Unfortunately, I think that a lot of more recent government funding has moved away from things that are useful to industry. Contracts I've worked on have pretty much been a matter of pouring money down a rat hole. Perhaps reading through the DARPA solicitations would show what I mean. At first blush many of them look good, but dig deeper and many make no friggin' sense, if they're in an area that you're knowledgeable in. Plus the rewarding of contracts is highly political (in a lucrative-revolving-door and looks-good-on-a-resume sense). By the time everyone takes their cut, not a large portion of the money is left for research anyway. Its mostly just R&D on paper. Useful innovations that I am acquainted with which were developed with government money were finished in the 70's or late 80's. I would like to see a relaxation of the obsession with various kinds of surveillance, and more of an emphasis on things that are useful to the rest of the economy. I don't know if that's realistic though.
So what other word would a person use besides cult? Calling something an 'organization' is much less descriptive. A chess club is an organization. 'Campus Christians' is a religious organization with some mild cult-like characteristics, but its not a cult. The Rajneeshees were a cult. The Branch Davidians were a cult. Even if you've never heard of the Rajneeshees, you get a lot of accurate information about what they were just from that one word, information that is not simply pejorative.
Its true that religions start off as cults. But if religious people use the world hypocritically, and are uncomfortable when it is applied to the roots of their own religion, that says something about their own lack of objectivity, not so much about the meaning of the word. Likewise for cult members.
I don't think that the Merriam-Webster definition captures the common meaning of the word very well. The reason Campus Christians aren't a cult isn't because we like them better than Scientologists. Its because they don't have anything like the same degree of control over their members. A cult is more gang-like, more totalitarian. A cult is usually relatively small, because the degree of psychological manipulation that characterizes a cult doesn't scale very easily. Also, it usually takes a while for a cult to become large, and later leaders usually lack the charisma of the founder.
Again, I suppose you could define 'now' in such a way, but it's not at all useful to think of the big bang happening 'right now' as we look far out into space. It makes much more sense to think in terms of it having happened 13.7 billion years ago, and we're only now receiving signals from the afterglow of the big bang from distant regions of space.
I think whether or not its useful to think of it one way or the other depends on what insight you're trying to gain when you're thinking about it. I also think we can reasonably define "now" any way we want to, as long as we do it in an internally consistent manner and attempt to communicate how we're using the word. Thinking about the big bang as if its in the "past" right here but "now" far away might yield something useful, as something to consider anyway. I really was asking an exploratory question, not just feigning a question as a debating tactic.
When an event is X light-years away, and we're just seeing it now, people speak of the event "having happened" X years ago, on the grounds that it takes X years for light to travel that distance. But how meaningful is it to think of the faraway event as being exactly concurrent with an earthly event X years ago? Light from faraway shows events from when the universe was/is in a less advanced state, so we may try to think of that as the "past". But in a way, for us, those far away events are really "now". There isn't a previous time at which we could witness them without time travel, not even in principle. Furthermore, the thought that "the event really occurred X years ago" seems to assume a universal standard of time, independent of the location and velocity of the observer, by which far apart events can be ordered. But time is not like that is it?
People from Oregon may be kooky ( I was born and lived there for 30 years ) but they believe in freedom.
I lived in Oregon for ~20 years. For historical reasons, Oregon doesn't have much of a defense industry, and consequently not much vested interest in the fear-of-terrorists business. In certain regards Oregon is arguably less authoritarian than other places, but overall, authoritarianism seems to me to be about as strong there as elsewhere in the US.
Here's a couple of anecdotes as examples....An acquaintance of a friend who lived in the 'historic district' in Albany, Oregon, needed to replace his windows. The Albany historic district is basically just a normal neighborhood with relatively old houses that isn't a slum. He bought new windows, and took his old ones out. But then a neighbor ratted him out, and his new windows were judged insufficiently historic. He couldn't put the old ones back, and he couldn't afford to buy another set immediately, so then he had no windows at all. I know another man who tried to build his own house in the country with a drain in the bathroom floor, like is common in some European countries, and the state government wouldn't let him do it because it wasn't according to code. What kind of freedom is it when you can't make an improvement to your own house which you own? These are both zoning examples, but I could give others.
Had "one of the set lied about their birthday", then the set of 15 or so would still have been clustered tightly around one side of the cycle, but with two outliers instead of one.
Note my subsequent correction to the first post, where I had typed "of the" when I meant "other". That might have confused things.
Yes, ~15 is limited sample. Like I said I've got other data besides this one example. However, given the number of assumptions you've made about my reasoning based on a quick misreading of one long yet hurried slashdot post, it seems pointless to try to go into it all. Apparently it seems more fun to feel smugly superior than to be open to understanding what I'm saying. Yes I've understood the birthdays problem since grade school. To use that analogy, this is like having 15 people with a 28 day year, and everybody's birthday falls within a span of 3 days except for one person, with no apparent reason for the birthday's clustering like that besides chance. If the 28 days were an actual physical season it would be one thing, but it doesn't divide evenly into the calendar year, and we were born many years apart. Of course there can be flaws in my reasoning, but to find those flaws, first you'd have to find the desire to see what I'm saying instead of arguing with a straw man.
In relation to my biorhythm example, the skeptic will say that if the cycle is real, then it ought to show up statistically in a large study. The problem with that is, how is a person going to set up a study that separates out all the confounding factors? Lots of Japanese people believe in biorhythms, so that belief is going to skew their experiences. Study a population that doesn't believe in biorhythms, and you'll likely find nothing because biorythms are irrelevant to them. The subject is relevant to me, as someone who doesn't believe that biorythms describe a real 'law' in nature, primarily because I'm interested in understanding things that defy the usual categories of 'real' and 'unreal'. I'm a special case, and the example I gave, while statistically significant for me as an individual, is personal specific to me and my life. I doubt the same pattern would even show up for me now, because I no longer base friendships on the kind of emotional affinity that I did 20 years ago.
A natural law should be universal, it should appear the same to any person who runs the same experiment. My larger point is that our scientific way of thinking is poor at coming to terms with real things that do not obey that rule in the way that we know how to look for.
I think there's confusion on both sides about what it means for something to be true.
Astrologists apparently think that they're dealing with fundamental principles, a kind of natural law. A skeptic looks at their theory, sees that it is contrived or constructed, lacking the deep logic of a real natural law, and rejects it as utter bullshit. But I think the reality is something different from either of those views.
The current scientific model of nature is underdetermined, with a lot left out that is "random". Is all of that truely random, or is there some kind of sloppy structure to the randomness? Are there ghosts of patterns in it that are more than just figments of the imagination? It would not take something very strong or obvious to cause such patterns. If something is "random" relative to the causes and effects that we understand, then there's no energy potential to be overcome, nothing that has to be overpowered in order to twist the randomness into something less than random. It can be influenced by something that is infinitesimally close to unreal. A scientific skeptic will dismiss any such patterns as unreal however, if they can't be probed and controlled in a ridged and universally repeatable manner.
I'll give an example....years ago I looked into astrology, and did statistics on the birthdays of friends and female acquaintances who had clicked well enough with me to share their birthdays. There were perhaps 15 individuals. The 3 who were my closest friends were born multiples of 28 days from me, which is the Japanese emotional biorythmic cycle. And emotional affinity was the basis of our relationship. The of the people were tightly clustered around that side of the cycle, within a day or two out of sync. There was only one exception, a person who was exactly on the opposite side of the cycle, and who had previously stood out to me as being an emotional blank, someone who I could not feel. In terms of statistical significance, the data said that there was a real pattern, with something on the order of a million to one odds (I've forgotten exactly). And yet, a 28 day cycle makes no sense. What possible basis could it have? Its a multiple of 7, the the four of us who were exactly in-sync born on Fridays, and there could be a pattern with that. Perhaps, for example, we're born on Fridays because that's the day the doctor chooses to induce labor, because he wants to golf on Saturday, and perhaps there's some kind of emotional affinity that results from having been born traumatically in that manner. But that seems far fetched, and it doesn't work anyway, since it doesn't explain why I had no friends on the other 3 Fridays of the cycle.
Given the above information, or even a lot less, an astrologer would likely believe in the 28 day cycle. I still think its contrived - I don't believe that there is a fundamental natural process that comes around every 28 days. But it is nevertheless somehow real, even if only as the shadow of a superstition. To a skeptic, everything I just said will be dismissed as delusional, or as a statistical fluke. In their worldview, a superstition can not somehow cause or be caused by actual patterns in the real world that affect people who do not share the superstition. And I would agree with them if I had just this one example. But I have many, many other examples also, unexpected observations that I inquired into further rather than just blowing off because they didn't fit my view of how the world should work.
So I don't believe in astrology, in the sense that I don't endorse or support that thought of how the world works. Its like a god that I don't consider worth worshiping. Yet neither do I don't dismiss the god as an utter hallucination, and I think the people who do so are ignorant. Looking strictly at the meaning of the words, I think its fair to call astrology a superstition, and a pseudo-science. It stands above, and its only partially scientific, meaning that its half bullshit. But its not all bullshit, even though our modern science does not have an explanation for how that could be so.
One application of neurofeedback is used to treat migraines. Various chemical stimulants and depressants are also used for that of course. Migraines are a serious, life wrecking problem for some people, so maybe the benefits of the treatments outweigh the dangers and drawbacks. At the same time I also think the migraine cycles are the body's way of trying to cope with a deeper problem, and I see some reason to believe that cures can have serious but non-obvious bad effects when they counteract the headache cycles without understanding what's driving them. This starts to get a bit wishy-washy though, since I'm concerned about dangers which almost border on metaphysical. For most people, if the debilitating pain is gone, that's a welcome improvement, and I can't argue with that. But I would argue that the subtler effects are important enough to at least keep an open mind about recognizing them.
I want to start by asking if you, yourself, are a neuroscientist or affiliated with the field. If not, are you at least, in an HONEST opinion, well informed about the field? I ask this not to accuse anything, but simply to understand the perspective.
I have worked as an engineer with neurofeedback, and have additional peripheral awareness of the neurology field in relation to medical imaging. On these topics I would consider myself well informed relative to the average/. reader, and not well informed relative to someone like yourself. I've got a couple of reasons to think that I have a useful perspective even relative to subject matter experts however. One is that I've paid a lot of attention to the way the motives of researchers affects their work over the course of several years, the way information is pursued or overlooked depending on funding imperatives and other factors. I've seen things that concern and disturb me in the neurofeedback field, as well as in hospitals in more mainstream treatment areas. Additionally, I have some visibility into my own mental function in a couple of areas that tend to be more subconscious for most people. From this I know that some important processes are extremely hard to measure, and may be regarded as unreal by people who are not aware of them and have not tried or succeeded in measuring them in a reliable way. So when somebody says that they have detected no change or effect as the result of some stimulus, in some cases it looks to me that a change is likely but is just not something that they know how to look for.
Your argument seems to be seated in the idea that brain functioning, at least for most of our life, is fixed....
I agree with you that its not fixed, and I generally agree with your other points also.
Maybe here's a better way to try to make my original point....If a person wants something, and is willing to pay for it, its likely that they will be able to find someone else who is willing to sell it to them. Even if 9 of 10 neurologists are highly qualified, empathetic, and professionally objective, there is still the one who is willing to take risks with other people's health for a profit, and the person seeking a dangerous treatment will find them. So my message was really intended for technologically optimistic people who are not experts, but who may be interested in neurofeedback, or finding someone to prescribe a medication, or down the road may be interested in messing with magnetic fields. For your own sake be careful. I don't have a beef with honest scientists, including those experimenting with magnetic fields. But as a medical student, you must be aware that many people in that field are less than completely conscientious, and this will probably become even more obvious once you get out into industry. In my view, the brain is an intimate enough instrument that an otherwise unremarkable degree of dishonesty and subjectivity is dangerous for a person working in that field.
The essence of science is to form an idea, try it out, take an honest look at what the results are, and then modify accordingly. Nearly everything in life can be viewed that way, to me 'science' is almost synonymous with intelligence.
I agree that the 'natural' status quo is a poor god. We are a part of nature, and using our intelligence to make nature better IS natural. But after we try something the next step is to look honestly at what follows and take it into account, or else we're not doing science. We do have quite a bit of long term data on drug use, neurofeedback, and electrical stimulation, enough to inform a qualified, tentative opinion on magnetic stimulation. Furthermore, its apparent that financial and emotional 'self-interest' has had an influence on the interpretation of data in a couple of these other areas - we have a kind of data on that also.
The body has evolved to reward beneficial behavior with feelings of pleasure, and to punish detrimental behavior with pain. Its an imperfect system, and it can go awry. But start mucking around with the feedback mechanism, bypassing it by stimulating the brain directly, and you can get into a lot of trouble. Similarly, other aspects of brain functionality tend to be as strong or weak as they are for reasons that have evolved over a long period of time. Almost anything that can be done to stimulate some aspect of brain function is at the expense of something else. The tradeoffs are many and poorly understood, and harmful effects aren't always very easy to detect externally. If it feels good enough, or produces compelling enough short term benefits, how does a person resist the temptation to do something that may have non-obvious long term penalties? By altering your brain function, your altering the one thing that is capable of warning you when you're going in a bad direction. In that regard its a highly unstable undertaking. A person can try to add a safeguard by handing the reins over to another person, like is done with prescriptions for therapeutic drugs. But that other person's judgment is almost unavoidably colored by their own self interest.
Medical technology is great for stuff like repairing busted knees. But if a person adds up all the human carnage caused by devices aimed at helping or correcting brain function, I wonder how its stacks up against the benefits.
Yes of course some people are going to explore this sort of thing anyway. I'm not in favor of banning it, and maybe I'm not even in favor of regulating it. But I still think its worth pause for thought.
The "ethics rules" in a government organization are often crafted in a way that allows people to behave immorally for personal gain, just like at a private corporation. For example, government program managers give R&D contracts to companies who allow them to put themselves as authors, sometimes primary authors, on papers that they had no part in writing or doing research for. Then they can have long lists of publications on their resumes even though they haven't done 10 minutes of research in their lives. That helps them climb the GS scale, and later land a job at a R&D contractor where they can pose as being qualified to be awarded large contracts because they've got lots of publications. The companies hire them because they bring contracts from their friends in the government, and their friends give them contracts because they're working on the same resume building process. There's almost no risk of getting fired or going to jail for this, its all part of "accepted practice". As long as you don't cross any of the wrong people or do anything too publicly embarrassing to the organization, its all good. And its pretty easy to hide all this from public view because most of its secret, and few people are paying much attention anyway.
So I agree that corporations are the gold standard for corruption, and if you want to rake in the big bucks, that's where you want to go. But there's a lot of corruption in government also, notwithstanding "ethics rules" which are mostly there for show. And the leader of a corporation can get fired for breaking a private corporation's ethics rules in an embarrassing way also. Its all about managing appearances.
Here we have a thread filled with posts in which people wax eloquent about science and evidence. Somebody posts a tiny scrap of information on the subject of ghosts, hardly enough to do anything with, but a start, and its ignored except for a flippant comment.
A scientist who says they found no ghosts doesn't say ghosts do not exist....How about you help science try to figure out what to look for, what to measure?
Speaking for myself, not for AC:
1. What to look for and how to look for it is a hard problem. As I see it, the nature of the phenomena is not at all easy to understand, and its not easy to corner and control for a scientific demonstration. 2. Why bother? Why do people want to know? Thrill seeking? Power lust? (All advances in knowledge bring new avenues for abuse.) The paranormal crap on TV makes me want to puke. Why should I try to feed that? And why should I beat my head against the wall trying to convince people who are already fairly content with the way they see the world? There are many good scientists, but the ideal scientist doesn't exist. Everyone is constrained by grant considerations, and what benefits their own careers.
Some observations on this....In the case of the bee and ant colonies, the members are generally all siblings. So the need to "propagate one's own genes" accounts for all the cooperation. Furthermore, common ants fight genocidal wars as a matter of policy when encountering another colony. The lion pride is also a family, generally with one dominant male. And lions exhibit various kinds of nasty behavior for the sake of their own genes, such as the dominant male killing the existing cubs if taking over a pride from another male.
Its true that an insufficiently cooperative group or species may lose out relative to another group or species. However, for the most part this doesn't actually provide much positive reinforcement for cooperative behavior within large groups, because punishing or rewarding the whole group doesn't select between selfish and unselfish individuals within the group. At that level, whatever behavior is most favorable for an individual's genes relative to the rest of the group still dominates. This is the same kind of dynamic as 'the tragedy of the commons'. If a person tries to model the group dynamics, it doesn't support much cooperation beyond what benefits the individual and its cousins. Another way of saying this is that natural selection doesn't think ahead. The fact that a certain behavior will be detrimental to the future of the group doesn't cause cooperative individuals to be selected for, they are only selected for if their behavior immediately benefits themselves and their cousins. So any altruism that results from that is a form of selfishness. The best strategy is still to be perfectly treacherous: Do good when you would be punished otherwise, and cheat when you can get away with it.
To me, the answer to this is to look beyond it. Within the arena that is modeled by science, natural selection describes a kind of rule that has to be satisfied in order to exist. But even after all the causes and constraints are understood within that system, there's still freedom left over. The system is under-determined. If you can find that freedom and cultivate it, expanding it, the rules are modified because the scope you're working in is altered. You don't have to be able to beat selfishness within its own arena, you just have to find enough other strength that you can match it so that you can continue playing in its world, to speak. My criticism of Dawkins and many other atheists is that anything that is known to not be captured by their current model is considered to be 'random' or unreal. They're declaring, in effect, that our vision and understanding must stay within the bounds that they have already sketched out. A problem with this is that their method of inquiry only lends itself well to certain kinds of problems. If something can be manipulated in a repeatable manner in a lab setting, then its real to them, particularly if its relatively easy to model. So science starts out by dealing with things that are approximately linear, then moves on to deal successfully with some harder, nonlinear dynamics, then gets bogged down and kind of stops. Almost by definition, this approach does capture some of the most important dynamics in nature, to a certain order of approximation. But it doesn't follow that everything outside of that is unimportant. A very weak influence can have very profound effects. (By way of analogy, gravity is a very weak interaction compared to electromagnetic interactions, but it matters anyway because of its cumulative effects, where the stronger electromagnetic effects tend to counteract each other and cancel out on large scales.) There is no love, or choice, or true aspiration within the scope of what is described by science. There is causal mechanics, and randomness, and anything that can't be modeled by dividing the world into those categories disappears.
That sounds about right, based on my experience in other analogous situations.
It seems like all you can do is take that all into account, then still try to do what you think is right anyway. Otherwise its a weasel race to the bottom, which doesn't really work either.
I agree with you that the petty and unjust God is not worthy of our worship. A lot of people don't want to see it that way though, they still hope to benefit by trying to kiss that God's ass. And they don't see the wrong in their God because they don't want to see their own selfishness which is similar. After a while, I don't think it makes much sense to be angry on their behalf. The more honest of them will have their own day of anger when they see how they've been duped. Then they'll see that they've also been vicious or dishonest also, in one way or another, and they'll start working to get over it.
I've gone to some trouble trying to work out how to reconcile the idea of goodness with the idea of natural selection. The two ideas are at least partially incompatible as most people conceive of them, but if you try to get rid of one or the other you wind up with different kinds of problems. I'm pretty sure now that the ideas can be reconciled, but some other commonly held assumptions have to be removed first.
I don't think its just Christianity that's messed up, its all religions, and all splinter sects. Everyone wants to twist the truth into something proprietary. And everyone wants to pretend that they have the whole solution when they only have a small part of it. I don't think a Richard Dawkin's style of atheism is much better in that regard. But I've learned by studying other religious ideas, even though I'm certain that none of it can be trusted.
I'm also with you that truth is more important than happiness. I'd rather suffer than be pleasantly deluded. For me there have been periods of shock after seeing through a lie, where what's left seems relatively stark and empty. But later I've discovered new things that are better than what I could have found before throwing out the old half-truths. So I think that killing one's personal god tends to pay off in the long run, if a person is honest and sticks with it.
If you haven't already, you might try dating chinese women, as a way to get 'family values' without the religious conflict.
A trouble I have had is that mixed in with all the bullshit in Christianity, there's an element that's valuable to me. But when I react against the bullshit I tend to close myself off from all of it. So there's been a long process of recovering the important stuff internally, while sifting out all the stupidity and power lust that caused me to reject it all in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Is someone going to fix the /. thresholds or not? There should be a way to see +5 responses to +2 comments without browsing at +2.
In one of Alastair Reynolds' SF novels, an entire space-faring civilization traces its roots back to /.
Ha ha ha. We can't even get remotely accurate summaries or web software that works right.
Unfortunately, I think that a lot of more recent government funding has moved away from things that are useful to industry. Contracts I've worked on have pretty much been a matter of pouring money down a rat hole. Perhaps reading through the DARPA solicitations would show what I mean. At first blush many of them look good, but dig deeper and many make no friggin' sense, if they're in an area that you're knowledgeable in. Plus the rewarding of contracts is highly political (in a lucrative-revolving-door and looks-good-on-a-resume sense). By the time everyone takes their cut, not a large portion of the money is left for research anyway. Its mostly just R&D on paper. Useful innovations that I am acquainted with which were developed with government money were finished in the 70's or late 80's. I would like to see a relaxation of the obsession with various kinds of surveillance, and more of an emphasis on things that are useful to the rest of the economy. I don't know if that's realistic though.
So what other word would a person use besides cult? Calling something an 'organization' is much less descriptive. A chess club is an organization. 'Campus Christians' is a religious organization with some mild cult-like characteristics, but its not a cult. The Rajneeshees were a cult. The Branch Davidians were a cult. Even if you've never heard of the Rajneeshees, you get a lot of accurate information about what they were just from that one word, information that is not simply pejorative.
Its true that religions start off as cults. But if religious people use the world hypocritically, and are uncomfortable when it is applied to the roots of their own religion, that says something about their own lack of objectivity, not so much about the meaning of the word. Likewise for cult members.
I don't think that the Merriam-Webster definition captures the common meaning of the word very well. The reason Campus Christians aren't a cult isn't because we like them better than Scientologists. Its because they don't have anything like the same degree of control over their members. A cult is more gang-like, more totalitarian. A cult is usually relatively small, because the degree of psychological manipulation that characterizes a cult doesn't scale very easily. Also, it usually takes a while for a cult to become large, and later leaders usually lack the charisma of the founder.
The 'drilling down' doesn't even work on iPhone, last I checked, because the slider doesn't work there.
I used to do that, but then recently I got rejected. I think some stations implemented the zip code request before they started validating it.
Again, I suppose you could define 'now' in such a way, but it's not at all useful to think of the big bang happening 'right now' as we look far out into space. It makes much more sense to think in terms of it having happened 13.7 billion years ago, and we're only now receiving signals from the afterglow of the big bang from distant regions of space.
I think whether or not its useful to think of it one way or the other depends on what insight you're trying to gain when you're thinking about it. I also think we can reasonably define "now" any way we want to, as long as we do it in an internally consistent manner and attempt to communicate how we're using the word. Thinking about the big bang as if its in the "past" right here but "now" far away might yield something useful, as something to consider anyway. I really was asking an exploratory question, not just feigning a question as a debating tactic.
When an event is X light-years away, and we're just seeing it now, people speak of the event "having happened" X years ago, on the grounds that it takes X years for light to travel that distance. But how meaningful is it to think of the faraway event as being exactly concurrent with an earthly event X years ago? Light from faraway shows events from when the universe was/is in a less advanced state, so we may try to think of that as the "past". But in a way, for us, those far away events are really "now". There isn't a previous time at which we could witness them without time travel, not even in principle. Furthermore, the thought that "the event really occurred X years ago" seems to assume a universal standard of time, independent of the location and velocity of the observer, by which far apart events can be ordered. But time is not like that is it?
People from Oregon may be kooky ( I was born and lived there for 30 years ) but they believe in freedom.
I lived in Oregon for ~20 years. For historical reasons, Oregon doesn't have much of a defense industry, and consequently not much vested interest in the fear-of-terrorists business. In certain regards Oregon is arguably less authoritarian than other places, but overall, authoritarianism seems to me to be about as strong there as elsewhere in the US.
Here's a couple of anecdotes as examples....An acquaintance of a friend who lived in the 'historic district' in Albany, Oregon, needed to replace his windows. The Albany historic district is basically just a normal neighborhood with relatively old houses that isn't a slum. He bought new windows, and took his old ones out. But then a neighbor ratted him out, and his new windows were judged insufficiently historic. He couldn't put the old ones back, and he couldn't afford to buy another set immediately, so then he had no windows at all. I know another man who tried to build his own house in the country with a drain in the bathroom floor, like is common in some European countries, and the state government wouldn't let him do it because it wasn't according to code. What kind of freedom is it when you can't make an improvement to your own house which you own? These are both zoning examples, but I could give others.
Had "one of the set lied about their birthday", then the set of 15 or so would still have been clustered tightly around one side of the cycle, but with two outliers instead of one.
Note my subsequent correction to the first post, where I had typed "of the" when I meant "other". That might have confused things.
Yes, ~15 is limited sample. Like I said I've got other data besides this one example. However, given the number of assumptions you've made about my reasoning based on a quick misreading of one long yet hurried slashdot post, it seems pointless to try to go into it all. Apparently it seems more fun to feel smugly superior than to be open to understanding what I'm saying. Yes I've understood the birthdays problem since grade school. To use that analogy, this is like having 15 people with a 28 day year, and everybody's birthday falls within a span of 3 days except for one person, with no apparent reason for the birthday's clustering like that besides chance. If the 28 days were an actual physical season it would be one thing, but it doesn't divide evenly into the calendar year, and we were born many years apart. Of course there can be flaws in my reasoning, but to find those flaws, first you'd have to find the desire to see what I'm saying instead of arguing with a straw man.
Cutting hair has required a license in most parts of America for a very long time. This isn't something new.
The of the people
The other people
Anticipating a likely objection:
In relation to my biorhythm example, the skeptic will say that if the cycle is real, then it ought to show up statistically in a large study. The problem with that is, how is a person going to set up a study that separates out all the confounding factors? Lots of Japanese people believe in biorhythms, so that belief is going to skew their experiences. Study a population that doesn't believe in biorhythms, and you'll likely find nothing because biorythms are irrelevant to them. The subject is relevant to me, as someone who doesn't believe that biorythms describe a real 'law' in nature, primarily because I'm interested in understanding things that defy the usual categories of 'real' and 'unreal'. I'm a special case, and the example I gave, while statistically significant for me as an individual, is personal specific to me and my life. I doubt the same pattern would even show up for me now, because I no longer base friendships on the kind of emotional affinity that I did 20 years ago.
A natural law should be universal, it should appear the same to any person who runs the same experiment. My larger point is that our scientific way of thinking is poor at coming to terms with real things that do not obey that rule in the way that we know how to look for.
I think there's confusion on both sides about what it means for something to be true.
Astrologists apparently think that they're dealing with fundamental principles, a kind of natural law. A skeptic looks at their theory, sees that it is contrived or constructed, lacking the deep logic of a real natural law, and rejects it as utter bullshit. But I think the reality is something different from either of those views.
The current scientific model of nature is underdetermined, with a lot left out that is "random". Is all of that truely random, or is there some kind of sloppy structure to the randomness? Are there ghosts of patterns in it that are more than just figments of the imagination? It would not take something very strong or obvious to cause such patterns. If something is "random" relative to the causes and effects that we understand, then there's no energy potential to be overcome, nothing that has to be overpowered in order to twist the randomness into something less than random. It can be influenced by something that is infinitesimally close to unreal. A scientific skeptic will dismiss any such patterns as unreal however, if they can't be probed and controlled in a ridged and universally repeatable manner.
I'll give an example....years ago I looked into astrology, and did statistics on the birthdays of friends and female acquaintances who had clicked well enough with me to share their birthdays. There were perhaps 15 individuals. The 3 who were my closest friends were born multiples of 28 days from me, which is the Japanese emotional biorythmic cycle. And emotional affinity was the basis of our relationship. The of the people were tightly clustered around that side of the cycle, within a day or two out of sync. There was only one exception, a person who was exactly on the opposite side of the cycle, and who had previously stood out to me as being an emotional blank, someone who I could not feel. In terms of statistical significance, the data said that there was a real pattern, with something on the order of a million to one odds (I've forgotten exactly). And yet, a 28 day cycle makes no sense. What possible basis could it have? Its a multiple of 7, the the four of us who were exactly in-sync born on Fridays, and there could be a pattern with that. Perhaps, for example, we're born on Fridays because that's the day the doctor chooses to induce labor, because he wants to golf on Saturday, and perhaps there's some kind of emotional affinity that results from having been born traumatically in that manner. But that seems far fetched, and it doesn't work anyway, since it doesn't explain why I had no friends on the other 3 Fridays of the cycle.
Given the above information, or even a lot less, an astrologer would likely believe in the 28 day cycle. I still think its contrived - I don't believe that there is a fundamental natural process that comes around every 28 days. But it is nevertheless somehow real, even if only as the shadow of a superstition. To a skeptic, everything I just said will be dismissed as delusional, or as a statistical fluke. In their worldview, a superstition can not somehow cause or be caused by actual patterns in the real world that affect people who do not share the superstition. And I would agree with them if I had just this one example. But I have many, many other examples also, unexpected observations that I inquired into further rather than just blowing off because they didn't fit my view of how the world should work.
So I don't believe in astrology, in the sense that I don't endorse or support that thought of how the world works. Its like a god that I don't consider worth worshiping. Yet neither do I don't dismiss the god as an utter hallucination, and I think the people who do so are ignorant. Looking strictly at the meaning of the words, I think its fair to call astrology a superstition, and a pseudo-science. It stands above, and its only partially scientific, meaning that its half bullshit. But its not all bullshit, even though our modern science does not have an explanation for how that could be so.
One application of neurofeedback is used to treat migraines. Various chemical stimulants and depressants are also used for that of course. Migraines are a serious, life wrecking problem for some people, so maybe the benefits of the treatments outweigh the dangers and drawbacks. At the same time I also think the migraine cycles are the body's way of trying to cope with a deeper problem, and I see some reason to believe that cures can have serious but non-obvious bad effects when they counteract the headache cycles without understanding what's driving them. This starts to get a bit wishy-washy though, since I'm concerned about dangers which almost border on metaphysical. For most people, if the debilitating pain is gone, that's a welcome improvement, and I can't argue with that. But I would argue that the subtler effects are important enough to at least keep an open mind about recognizing them.
I want to start by asking if you, yourself, are a neuroscientist or affiliated with the field. If not, are you at least, in an HONEST opinion, well informed about the field? I ask this not to accuse anything, but simply to understand the perspective.
I have worked as an engineer with neurofeedback, and have additional peripheral awareness of the neurology field in relation to medical imaging. On these topics I would consider myself well informed relative to the average /. reader, and not well informed relative to someone like yourself. I've got a couple of reasons to think that I have a useful perspective even relative to subject matter experts however. One is that I've paid a lot of attention to the way the motives of researchers affects their work over the course of several years, the way information is pursued or overlooked depending on funding imperatives and other factors. I've seen things that concern and disturb me in the neurofeedback field, as well as in hospitals in more mainstream treatment areas. Additionally, I have some visibility into my own mental function in a couple of areas that tend to be more subconscious for most people. From this I know that some important processes are extremely hard to measure, and may be regarded as unreal by people who are not aware of them and have not tried or succeeded in measuring them in a reliable way. So when somebody says that they have detected no change or effect as the result of some stimulus, in some cases it looks to me that a change is likely but is just not something that they know how to look for.
Your argument seems to be seated in the idea that brain functioning, at least for most of our life, is fixed....
I agree with you that its not fixed, and I generally agree with your other points also.
Maybe here's a better way to try to make my original point....If a person wants something, and is willing to pay for it, its likely that they will be able to find someone else who is willing to sell it to them. Even if 9 of 10 neurologists are highly qualified, empathetic, and professionally objective, there is still the one who is willing to take risks with other people's health for a profit, and the person seeking a dangerous treatment will find them. So my message was really intended for technologically optimistic people who are not experts, but who may be interested in neurofeedback, or finding someone to prescribe a medication, or down the road may be interested in messing with magnetic fields. For your own sake be careful. I don't have a beef with honest scientists, including those experimenting with magnetic fields. But as a medical student, you must be aware that many people in that field are less than completely conscientious, and this will probably become even more obvious once you get out into industry. In my view, the brain is an intimate enough instrument that an otherwise unremarkable degree of dishonesty and subjectivity is dangerous for a person working in that field.
The essence of science is to form an idea, try it out, take an honest look at what the results are, and then modify accordingly. Nearly everything in life can be viewed that way, to me 'science' is almost synonymous with intelligence.
I agree that the 'natural' status quo is a poor god. We are a part of nature, and using our intelligence to make nature better IS natural. But after we try something the next step is to look honestly at what follows and take it into account, or else we're not doing science. We do have quite a bit of long term data on drug use, neurofeedback, and electrical stimulation, enough to inform a qualified, tentative opinion on magnetic stimulation. Furthermore, its apparent that financial and emotional 'self-interest' has had an influence on the interpretation of data in a couple of these other areas - we have a kind of data on that also.
The body has evolved to reward beneficial behavior with feelings of pleasure, and to punish detrimental behavior with pain. Its an imperfect system, and it can go awry. But start mucking around with the feedback mechanism, bypassing it by stimulating the brain directly, and you can get into a lot of trouble. Similarly, other aspects of brain functionality tend to be as strong or weak as they are for reasons that have evolved over a long period of time. Almost anything that can be done to stimulate some aspect of brain function is at the expense of something else. The tradeoffs are many and poorly understood, and harmful effects aren't always very easy to detect externally. If it feels good enough, or produces compelling enough short term benefits, how does a person resist the temptation to do something that may have non-obvious long term penalties? By altering your brain function, your altering the one thing that is capable of warning you when you're going in a bad direction. In that regard its a highly unstable undertaking. A person can try to add a safeguard by handing the reins over to another person, like is done with prescriptions for therapeutic drugs. But that other person's judgment is almost unavoidably colored by their own self interest.
Medical technology is great for stuff like repairing busted knees. But if a person adds up all the human carnage caused by devices aimed at helping or correcting brain function, I wonder how its stacks up against the benefits.
Yes of course some people are going to explore this sort of thing anyway. I'm not in favor of banning it, and maybe I'm not even in favor of regulating it. But I still think its worth pause for thought.
The "ethics rules" in a government organization are often crafted in a way that allows people to behave immorally for personal gain, just like at a private corporation. For example, government program managers give R&D contracts to companies who allow them to put themselves as authors, sometimes primary authors, on papers that they had no part in writing or doing research for. Then they can have long lists of publications on their resumes even though they haven't done 10 minutes of research in their lives. That helps them climb the GS scale, and later land a job at a R&D contractor where they can pose as being qualified to be awarded large contracts because they've got lots of publications. The companies hire them because they bring contracts from their friends in the government, and their friends give them contracts because they're working on the same resume building process. There's almost no risk of getting fired or going to jail for this, its all part of "accepted practice". As long as you don't cross any of the wrong people or do anything too publicly embarrassing to the organization, its all good. And its pretty easy to hide all this from public view because most of its secret, and few people are paying much attention anyway.
So I agree that corporations are the gold standard for corruption, and if you want to rake in the big bucks, that's where you want to go. But there's a lot of corruption in government also, notwithstanding "ethics rules" which are mostly there for show. And the leader of a corporation can get fired for breaking a private corporation's ethics rules in an embarrassing way also. Its all about managing appearances.
Here we have a thread filled with posts in which people wax eloquent about science and evidence. Somebody posts a tiny scrap of information on the subject of ghosts, hardly enough to do anything with, but a start, and its ignored except for a flippant comment.
A scientist who says they found no ghosts doesn't say ghosts do not exist....How about you help science try to figure out what to look for, what to measure?
Speaking for myself, not for AC:
1. What to look for and how to look for it is a hard problem. As I see it, the nature of the phenomena is not at all easy to understand, and its not easy to corner and control for a scientific demonstration.
2. Why bother? Why do people want to know? Thrill seeking? Power lust? (All advances in knowledge bring new avenues for abuse.) The paranormal crap on TV makes me want to puke. Why should I try to feed that? And why should I beat my head against the wall trying to convince people who are already fairly content with the way they see the world? There are many good scientists, but the ideal scientist doesn't exist. Everyone is constrained by grant considerations, and what benefits their own careers.
How long before they crash it? Put me down for 8 months.
Some observations on this....In the case of the bee and ant colonies, the members are generally all siblings. So the need to "propagate one's own genes" accounts for all the cooperation. Furthermore, common ants fight genocidal wars as a matter of policy when encountering another colony. The lion pride is also a family, generally with one dominant male. And lions exhibit various kinds of nasty behavior for the sake of their own genes, such as the dominant male killing the existing cubs if taking over a pride from another male.
Its true that an insufficiently cooperative group or species may lose out relative to another group or species. However, for the most part this doesn't actually provide much positive reinforcement for cooperative behavior within large groups, because punishing or rewarding the whole group doesn't select between selfish and unselfish individuals within the group. At that level, whatever behavior is most favorable for an individual's genes relative to the rest of the group still dominates. This is the same kind of dynamic as 'the tragedy of the commons'. If a person tries to model the group dynamics, it doesn't support much cooperation beyond what benefits the individual and its cousins. Another way of saying this is that natural selection doesn't think ahead. The fact that a certain behavior will be detrimental to the future of the group doesn't cause cooperative individuals to be selected for, they are only selected for if their behavior immediately benefits themselves and their cousins. So any altruism that results from that is a form of selfishness. The best strategy is still to be perfectly treacherous: Do good when you would be punished otherwise, and cheat when you can get away with it.
To me, the answer to this is to look beyond it. Within the arena that is modeled by science, natural selection describes a kind of rule that has to be satisfied in order to exist. But even after all the causes and constraints are understood within that system, there's still freedom left over. The system is under-determined. If you can find that freedom and cultivate it, expanding it, the rules are modified because the scope you're working in is altered. You don't have to be able to beat selfishness within its own arena, you just have to find enough other strength that you can match it so that you can continue playing in its world, to speak. My criticism of Dawkins and many other atheists is that anything that is known to not be captured by their current model is considered to be 'random' or unreal. They're declaring, in effect, that our vision and understanding must stay within the bounds that they have already sketched out. A problem with this is that their method of inquiry only lends itself well to certain kinds of problems. If something can be manipulated in a repeatable manner in a lab setting, then its real to them, particularly if its relatively easy to model. So science starts out by dealing with things that are approximately linear, then moves on to deal successfully with some harder, nonlinear dynamics, then gets bogged down and kind of stops. Almost by definition, this approach does capture some of the most important dynamics in nature, to a certain order of approximation. But it doesn't follow that everything outside of that is unimportant. A very weak influence can have very profound effects. (By way of analogy, gravity is a very weak interaction compared to electromagnetic interactions, but it matters anyway because of its cumulative effects, where the stronger electromagnetic effects tend to counteract each other and cancel out on large scales.) There is no love, or choice, or true aspiration within the scope of what is described by science. There is causal mechanics, and randomness, and anything that can't be modeled by dividing the world into those categories disappears.
That sounds about right, based on my experience in other analogous situations.
It seems like all you can do is take that all into account, then still try to do what you think is right anyway. Otherwise its a weasel race to the bottom, which doesn't really work either.
I agree with you that the petty and unjust God is not worthy of our worship. A lot of people don't want to see it that way though, they still hope to benefit by trying to kiss that God's ass. And they don't see the wrong in their God because they don't want to see their own selfishness which is similar. After a while, I don't think it makes much sense to be angry on their behalf. The more honest of them will have their own day of anger when they see how they've been duped. Then they'll see that they've also been vicious or dishonest also, in one way or another, and they'll start working to get over it.
I've gone to some trouble trying to work out how to reconcile the idea of goodness with the idea of natural selection. The two ideas are at least partially incompatible as most people conceive of them, but if you try to get rid of one or the other you wind up with different kinds of problems. I'm pretty sure now that the ideas can be reconciled, but some other commonly held assumptions have to be removed first.
I don't think its just Christianity that's messed up, its all religions, and all splinter sects. Everyone wants to twist the truth into something proprietary. And everyone wants to pretend that they have the whole solution when they only have a small part of it. I don't think a Richard Dawkin's style of atheism is much better in that regard. But I've learned by studying other religious ideas, even though I'm certain that none of it can be trusted.
I'm also with you that truth is more important than happiness. I'd rather suffer than be pleasantly deluded. For me there have been periods of shock after seeing through a lie, where what's left seems relatively stark and empty. But later I've discovered new things that are better than what I could have found before throwing out the old half-truths. So I think that killing one's personal god tends to pay off in the long run, if a person is honest and sticks with it.
If you haven't already, you might try dating chinese women, as a way to get 'family values' without the religious conflict.
A trouble I have had is that mixed in with all the bullshit in Christianity, there's an element that's valuable to me. But when I react against the bullshit I tend to close myself off from all of it. So there's been a long process of recovering the important stuff internally, while sifting out all the stupidity and power lust that caused me to reject it all in the first place.