According to you, there's no way for you to tell if I'm ignorant or not.
Meanwhile, if there is such a thing as "objective reality", then our various subjective realities don't make objective reality any less objective; on the contrary, objective reality just makes our subjective realities "wrong".
If we both encounter an Objective Elephant, you believing it's actually a Lion doesn't make the Elephant any less absolute or true. It just makes your subjective reality an imperfect approximation of what is truly real.
You can't negate objective reality simply by believing something else instead. Nor can you negate my perception of objective reality simply by perceiving it differently than I do.
All you can do, really, is explain in painful detail why it is that you have no authority to explain anything. If you truly believe there is no objective reality, then you must give up all use of the words "must", "should", and "is".
Such as maybe, US workers facing >60% underemployment and no way to pay back the loan other than to blow up the bank?
Exactly my point.
The Middle Kingdom's own master strategist, Sun Tzu himself, taught that putting your enemy on death ground was bad strategy. Any policy that makes nuclear war cheaper than the alternatives for the U.S. is a policy the Chinese government will not adopt. Why would a committee of old men with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo enact a policy that added up to a nuke in the face?
I get it. This is one of those logical contradictions that reduce all your claims to meaninglessness, right?
You claim that humans cannot be objective, but then admit that you have no way of knowing if this claim is true outside of your own subjective reality.
You claim that the rules of the universe impose this condition upon you, but admit that you have no way of knowing if these rules hold true outside your own subjective reality.
You claim that assumptions are "always" bad. But you say that you have no way of knowing if this is true outside of your own subjective reality. In fact, you must *assume* that assumptions are always bad.
I guess you could be right: all your claims could be true... for *you*. But if they are, then they can't possibly be applied to anyone else, or to any phenomena outside your direct experience and interpretation.
For all you know, the rest of us may very well live and thrive in a reality replete with absolute truths and objective viewpoints. At the very least, you cannot possibly know for sure that we *don't*.
I don't think unpaid loans will lead to nuclear war, though. Historically, committees of powerful old men with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo have been very reluctant to solve problems with nukes.
I'm sure that the Chinese and U.S. governments will find a relatively peaceful modus vivendi, perhaps at terms unfavorable to the U.S., but even then probably not as unfavorable as some might think.
Nuclear war is much more likely to get started by ideological extremists with nothing to lose.
Again, the whole PURPOSE of citation is to say that this idea is not my own, and this is the source of my information/position, or this source backs up my personal information/position.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be kind of pathetic if you were basing an important philosophical, ideological, or political conclusion on a Wikipedia article?
I mean, if you can cite a Wiki in support of your position, couldn't you just as easily cite the more authoritative sources--your childhood mentor, your high school civics teacher, the many volumes of theory written by the grand masters of the subject that you read at university, etc.--whose instruction was the true support for your convictions?
I mean, are you seriously saying that when you run into an important issue that you know nothing about, you arrive at a conclusion based on what Wikipedia has to say about the subject?
If so, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution. And if not, why bother citing Wikipedia at all, rather than the superior sources that actually influenced you?
Yeah, and I remember when China beat out the US as the world's biggest supplier of cheap plastic goods.
The American economy collapsed back then, too, and China became the new world economic power overnight...
Oh, wait. It didn't happen that way at all.
No, I think what we're seeing here is that "IT goods"--i.e., consumer electronics, are no longer so cutting edge nor so expensive to manufacture, that only the world's leading economies and most advanced production methods can afford to produce them at the commodity level.
The real trend here is China's overtaking the rest of the world as the chief supplier of cheap-and-easy goods of all kinds.
Whether or not that's going to be enough to meet their population's growing food and power needs is a question that will make the next fifty years or so very interesting.
One thing I always wondered about the warmer period before the little ice age... wouldn't it have flooded Europe, just as people predict the current warming trend will do?
Note also that all the cases of bird flu in humans so far have taken place in densely populated urban centers, where people customarily share their living space with their livestock (in this case, birds), under less-than-(western)-ideal hygienic and sanitary conditions.
Since I: do not sleep with chickens, do not live in close proximity to hundreds or thousands of people who do, take a shower and brush my teeth every day in clean water, eat only government-regulated foodstuffs, and am not even suffering from failures in my immune system due to the onset of old age, I don't see much reason to worry about bird flu.
I'm much more likely to die of cancer caused by the preservatives in Twinkies.
Don't the/. editors choose stories based on their signal value?
I mean, the guy is getting his front-page presence by submitting worthwhile stories; i.e., by trying to increase the signal and decrease the noise on the front page. His articles have merit, which is why they are accepted by the editors.
How does contributing meritorious articles decrease the signal/noise ratio?
And why is this the submitter's fault? It's the editors that approve the articles. If they're posting noise instead of signal, that's an editorial issue, not a submitter issue.
Besides, signal and noise are subjective terms. It's clear that "Beatles" believes he is getting quite a bit of signal from Slashdot, in exchange for his signal-rich submissions to Slashdot.
And to the extent that Slashdot is rewarding him in the currency of his choice (in this case, boosts for his link farm) for his effort in finding articles that are interesting to Slashdot, I think it's a pretty signal-rich emergent pattern overall.
You know what decreases the signal/noise ratio, in my opinion? A comments thread that, instead of discussing the interesting implications of recent discoveries regarding cancer propagation, chooses to bitch about the totally irrelevant ulterior motives of the article submitter.
So, um, thank you so much for doing your part to increase the noise around here.
In order to leverage Slashdot's high potential value to him and his interests, he has to offer something of high value to Slashdot.
Which he does.
So long as there's no conspiracy between him and the/. editors to feature his articles on the front page, what's the big deal? He establishes a name for himself by submitting valuable articles to Slashdot, and then leverages that brand identity however he sees fit.
What I want to know is why more regular submitters haven't leveraged their fame in the same way already.
You can't fit evolution, the statement 'god created man', and Occam's Razor together no matter what God's representative to Earth says.
Oh, I'm not trying to. I admit to having an axe to grind, but it's mostly just a question of satisfying my curiosity. I have no interest in cleverly blindsiding you with some cleverly-concealed logical shenanigans or subtle Socratic misdirection.
Anyway, fair enough. But what's the evolutionary benefit to a species that seems to use most of its advanced cognitive powers rejecting the notion of morality defined as the need to propagate genetic material?
Given the success of Google's products, I think the logical conclusion is that Joel Spolsky may not be the only guy having good ideas about workforce management.
It's obvious that Google agrees with him about Class A hiring practices, but disagrees with him about the sacrosanctity of the Fortress of Solitude approach to teamwork.
And from the article it's equally obvious that Google thinks their approach has been successful.
You and I can think of all sorts of reasons why it shouldn't work in theory, but Google is saying "we've discovered that it does work in practice". All I'm saying is, what if they're right?
If the kind of teamwork we're talking about results in the problems you envision, wouldn't the top programmers be leaving Google in droves, to work in more conventional environments?
Another possibility is that there's more than one way to skin this cat. Maybe Spolsky is optimized for Lone Gunmen, and so he's able to report huge success from that approach, while Google is optimized for the Justice League, and is similarly successful. It could be a win-win kind of thing: Joel gets a stable of top-notch solo operators, and Google gets a stable of top-notch team players, and ne'er the twain shall meet, except in stock portfolios of the wise...
It could even be that Joel has not yet reached Google's level of insight. Perhaps his success comes from optmizing for the old, solo operator paradigm, while Google's success comes from optimizing for a new team paradigm.
Whatever the case, it's clear that Google doesn't perceive the "frivolous interruptions" problems you predict. Either they're covering up (and their programmers are keeping silent about the truth of their crappy working conditions), or we're making some bad assumptions about the true productivity potential of teamwork, properly understood.
Wake me up when you get to the part where we should take him seriously about the whole "manufacturing consent" thing.
Also, it occurs to me that his insight is incomplete. What about the entertainment-industrial complex? The academic-industrial complex? The information-industrial complex? The entertainment-academic complex?
Hell, what about the military-entertainment complex?
Clearly, what you don't understand about "the states" is that it's ruled by the consensus of its citizens, most of whom are not actually extreme capitalists. In fact, there happens to be a very large and vocal leftist faction in our population and political arena, which is why you actually see a hodgepodge of assorted compromise policies, rather than the extremist situation you were somehow expecting.
But why were you expecting an extremist situation anyway?
Couldn't it just as easily be the other way 'round?
That this is the same media that had to make it look like Bush was some kind of draft-dodger to counter the inherent pansy-ness of a decorated war vet?
Last time I checked, he gets paid by MIT, which has strong ties to the military-industrial complex. So either he's a part of the conspiracy (probably an uwitting stooge), or there is no conspiracy (which much more plausibly explains why he's allowed to rant about the things he rants about).
I mean, seriously. If Chomsky is right about the manufacturing of consent and all, why does the military-industrial complex let him have such a bully pulpit? Can you give any other explanation than "reverse-psychology Jedi mind shit, just like in Orwell, man!"?
There's a huge difference between American shows produced in Canada for budgetary reasons (Stargate: SG-1) and Canadian shows produced in Canada because Canada produces its own shows as well as playing host to production companies from other countries (The Red Green Show).
For one thing, Canadian shows must have a minium percentage of Canadians involved with the production. American shows produced in Canada do not.
By "superior" I mean "more likely to be an accurate description of an objective moral code worth following".
So you seem to be saying that the genetic imperatives, as described and interpreted by you, here, are an objective moral code, the only moral code, and our only proper guide in times of moral uncertainty?
I think Google avoids this problem to a great extent by applying some of Joel's other principles: Namely, that "Class A" people hire other "Class A" people; and Google actively involves the workers themselves in the decision to hire their teammates.
I'd imagine there's a very low incidence "being interrupted by stupid questions" and a very high incidence "of greatness feeding greatness in a positive feedback loop".
Where most companies end up hiring a bunch of mediocre programmers and giving each of them enough personal space to make it as far as they can on their own, Google seems to be incredibly strict about hiring only the best, and making sure that they'll be a good fit for their team before signing them on.
Slashdot Mirror
I envy you the ignorance.
According to you, there's no way for you to tell if I'm ignorant or not.
Meanwhile, if there is such a thing as "objective reality", then our various subjective realities don't make objective reality any less objective; on the contrary, objective reality just makes our subjective realities "wrong".
If we both encounter an Objective Elephant, you believing it's actually a Lion doesn't make the Elephant any less absolute or true. It just makes your subjective reality an imperfect approximation of what is truly real.
You can't negate objective reality simply by believing something else instead. Nor can you negate my perception of objective reality simply by perceiving it differently than I do.
All you can do, really, is explain in painful detail why it is that you have no authority to explain anything. If you truly believe there is no objective reality, then you must give up all use of the words "must", "should", and "is".
Such as maybe, US workers facing >60% underemployment and no way to pay back the loan other than to blow up the bank?
Exactly my point.
The Middle Kingdom's own master strategist, Sun Tzu himself, taught that putting your enemy on death ground was bad strategy. Any policy that makes nuclear war cheaper than the alternatives for the U.S. is a policy the Chinese government will not adopt. Why would a committee of old men with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo enact a policy that added up to a nuke in the face?
No more so than Britain and Europe at large are culturally reactive to America.
Oh.
Ha ha.
I get it. This is one of those logical contradictions that reduce all your claims to meaninglessness, right?
You claim that humans cannot be objective, but then admit that you have no way of knowing if this claim is true outside of your own subjective reality.
You claim that the rules of the universe impose this condition upon you, but admit that you have no way of knowing if these rules hold true outside your own subjective reality.
You claim that assumptions are "always" bad. But you say that you have no way of knowing if this is true outside of your own subjective reality. In fact, you must *assume* that assumptions are always bad.
I guess you could be right: all your claims could be true... for *you*. But if they are, then they can't possibly be applied to anyone else, or to any phenomena outside your direct experience and interpretation.
For all you know, the rest of us may very well live and thrive in a reality replete with absolute truths and objective viewpoints. At the very least, you cannot possibly know for sure that we *don't*.
I admit, it's a problem.
I don't think unpaid loans will lead to nuclear war, though. Historically, committees of powerful old men with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo have been very reluctant to solve problems with nukes.
I'm sure that the Chinese and U.S. governments will find a relatively peaceful modus vivendi, perhaps at terms unfavorable to the U.S., but even then probably not as unfavorable as some might think.
Nuclear war is much more likely to get started by ideological extremists with nothing to lose.
Again, the whole PURPOSE of citation is to say that this idea is not my own, and this is the source of my information/position, or this source backs up my personal information/position.
Yeah, but wouldn't it be kind of pathetic if you were basing an important philosophical, ideological, or political conclusion on a Wikipedia article?
I mean, if you can cite a Wiki in support of your position, couldn't you just as easily cite the more authoritative sources--your childhood mentor, your high school civics teacher, the many volumes of theory written by the grand masters of the subject that you read at university, etc.--whose instruction was the true support for your convictions?
I mean, are you seriously saying that when you run into an important issue that you know nothing about, you arrive at a conclusion based on what Wikipedia has to say about the subject?
If so, you're part of the problem, not part of the solution. And if not, why bother citing Wikipedia at all, rather than the superior sources that actually influenced you?
Human beings are incapable of being objective.
May we assume that you have an objective source for this alleged "truth"?
Yeah, and I remember when China beat out the US as the world's biggest supplier of cheap plastic goods.
The American economy collapsed back then, too, and China became the new world economic power overnight...
Oh, wait. It didn't happen that way at all.
No, I think what we're seeing here is that "IT goods"--i.e., consumer electronics, are no longer so cutting edge nor so expensive to manufacture, that only the world's leading economies and most advanced production methods can afford to produce them at the commodity level.
The real trend here is China's overtaking the rest of the world as the chief supplier of cheap-and-easy goods of all kinds.
Whether or not that's going to be enough to meet their population's growing food and power needs is a question that will make the next fifty years or so very interesting.
One thing I always wondered about the warmer period before the little ice age... wouldn't it have flooded Europe, just as people predict the current warming trend will do?
Note also that all the cases of bird flu in humans so far have taken place in densely populated urban centers, where people customarily share their living space with their livestock (in this case, birds), under less-than-(western)-ideal hygienic and sanitary conditions.
Since I: do not sleep with chickens, do not live in close proximity to hundreds or thousands of people who do, take a shower and brush my teeth every day in clean water, eat only government-regulated foodstuffs, and am not even suffering from failures in my immune system due to the onset of old age, I don't see much reason to worry about bird flu.
I'm much more likely to die of cancer caused by the preservatives in Twinkies.
See also: SARS.
Elephants are big, ponderous, heavy, and slow.
Thus, they provide a certain visual humor when depicted dancing, that is not matched by, say people dancing, or meerkats dancing.
Disney also has dancing hippos, by the way.
And dancing crocodiles.
And dancing bears.
How does it decrease the signal/noise ratio?
/. editors choose stories based on their signal value?
Don't the
I mean, the guy is getting his front-page presence by submitting worthwhile stories; i.e., by trying to increase the signal and decrease the noise on the front page. His articles have merit, which is why they are accepted by the editors.
How does contributing meritorious articles decrease the signal/noise ratio?
And why is this the submitter's fault? It's the editors that approve the articles. If they're posting noise instead of signal, that's an editorial issue, not a submitter issue.
Besides, signal and noise are subjective terms. It's clear that "Beatles" believes he is getting quite a bit of signal from Slashdot, in exchange for his signal-rich submissions to Slashdot.
And to the extent that Slashdot is rewarding him in the currency of his choice (in this case, boosts for his link farm) for his effort in finding articles that are interesting to Slashdot, I think it's a pretty signal-rich emergent pattern overall.
You know what decreases the signal/noise ratio, in my opinion? A comments thread that, instead of discussing the interesting implications of recent discoveries regarding cancer propagation, chooses to bitch about the totally irrelevant ulterior motives of the article submitter.
So, um, thank you so much for doing your part to increase the noise around here.
So?
/. editors to feature his articles on the front page, what's the big deal? He establishes a name for himself by submitting valuable articles to Slashdot, and then leverages that brand identity however he sees fit.
In order to leverage Slashdot's high potential value to him and his interests, he has to offer something of high value to Slashdot.
Which he does.
So long as there's no conspiracy between him and the
What I want to know is why more regular submitters haven't leveraged their fame in the same way already.
You can't fit evolution, the statement 'god created man', and Occam's Razor together no matter what God's representative to Earth says.
Oh, I'm not trying to. I admit to having an axe to grind, but it's mostly just a question of satisfying my curiosity. I have no interest in cleverly blindsiding you with some cleverly-concealed logical shenanigans or subtle Socratic misdirection.
Anyway, fair enough. But what's the evolutionary benefit to a species that seems to use most of its advanced cognitive powers rejecting the notion of morality defined as the need to propagate genetic material?
Heh. I hear the same argument about embryonic stem cells all the time.
Given the success of Google's products, I think the logical conclusion is that Joel Spolsky may not be the only guy having good ideas about workforce management.
It's obvious that Google agrees with him about Class A hiring practices, but disagrees with him about the sacrosanctity of the Fortress of Solitude approach to teamwork.
And from the article it's equally obvious that Google thinks their approach has been successful.
You and I can think of all sorts of reasons why it shouldn't work in theory, but Google is saying "we've discovered that it does work in practice". All I'm saying is, what if they're right?
If the kind of teamwork we're talking about results in the problems you envision, wouldn't the top programmers be leaving Google in droves, to work in more conventional environments?
Another possibility is that there's more than one way to skin this cat. Maybe Spolsky is optimized for Lone Gunmen, and so he's able to report huge success from that approach, while Google is optimized for the Justice League, and is similarly successful. It could be a win-win kind of thing: Joel gets a stable of top-notch solo operators, and Google gets a stable of top-notch team players, and ne'er the twain shall meet, except in stock portfolios of the wise...
It could even be that Joel has not yet reached Google's level of insight. Perhaps his success comes from optmizing for the old, solo operator paradigm, while Google's success comes from optimizing for a new team paradigm.
Whatever the case, it's clear that Google doesn't perceive the "frivolous interruptions" problems you predict. Either they're covering up (and their programmers are keeping silent about the truth of their crappy working conditions), or we're making some bad assumptions about the true productivity potential of teamwork, properly understood.
Well, there you go, then.
Wake me up when you get to the part where we should take him seriously about the whole "manufacturing consent" thing.
Also, it occurs to me that his insight is incomplete. What about the entertainment-industrial complex? The academic-industrial complex? The information-industrial complex? The entertainment-academic complex?
Hell, what about the military-entertainment complex?
Yeah, but aren't Irishmen around the world always itching to kick the sh*t out of someone?
Truly it is said, "God invented whiskey so the Irish wouldn't rule the world."
Clearly, what you don't understand about "the states" is that it's ruled by the consensus of its citizens, most of whom are not actually extreme capitalists. In fact, there happens to be a very large and vocal leftist faction in our population and political arena, which is why you actually see a hodgepodge of assorted compromise policies, rather than the extremist situation you were somehow expecting. But why were you expecting an extremist situation anyway?
But would one want to own a quasi-intelligent PDA that runs off rat neurons?
You're asking the wrong question.
The real question is: Would anyone not want to own a quasi-intelligent PDA that runs off rat neurons?
A rat that can smart-bomb your rat-trap.
Couldn't it just as easily be the other way 'round?
That this is the same media that had to make it look like Bush was some kind of draft-dodger to counter the inherent pansy-ness of a decorated war vet?
Remember who told you about who controls the media and manufactures consent thereby.
Last time I checked, he gets paid by MIT, which has strong ties to the military-industrial complex. So either he's a part of the conspiracy (probably an uwitting stooge), or there is no conspiracy (which much more plausibly explains why he's allowed to rant about the things he rants about).
I mean, seriously. If Chomsky is right about the manufacturing of consent and all, why does the military-industrial complex let him have such a bully pulpit? Can you give any other explanation than "reverse-psychology Jedi mind shit, just like in Orwell, man!"?
There's a huge difference between American shows produced in Canada for budgetary reasons (Stargate: SG-1) and Canadian shows produced in Canada because Canada produces its own shows as well as playing host to production companies from other countries (The Red Green Show).
For one thing, Canadian shows must have a minium percentage of Canadians involved with the production. American shows produced in Canada do not.
By "superior" I mean "more likely to be an accurate description of an objective moral code worth following".
So you seem to be saying that the genetic imperatives, as described and interpreted by you, here, are an objective moral code, the only moral code, and our only proper guide in times of moral uncertainty?
I think Google avoids this problem to a great extent by applying some of Joel's other principles: Namely, that "Class A" people hire other "Class A" people; and Google actively involves the workers themselves in the decision to hire their teammates.
I'd imagine there's a very low incidence "being interrupted by stupid questions" and a very high incidence "of greatness feeding greatness in a positive feedback loop".
Where most companies end up hiring a bunch of mediocre programmers and giving each of them enough personal space to make it as far as they can on their own, Google seems to be incredibly strict about hiring only the best, and making sure that they'll be a good fit for their team before signing them on.