal phenomena would on balance be a bad thing, because there would be benefits also, I'm just saying that it might be.
I don't know what a 'location based phenomena' is. An object could physically 'move', or instead it could appear somewhere else as if it had always been there. I think that both would probably be special cases of a more general phenomena though.
OK, I guess you don't mean telekinesis, you mean phenomena that happen in a particular place, like hauntings. I've never watched those TV shows, but based on the few ads I've seen, and by extrapolation from the pseudo-historical bullshit on the same channels, I'm inclined to believe they're almost entirely fabricated. I would guess that those phenomena would be hard to prove too. Get a TV and sound crew in there, and a million viewers, and its just not the same setting any more. I also don't think that the phenomena are independent of the minds of the witnesses, so it comes back to the same problem as with other phenomena.
I think the brain is trying to create a sensate experience that seems to be congruent with the state that its in. The images aren't literally true, they are very strongly determined by a person's religious and cultural expectations.
From that it doesn't follow though that there's nothing at all 'real', about the experience. Just because we've formed a plausible explanation for a superficial aspect of it, doesn't mean there's nothing else going on there.
Its like understanding color. We know a lot about light, and how the eyes work, and some things about the visual cortex. But beyond that its mostly handwaving. People often imagine that we "understand" color because of those things that we do understand. But as far as I understand, the subjective experience of color has nothing directly to do with light, and remains mostly a mystery.
As I see it, to 'scientifically prove' something, you have to be able to control it well enough that it can be reliably reproduced in a lab setting. If there's an uncontrolled component, it has to follow some repeatable 'random' distribution.
But there's an awful lot of grey area between that and a claim that is unfalsifiable and effectively meaningless. A phenomena can have a real and discernible effects without being easily subject to scientific study. An example is precognitive dreaming. A lot of people have experienced such things occasionally. A few people experience such things a lot. Though there are many possible statistical and causal fallacies that people can and do mistake for the real thing, its possible to look for those and separate them with objective evidence. Yet it remains a long way away from being scientifically provable. Even for people who have such experiences almost daily, its not something that they can easily decouple from surrounding influences and force to conform to a designed experiment. And if they could, the experiment would need to be different from what is appropriate for something like a clinical trial, because the nature of what is being studied is different. If a person were to try to test the phenomena like its one of those easily controlled processes that can be neatly decoupled into causal and random components, then they're not going to find it, because that's not what it is.
And of course the issue is complicated by the fact that most people who make extraordinary claims are deluded or dishonest, so that has to be sorted out too.
The market is huge, closer to 50% than 1%, and Apple's sales, while growing rapidly, aren't as large as Samsung's or growing as fast as those of Huawei or ZTE.
It should be obvious that there are a lot of reasons besides poverty to prefer other smart phones over Apple phones.
I agree that management is at the center of the problem since they have the most power, but as with any other corrupt system there's blame from the top to the bottom.
I would have chosen my 'no respect for cowards' wording a little bit differently if I had more time when I posted earlier. What I meant was I agree with the sentiment of the parent poster, but that since nearly everyone sells out it makes it a lot harder for the few who do try to take a stand on something. I might have more compassion for sell-outs than my words implied. But in the end we all pay for it.
Thanks for the encouragement. My experience and skill is well suited to radar and video surveillance, not so much for the data-mining kind. I agree that the tech market in San Diego looks pretty good, and there's a lot of stuff there that I think I'm potentially pretty good at. So far I haven't been able to get the ball rolling, but I'm still trying.
OK, I'm with you. I'm not willing to do surveillance work. I have 'breeded responsibly', with the qualification that it takes ~16 years to raise a child, and few people have jobs that can be trusted that far into the future. I have extensive MS level education in math, CS, and EE, and many years of experience with C, C++, C#, and Python. I've tended to specialize in algorithm development and speed performance optimization. I've been employed in San Jose for several years, but my house and family are in San Diego. I have had no success finding non-surveillance work there, in part because I lack experience in video game and mobile development. Moving my wife and kids to San Jose doesn't work either, because my current job is just barely tenable, my wife can't find work here, and it costs a fortune to raise a family here. I think I could find 'evil' employment in San Diego fairly easily though.
I don't have much respect for 'play it safe' cowards either. But despite all the moral posturing on slashdot, pretty much everyone I've ever met sells out when it comes to making an actual personal sacrifice for the sake of doing what's right. And that determines what the employment climate is, which as I see it can make it fairly hard for honest people to find a way to make a living.
An enemy was needed after the cold war ended. There was terrorism in the 60's, 70's and 80's too, a lot more than there is now by most measures, but they didn't respond in the same way because they had the Soviets. The spectacularly successful attack in 2001 was a very bad luck, or a godsend, depending on how you earn your money. I don't think that Bin Laden has been the problem, it has been us. We've always been this way, even though previously a lot more of it was directed at Native Americans and southern blacks, and not so much at middle class whites. Sow the wind....
I think the fact that they're not fighting it now, when they do have a choice, and that they didn't fight it in 2008 when they had more power in congress, says that their not liking it before had more to do with partisanship than anything else, whether they admitted it or not. No excuses for those bastards, they're as bad as the Republicans on this issue.
Ironically, when I managed a drone surveillance related research project, and about a quarter of my budget disappeared, my company blocked my ability to see where it went. My government customer didn't seem to care very much either.
A reason there's less outrage in congress about the NSA spying, is they've grown so accustomed their own corruption that they don't recognize it anymore. They diss Snowden's integrity as moral preening because that's the only explanation for his behavior they can understand.
The Democrats have been like this for quite a while, they were only posturing when Bush was in office. Pelosi, for example, has pushed funding for surveillance programs for at least a decade.
If they we're actually honest, after a while they would start to see the contradictions. I worked in the surveillance industry, and when I started expressing concerns about corruption, all I got from anyone was crap. They only pretend to be honest.
If it got to the point where it objectively, undeniably mattered, like if you got arrested after having a suspicious pattern of Facebook connections for instance, then they'd be a bit more careful with their online activity. But they still wouldn't stand up for anything, and they wouldn't stand up for you.
A few years ago I got arrested for something I didn't do, and several of my neighbors who knew I was innocent wouldn't help me with an affidavit. The police, prosecutor, and even my own lawyer didn't care if I was innocent or guilty either. It was really an eye opener, not at all like on Law and Order. Then when I left my DoD surveillance job for a 'worse' job elsewhere all I got crap from nearly everybody I knew too. Essentially, "it can't be wrong because everyone else is doing it." For the most part, the few people who expressed a little understanding in either situation were the same kind of people who would have agreed had I argued about NSA surveillance. But if the stakes were higher, I sense that most of them would disappear too. Morally, most Americans are not different from 1930's Germans. Not to say that the US government is fascist, just to say that people aren't the way they see themselves, and that after a half billion years of evolution people haven't changed much in 100 years.
In my experience, remarkably little real work gets done by federal employees, because they can keep their jobs without meeting an objective bottom line. Private contractors work harder, as they compete for the money the federal workers are showering with, but there is a lot of waste in the way their work is assigned and coordinated. The system can still hurt us a lot potentially, but its not half as bad as it would be if it was more efficient.
we were once a great nation, but sadly, I cannot say we are a great nation anymore.
Its what's going on now more screwed up than the alien and sedition acts? Slavery? The Native American genocide? Jim Crow? Standard Oil? Domestic spying under Wilson? McCarthy? I agree its screwed up, and I hate it, but I don't think its new, its just spread around a little bit differently. Even recent developments like the exporting of almost our entire manufacturing economy are in the same profiteering spirit that built that economy to start with.
I worked in neurofeedback for a short time. My 'colleagues' were con artists and sociopaths, in my view, and neurofeedback definitely isn't marketed and sold in an honest manner. But it does do something, it's not simple quackery. A lot of things aren't easy to characterize in a controlled manner, or aren't studied adequately for funding reasons, but are nevertheless real. Whether neurofeedback does more good than harm for most users is a more difficult question. But that's not at all clear for drugs like Ritalin or Valium either, in my view.
Here there's an assumption of competence and good will on the part of many of the people doing the monitoring. Having been in the surveillance business myself for several years, I saw very little evidence of that. Many of them don't understand statistics well enough to see that most suspicious looking behavior will be false positives, and most of the rest don't care. Its all about money, greased with self-righteousness, with a pinch of blood-lust to add flavor.
Bull fucking shit. I own a technology company and I'd hire this guy in a second, and there are thousands of other business owners like me across the country who would do exactly the same. He's got more integrity and courage than just about anyone I've ever met.
He is a media celebrity, but it was the other whistle blowers that the grandparent referred to. Will you hire one of them?
Most whistle blowing doesn't have glamorous results or make newspaper headlines. A person can describe the corruption and incompetence for one particular program, but this never shows the scope of the true problem. Even for Snowden, critics have pointed out that funding for his program wasn't very big, and consequently it can't amount to what a lot of people are making it out to be.
Also keep in mind that an engineer or scientist with a surveillance background is going to have a fairly specific set of skills which isn't necessarily quite what you need. Also, you would be hiring a person who has demonstrated that they will do what they believe is morally right even if its not what you want. Based on what I've seen, I have a hard time believing there are 999 other business besides yours that value that. Most businesses I have direct experience with are either trying to screw their customers or trying to help their customers screw someone else.
But if its true that you're willing to reward integrity, tell me what part of the country you are in. I know two or three software, algorithm, and system admin professionals who's integrity has caused them to need work.
If more school is something that fits you well anyway, and you're happier doing that than whatever you would be doing otherwise, sure. That's not why I went back to school, but I can see the timing of that would work for some people.
If you don't like the rut you're in, you get out of it. If you live in a region of a mobile society that has few to no intelligent, single women in the workforce, and meeting single intelligent women is something that's important to you, then you go to where the women are. Relocating to a company in a bigger city could work for a lot of people, but for me that wouldn't be any more radical than going to graduate school.
Downside: Online relationships are kind of unnatural, you go through various stages of intimacy and its largely in your head. Its easy for the relationship to stray too far from reality, and even if you maintain perfect objectivity intellectually, there's still a kind of emotional disconnect, like you've missed something that you can't quite replace.
Upside: Its way easier to find someone who shares your values and is otherwise compatible with you. Modern life is so strongly partitioned into different kinds of careers and social settings, it can be almost impossible to meet a compatible person just by offline social networking. A lot of times people get hooked up with someone in high school or college that they don't actually fit very well with, they were just the closest thing in proximity. Online matches can be a lot better in that regard.
I'd say that if you live in a big metropolitan area, and date online, you're probably best off dating people who are close enough that not much of the relationship is online except for the original contact. That doesn't work if you don't live in such an area of course, which was the case for me.
I think an alternative to dating online that can work for a lot of people is graduate school. When I was an undergrad, two out of more than a hundred students in my major were women, and one was middle aged and married. I think the ratios are a lot more favorable than that now though, and the women who go to graduate school are different than undergraduates also.
I saw them a couple of years ago at Ozzfest. They're basically an Iron Maiden / Iced Earth copycat, with the pretentiousness of an 80's hair band but even less talent.
(By the by, I have about 50 books about Go and I've read 4 of them... any clue why I'm still 7kyu?)
Maybe because you're not actually extremely, ridiculously intelligent?
I'm about 3dan AGA without having read any books, and in a lot of ways I'm one of the least intelligent people at my office. Unless you've just recently started playing, to play at 7kyu in any ranking system, not only does your strategy have to be bad, you have to be fairly bad at logic. Nothing wrong with that of course.
Slashdot Mirror
we need real scientists investigating "hauntings," not 2 fat plumbers from Boston, or 3 fay dudes with Sony Handycams.
Some reasons this doesn't happen, as I see it:
Most PhD's are motivated largely by a desire to make their name professionally. For example, Feynman developed a quantum electrodynamics formulation: he could claim responsibility for that, and he was one of an elite group who were even qualified to understand it properly. But to demonstrate paranormal phenomena, the best chance is to start with someone who is relatively good at producing such phenomena. And then the scientist isn't really the star any more, he's more along for the ride, making observations about something that he can neither claim credit for or even understand.
Why would anyone fund such a study? Ideas like "the public good" are never enough, it has to benefit the career of a wealthy investor or government program manager who provides the funds. But it would be very hard to patent and control psychism, there's no potential personal benefit to outweigh the high risk of ridicule and failure. Even if funds were somehow available, it would be a very bad gamble for a scientist, even a scientist who knew that the phenomena in question are real. And by natural section, scientists are those who have a knack for avoiding bad research gambles, the others were not able to continue as scientists. Its not necessary simply to win a grant, there has to be a high probability path for winning repeated grants, otherwise it just doesn't work as a line of research.
Though this thought would make Michael Shermer's head explode, there is an element of collective destiny or providence involved. If proving a phenomena isn't favored by the current state and direction of human development, its not going to happen. And its not clear to me that it would be beneficial to push for it to happen. Look at the mess we've made with a simple idea like money. Or more recently, look what's been done with the internet. The internet seems to me to be like what you would do if you didn't have real ESP, and its been turned into a vehicle for corporate and government control of information. If everyone knew that psychism was real, there would be a proliferation of destructive cults and other con games. And all the people who benefit from control of conventional technology would be opposed to that, so the weight of their thought and effort is against it for that reason also. I'm not saying that I think that proof of paranormal phenomena would on balance be a bad thing, because there would be benefits also, I'm just saying that it might be.
I don't know what a 'location based phenomena' is. An object could physically 'move', or instead it could appear somewhere else as if it had always been there. I think that both would probably be special cases of a more general phenomena though.
OK, I guess you don't mean telekinesis, you mean phenomena that happen in a particular place, like hauntings. I've never watched those TV shows, but based on the few ads I've seen, and by extrapolation from the pseudo-historical bullshit on the same channels, I'm inclined to believe they're almost entirely fabricated. I would guess that those phenomena would be hard to prove too. Get a TV and sound crew in there, and a million viewers, and its just not the same setting any more. I also don't think that the phenomena are independent of the minds of the witnesses, so it comes back to the same problem as with other phenomena.
I think the brain is trying to create a sensate experience that seems to be congruent with the state that its in. The images aren't literally true, they are very strongly determined by a person's religious and cultural expectations.
From that it doesn't follow though that there's nothing at all 'real', about the experience. Just because we've formed a plausible explanation for a superficial aspect of it, doesn't mean there's nothing else going on there.
Its like understanding color. We know a lot about light, and how the eyes work, and some things about the visual cortex. But beyond that its mostly handwaving. People often imagine that we "understand" color because of those things that we do understand. But as far as I understand, the subjective experience of color has nothing directly to do with light, and remains mostly a mystery.
As I see it, to 'scientifically prove' something, you have to be able to control it well enough that it can be reliably reproduced in a lab setting. If there's an uncontrolled component, it has to follow some repeatable 'random' distribution.
But there's an awful lot of grey area between that and a claim that is unfalsifiable and effectively meaningless. A phenomena can have a real and discernible effects without being easily subject to scientific study. An example is precognitive dreaming. A lot of people have experienced such things occasionally. A few people experience such things a lot. Though there are many possible statistical and causal fallacies that people can and do mistake for the real thing, its possible to look for those and separate them with objective evidence. Yet it remains a long way away from being scientifically provable. Even for people who have such experiences almost daily, its not something that they can easily decouple from surrounding influences and force to conform to a designed experiment. And if they could, the experiment would need to be different from what is appropriate for something like a clinical trial, because the nature of what is being studied is different. If a person were to try to test the phenomena like its one of those easily controlled processes that can be neatly decoupled into causal and random components, then they're not going to find it, because that's not what it is.
And of course the issue is complicated by the fact that most people who make extraordinary claims are deluded or dishonest, so that has to be sorted out too.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought people were starving in China and a very few (1%) can actually afford an iPhone or a new computer.
You're wrong.
http://www.zdnet.com/chinas-internet-population-surges-to-564-million-75-percent-on-mobile-7000009813/
http://www.minyanville.com/sectors/global-markets/articles/Apple-Inc-Doubles-iPhone-4-Sales/6/21/2013/id/50472
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-26/apple-iphone-share-shrinks-as-china-s-huawei-to-zte-lure-users.html
The market is huge, closer to 50% than 1%, and Apple's sales, while growing rapidly, aren't as large as Samsung's or growing as fast as those of Huawei or ZTE.
It should be obvious that there are a lot of reasons besides poverty to prefer other smart phones over Apple phones.
I agree that management is at the center of the problem since they have the most power, but as with any other corrupt system there's blame from the top to the bottom.
I would have chosen my 'no respect for cowards' wording a little bit differently if I had more time when I posted earlier. What I meant was I agree with the sentiment of the parent poster, but that since nearly everyone sells out it makes it a lot harder for the few who do try to take a stand on something. I might have more compassion for sell-outs than my words implied. But in the end we all pay for it.
Thanks for the encouragement. My experience and skill is well suited to radar and video surveillance, not so much for the data-mining kind. I agree that the tech market in San Diego looks pretty good, and there's a lot of stuff there that I think I'm potentially pretty good at. So far I haven't been able to get the ball rolling, but I'm still trying.
OK, I'm with you. I'm not willing to do surveillance work. I have 'breeded responsibly', with the qualification that it takes ~16 years to raise a child, and few people have jobs that can be trusted that far into the future. I have extensive MS level education in math, CS, and EE, and many years of experience with C, C++, C#, and Python. I've tended to specialize in algorithm development and speed performance optimization. I've been employed in San Jose for several years, but my house and family are in San Diego. I have had no success finding non-surveillance work there, in part because I lack experience in video game and mobile development. Moving my wife and kids to San Jose doesn't work either, because my current job is just barely tenable, my wife can't find work here, and it costs a fortune to raise a family here. I think I could find 'evil' employment in San Diego fairly easily though.
I don't have much respect for 'play it safe' cowards either. But despite all the moral posturing on slashdot, pretty much everyone I've ever met sells out when it comes to making an actual personal sacrifice for the sake of doing what's right. And that determines what the employment climate is, which as I see it can make it fairly hard for honest people to find a way to make a living.
An enemy was needed after the cold war ended. There was terrorism in the 60's, 70's and 80's too, a lot more than there is now by most measures, but they didn't respond in the same way because they had the Soviets. The spectacularly successful attack in 2001 was a very bad luck, or a godsend, depending on how you earn your money. I don't think that Bin Laden has been the problem, it has been us. We've always been this way, even though previously a lot more of it was directed at Native Americans and southern blacks, and not so much at middle class whites. Sow the wind....
I think the fact that they're not fighting it now, when they do have a choice, and that they didn't fight it in 2008 when they had more power in congress, says that their not liking it before had more to do with partisanship than anything else, whether they admitted it or not. No excuses for those bastards, they're as bad as the Republicans on this issue.
Ironically, when I managed a drone surveillance related research project, and about a quarter of my budget disappeared, my company blocked my ability to see where it went. My government customer didn't seem to care very much either.
A reason there's less outrage in congress about the NSA spying, is they've grown so accustomed their own corruption that they don't recognize it anymore. They diss Snowden's integrity as moral preening because that's the only explanation for his behavior they can understand.
The Democrats have been like this for quite a while, they were only posturing when Bush was in office. Pelosi, for example, has pushed funding for surveillance programs for at least a decade.
If they we're actually honest, after a while they would start to see the contradictions. I worked in the surveillance industry, and when I started expressing concerns about corruption, all I got from anyone was crap. They only pretend to be honest.
If it got to the point where it objectively, undeniably mattered, like if you got arrested after having a suspicious pattern of Facebook connections for instance, then they'd be a bit more careful with their online activity. But they still wouldn't stand up for anything, and they wouldn't stand up for you.
A few years ago I got arrested for something I didn't do, and several of my neighbors who knew I was innocent wouldn't help me with an affidavit. The police, prosecutor, and even my own lawyer didn't care if I was innocent or guilty either. It was really an eye opener, not at all like on Law and Order. Then when I left my DoD surveillance job for a 'worse' job elsewhere all I got crap from nearly everybody I knew too. Essentially, "it can't be wrong because everyone else is doing it." For the most part, the few people who expressed a little understanding in either situation were the same kind of people who would have agreed had I argued about NSA surveillance. But if the stakes were higher, I sense that most of them would disappear too. Morally, most Americans are not different from 1930's Germans. Not to say that the US government is fascist, just to say that people aren't the way they see themselves, and that after a half billion years of evolution people haven't changed much in 100 years.
In my experience, remarkably little real work gets done by federal employees, because they can keep their jobs without meeting an objective bottom line. Private contractors work harder, as they compete for the money the federal workers are showering with, but there is a lot of waste in the way their work is assigned and coordinated. The system can still hurt us a lot potentially, but its not half as bad as it would be if it was more efficient.
we were once a great nation, but sadly, I cannot say we are a great nation anymore.
Its what's going on now more screwed up than the alien and sedition acts? Slavery? The Native American genocide? Jim Crow? Standard Oil? Domestic spying under Wilson? McCarthy? I agree its screwed up, and I hate it, but I don't think its new, its just spread around a little bit differently. Even recent developments like the exporting of almost our entire manufacturing economy are in the same profiteering spirit that built that economy to start with.
But five out of six bees think it's a big improvement.
I worked in neurofeedback for a short time. My 'colleagues' were con artists and sociopaths, in my view, and neurofeedback definitely isn't marketed and sold in an honest manner. But it does do something, it's not simple quackery. A lot of things aren't easy to characterize in a controlled manner, or aren't studied adequately for funding reasons, but are nevertheless real. Whether neurofeedback does more good than harm for most users is a more difficult question. But that's not at all clear for drugs like Ritalin or Valium either, in my view.
Here there's an assumption of competence and good will on the part of many of the people doing the monitoring. Having been in the surveillance business myself for several years, I saw very little evidence of that. Many of them don't understand statistics well enough to see that most suspicious looking behavior will be false positives, and most of the rest don't care. Its all about money, greased with self-righteousness, with a pinch of blood-lust to add flavor.
Bull fucking shit. I own a technology company and I'd hire this guy in a second, and there are thousands of other business owners like me across the country who would do exactly the same. He's got more integrity and courage than just about anyone I've ever met.
He is a media celebrity, but it was the other whistle blowers that the grandparent referred to. Will you hire one of them?
Most whistle blowing doesn't have glamorous results or make newspaper headlines. A person can describe the corruption and incompetence for one particular program, but this never shows the scope of the true problem. Even for Snowden, critics have pointed out that funding for his program wasn't very big, and consequently it can't amount to what a lot of people are making it out to be.
Also keep in mind that an engineer or scientist with a surveillance background is going to have a fairly specific set of skills which isn't necessarily quite what you need. Also, you would be hiring a person who has demonstrated that they will do what they believe is morally right even if its not what you want. Based on what I've seen, I have a hard time believing there are 999 other business besides yours that value that. Most businesses I have direct experience with are either trying to screw their customers or trying to help their customers screw someone else.
But if its true that you're willing to reward integrity, tell me what part of the country you are in. I know two or three software, algorithm, and system admin professionals who's integrity has caused them to need work.
What the hell? Signing the ACLU petition puts you on their spam list, with no check box to opt out.
If more school is something that fits you well anyway, and you're happier doing that than whatever you would be doing otherwise, sure. That's not why I went back to school, but I can see the timing of that would work for some people.
If you don't like the rut you're in, you get out of it. If you live in a region of a mobile society that has few to no intelligent, single women in the workforce, and meeting single intelligent women is something that's important to you, then you go to where the women are. Relocating to a company in a bigger city could work for a lot of people, but for me that wouldn't be any more radical than going to graduate school.
Downside: Online relationships are kind of unnatural, you go through various stages of intimacy and its largely in your head. Its easy for the relationship to stray too far from reality, and even if you maintain perfect objectivity intellectually, there's still a kind of emotional disconnect, like you've missed something that you can't quite replace.
Upside: Its way easier to find someone who shares your values and is otherwise compatible with you. Modern life is so strongly partitioned into different kinds of careers and social settings, it can be almost impossible to meet a compatible person just by offline social networking. A lot of times people get hooked up with someone in high school or college that they don't actually fit very well with, they were just the closest thing in proximity. Online matches can be a lot better in that regard.
I'd say that if you live in a big metropolitan area, and date online, you're probably best off dating people who are close enough that not much of the relationship is online except for the original contact. That doesn't work if you don't live in such an area of course, which was the case for me.
I think an alternative to dating online that can work for a lot of people is graduate school. When I was an undergrad, two out of more than a hundred students in my major were women, and one was middle aged and married. I think the ratios are a lot more favorable than that now though, and the women who go to graduate school are different than undergraduates also.
Wasted years, but at least they were running free instead of wasting love back in the village.
I saw them a couple of years ago at Ozzfest. They're basically an Iron Maiden / Iced Earth copycat, with the pretentiousness of an 80's hair band but even less talent.
I'm actually extremely, ridiculously intelligent.
(By the by, I have about 50 books about Go and I've read 4 of them... any clue why I'm still 7kyu?)
Maybe because you're not actually extremely, ridiculously intelligent?
I'm about 3dan AGA without having read any books, and in a lot of ways I'm one of the least intelligent people at my office. Unless you've just recently started playing, to play at 7kyu in any ranking system, not only does your strategy have to be bad, you have to be fairly bad at logic. Nothing wrong with that of course.