you go there with just the clothes on your back, if you've got a true gift to offer.
So you go there with the clothes on your back and your true gift, then?
Coming up with $150 for the ticket isn't the only expense, of course. You still have to buy or barter for transportation, food, water, art supplies, shelter, &c. When many of my acquaintances go, they expend significantly more treasure than the $150 that the ticket costs. They claim that the experience is worth the couple thousand dollars worth of resources they expend to get there, stay there, and get back, but sometimes I'm not so sure... it seems possible that they've bought into the Burning Man hype, and that their resources would be much better spent getting a job, keeping a job, saving some money, repairing their cars, furnishing their homes, or any one of the ten thousand other things that don't involve spending money they can't really spare on some sort of overhyped "celebration of anti-commercialism and equality".
No doubt I'm missing out on something really good and special by avoiding Burning Man, but on the other hand, I seem to live better the rest of the year than almost anybody I personally know who makes the effort of going. Certainly I spend the rest of the year with less dodging of creditors. As far as I can tell, you need a certain minimum commitment to commercialism and conformity to even be able to afford Burning Man, without taking a significant hit to your overall quality of life.
It was probably much better in Soviet Russia, where Burning Man would come to you.
Actually, this pluralism of styles, philosophies, and standards is exactly what postmodernism is. Modernism is quite different.
Burning Man is pretty much the archtypical postmodern event--so far as anything postmodern can be thought of as "archtypical", of course. One of the core concepts of postmodernism is the rejection of fixed archetypes.
When you say that Burning Man cannot be narrowly or exclusively defined, what you are really saying is that Burning Man is postmodern, by definition.
That must be Christian logic: We're right everyone else is wrong.
For those moderators who are unduly impressed with this statement, please keep in mind that this is everybody's logic.
Observe: "Buddhism is right, and so is Christianity--except for the part where Christianity says that Bhuddhism is wrong, of course. On that point, Bhuddism is right, and everybody else is wrong."
Even the most tolerant and culturally relativistic religion still has to reject those religions that reject tolerance and cultural relativsm. Otherwise they make no sense at all.
What? The most wise and insightful religion is the one that asserts the truth of all religions that contradict it? Think about that for a moment. Saying that some things are right and others are wrong is the fundamental principle of getting anything done. It's not faulty logic, but clearheaded, sensible thinking. Christians may be wrong about everything else, but at least they're right about discriminating between what they believe and what they don't believe.
Why is any religion not of Christian origin called a "cult"?
I guess it mainly depends on who's doing the talking... anything can be called a "cult", if you like. But here's one variant of the generally accepted indicators that a community is a cult. These signs can be applied to Christianity, too, and often rightly so. But when you compare the mainstream religions to the "cult" religions, the difference between the two is extreme. E.g., my parents are Christians--have been all their lives--but they've never exhibited any of the signs of a cult.
Well, maybe the "if you leave the church, you're wrong" sign, but that can be said about any standard: If you cross on a red light, you're wrong; that doesn't mean that traffic laws are a cult, though. Certainly I've never seen Christians, or Buddhists, or Neopagans punish their ex-members the way the Scientoligists or the Jehova's Witnesses do.
I don't know if the Raelians meet the more technical definition of a "cult", or if they're simply being discrimintated against because they're non-Christian. I suspect it's a little bit of both, though. Since they're refusing to publish their methodology, open their experimental process up to peer review, offer any sort of supporting evidence, or allow for independent corroboration of their claims, I'm content to let the media put them in the "cult" bucket pending clarification of the matter.
"My car is a car of good mileage, satisfying agility, and convenient compactness."
What am I doing? Rationalizing a parasitic belief, or simply expressing things I believe to be true? It seems clear to me that statements of this form are not automatically self-invalidating.
Also, it seems petty to whine about public expressions of personal belief in a thread about that very topic. Might as well ask why the pro-carrot people insist on pointing out the advantages of carrots every time a discussion of vegetables comes up. Why? Because it's topical.
Heh. I've seen the quality of life of refurbished laser printers. If that's what Tomahawks have to look forward to, I'd prefer to go out in a blaze of glory myself.
System administration. There's only going to be more corporate WANs and servers as time goes on. Pretty soon, being a sysadmin will be like being an HVAC technician.
I imagine that software engineers would have an even easier time at system administration, where their powerful coding skills could allow them to automate their work to a much higher degree than the average MCSE.
Surely modern guided missiles are essentially robots, though?
Take the Tomahawk missle, for example: preprogrammed, autonomous navigation... the only practical difference between it and the Roomba is the payload and mission.
Also, I imagine the Tomahawk is much smarter than the Roomba, and has a much better maintenance plan.
It has a tendancy to smite my enemies, and reward my allies.
Could you elaborate on this point? As an evil overlord, I usually have no problem finding sla^H^H^Hrobots to vacuum my floors. I am, however, having difficulty finding an enterprise solution for automated smiting and rewarding.
If the dome is more space-efficient, but everybody refuses to make stuff with more space-efficient form factors, whose fault is that?
Also, what's to prevent someone from putting rectangular rooms (full of rectangular stuff) inside a dome, and using the "dead space" for storage closets, HVAC units, and all the other things that human buildings generally like to have? You get to keep your familiar rectangular user interface, and still make use of the increased space-efficiency to house all the behind-the-scenes stuff... more efficiently.
Aren't buckydomes more stable than rectangular structures, and cheaper to build than than the same volume of rectangular structures? If so, then the wins should be obvious: cheaper, more stable, and more space-efficient.
"Buckydomes are round, but desks are square" doesn't seem like much of a problem at all.
I'm glad you're enjoying the debate. I am, too. I think that by now we have a pretty good idea of where we're each coming from; it seems clear that neither of us is going to change the other's mind anytime soon. I'd still like to continue the discussion, though. It's both fun and educational for me.
Thanks for the SAB link; it's very instructive. I guess I haven't done my due diligence on the issue. One thing did strike me as odd, though: the author seems to base his analysis on the King James translation, which isn't the only, or even the best translation available. Compare some of the passages in the SAB with the same passages in the New International Version (a good reference can be found online here).
This sort of thing has always raised a couple obvious questions for me. How true can the Bible be, if its meaning varies from translation to translation? How do we know which translators to trust, if any?
These are tough questions, and not ones that I can answer in any definitive way right now. However...
The edition of the NIV translation that's sitting on my bookshelf at home includes a lengthy preface that details the makeup of the translation team, the sources used, and the methods used to do the translation. Where multiple sources include the same passage, one is chosen as "canonical", and the others are referenced via footnotes. The reasons for choosing one source over another are explained. Where two sources do not agree, the canonical passage is in the main text, and the alternate passage is provided in full, in a footnote. I would like to see similar assurances of scholarly rigor from the author of the SAB. Please let me know if I've missed the webpage where that information is provided. I haven't had much time to explore the site yet.
But I'm not a biblical scholar, and I really don't know anything about textual criticism. So as far as the accuracy of the translation, and the validity of the original source texts goes, I have to rely almost entirely on the experts in the field.
So I will read more of the SAB, and cross-reference it with other translations, and consider its points. It's the least I can do, if I'm at all serious about finding the truth.
May I ask a favor in return? That you read the first chapter or two of Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. I couldn't find any online editions with a casual Google search, but it should be available in any bookstore. It is, I think, a good example of an intelligent, well-reasoned choice for Christianity. Its arguments are probably not bulletproof, but they make an interesting counterpoint to the SAB.
The rest of our conversation seems to be about trust: who can we trust, and why should we trust them? I think that the answer is the same for religious matters as it is for anything else. The difficulty is when two trustworthy people make contradicting statements. If we care about the topic at all, this means more work for us. In the end, we must examine the issue for ourselves, and personally decide which statement is true, and which is false.
Now that we've exchanged book titles, we can probably come back to the issue of trust later, after we've done some studying of our own:)
I've copied this post into my journal; would you mind posting your reply there, instead of here? It's probably a better place to continue this discussion.
No, you're right. I was getting little elitist, there. It's one of my many flaws, and one that many of my friends and family call me on all the time.
You'll probably see more of it in my latest response on the other thread, for which I apologize. Please forgive me. It's not my intention to pummel you into submission with my proclamations, even if it seems that way. I'll try to be less like that in the future.
Hrm. I may be confusing "religion" with "religious institutions". If you're saying that religious institutions (such as the Catholic Church) are a bad thing, you'll get no argument from me. But if you're talking about religions themselves (i.e.; the fundamental principles and practices of a faith), then we're still on the same page. I hope you don't mind if we continue to use Christianity as our example. It's the religion I've had the most experience with.
The scientific community is very open about their experiments allowing anyone with the resources to try, any encourage it to make sure they didn't make any mistakes. They try to explain things to the public as logical as possible. So I trust this community.
The Christian community is very open about their source texts, allowing anyone with the resources to make their own translations and interpretations. Translations are done by multipartisan committees to prevent intentional or accidental errors. In my experience, they try to explain things as logically as possible. For these reasons, and my own experience of the community, I find them generally trustworthy--certainly as trustworthy as I find the Physics community, for example.
... socialism was not on faith. It was based on reason. The people after reading documentation on it felt that it could work. Given their current living conditions it was a worthy risk. Their was no faith involved just trust in themselves. They followed through and it failed. In a sense it could be considered an experiment. Tried, tested, failed.
People, after reading the documentation on Christianity, felt it could work. They felt it was a worthy risk. There was no faith involved, just trust in themselves. They followed through and... well? They took the risk, made the leap... did they find the God their scriptures said was there, or not? The socialists conducted their experiment, and did not find the utopia they reasoned would be there. The Christians conducted their experiment. Was their reasoning correct, or flawed?
Religious institutions may be telling to you believe without question, but the thing they're telling you to believe is freely available for your own analysis. If you want to question it, you can. If you want to conduct the experiment yourself, you can. How thorough and accurate has your own analysis been?
With Quantum Physics, you have no choice but to trust the smarty-men with the expensive equipment. Unless you're one of them, you'll never be able to prove it for yourself. You'll just have to settle for other, less reliable methods of testing the truth of their claims.
Christian institutions may seem less reliable, but at least you don't need a million dollars and a Ph.D. to validate their claims. Ten dollars and basic literacy should be enough to get you started. You could conduct the experiment right now, if you wanted, and prove the thing for yourself, one way or the other.
...here all votes are counted by hand, since this is the only way to be 100% sure about the outcome.
Technically, I think the only way to be 100% sure about the outcome would be for you to count all the votes by hand yourself, without making any errors. Counting thousands of entities manually isn't inherently more accurate than counting them mechanically, whatever the Danish government may have told you.
I imagine that the vaunted superior accuracy of Danish ballot-counting is due more to their QA policies than to their manual counting. Perhaps also the Danes have a strong sense of civic duty, which makes them ideologically more committed to an accurate count than a personally pleasing one. Since machines don't have ideologies, they'd be inferior to Danes in this respect (all other things being equal, of course).
I, too, am bothered that Google is trying to be more than 'just search.'
This statement might make sense if we'd already developed the Ultimate Search Technology(tm). The truth is that the current search technology is only a pale shadow of what future search technology will be.
Also, we haven't even developed the Ultimate Information Organization Technology(tm). So even the UST will have to constantly evolve to remain relevant to the constantly evolving information organization technology.
I imagine that the organizing and searching technologies will ultimately converge (any sufficiently advanced database will be indistinguishable from a perfect search engine). I also imagine that the first company to "leverage the synergy" of these two symbiotic technologies will become very poweful indeed. I imagine, finally, that most of Google's "feature creep" is actually the prototyping of more advanced information-organization and information-retrieval technologies. I don't think it's even a question of "more bells and whistles to keep ahead of the competion", so much as "developing the next-generation technology while our competitors are still trying to catch up with the current generation".
But these are all imaginings. Only Google really knows what it's doing. But considering how smart they've been so far, it doesn't seem reasonable to assume they're suddenly going to start being stupid, though.
I'm sorry--I meant that BASF bit to be more humorous and less argumentative.
I also understand what you're saying about NASA ROI vs. Private ROI.
But what if you asked, "would I get a better deal from that car dealership than from this one?" All you'd have to do is compare the two dealership's prices, and there's your answer.
On the other hand, what if you asked, "if there were another dealership--would it give me a better deal than this one?" You'll never know the answer to that question, because there is no other dealership to compare the first one to.
There were no private companies investing in space research on the scale of NASA, or the Soviet Space agency. There still aren't. Historically, the ROI from the private sector has been close to zero, since there were close to zero private-sector space programs. So the obvious answer is "NASA gives, and has always given, better ROI than the private sector".
I didn't say the medium had gotten more technologically primitive, if that's what you mean by "worse". I said it's gotten more "unpleasant". Don't believe me? Pop-up ads. Do we really want commercial interests to make outer space as annoying as cyberspace? Personally, I'd be willing to accept lower ROI and longer development cycles if it meant less orbital pop-up ads.
Whenever a religious person can't come up with an explanation they usually say "God works in mysterious ways" and "You just gotta have faith."
How is this different from the way anybody else deals with the unexplainable? There's no semantic difference between Billy Graham saying "God is mysterious" and Niels Bohr saying "Quantum Physics is mysterious". And being religious doesn't mean not searching for the best, most sensible explanation you can find. Religion isn't the only refuge of the intellectually lazy, so it's a little unfair to single it out for a failing common to everyone, regardless of faith or creed. Finally, "having faith" isn't always a sign of intellectual laziness. Sometimes, it's a sign of intellectual rigor.
Christianity has no real relevance to real world...
If you believe that, then you're taking a lot of "facts" about religion on quite a bit more faith than necessary.
...it's a comfort for facing death and being alone.
So? Are you saying that only unpleasant statements are true, and that all comforting statements are false? That's not a very good criteria for determining truth. Anyway, the last time I checked, intellectually rigorous Christianity wasn't very comforting at all.
Socialism isn't a good analogy.
It isn't? It certainly seems to be analogous to Christianity:
Claims that "people were living a harsh existence"? Check.
"A book comes along and sounds logical", and people rebel against the status quo? Check.
The rebels "trusted their own ability to reason", and "knew [there] would be risk[s]"? Check.
"Their current way of life was awful..."? Redundant, but anyway. Check.
"...it's not like [they] had much to lose anyway"? Check.
"Others...just followed the masses in 'blind trust'"? Check.
If his reasoning doesn't entail what I say it does, than I'm wrong. If it does entail what I say it does, then it is flawed for the reasons I've given.
The best ways to demolish my own reasoning would be to either show that I'm wrong about what his reasoning entails, or show that my own reasoning has logical flaws.
All you've done is describe a common process for demonstrating logical flaws (statement --> absurd implication --> flaw), and then label it as a "straw man". Hardly a compelling counter-argument. Next time, be adventurous! Attack me with thinking instead of buzzwords!
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So you go there with the clothes on your back and your true gift, then?
Coming up with $150 for the ticket isn't the only expense, of course. You still have to buy or barter for transportation, food, water, art supplies, shelter, &c. When many of my acquaintances go, they expend significantly more treasure than the $150 that the ticket costs. They claim that the experience is worth the couple thousand dollars worth of resources they expend to get there, stay there, and get back, but sometimes I'm not so sure... it seems possible that they've bought into the Burning Man hype, and that their resources would be much better spent getting a job, keeping a job, saving some money, repairing their cars, furnishing their homes, or any one of the ten thousand other things that don't involve spending money they can't really spare on some sort of overhyped "celebration of anti-commercialism and equality".
No doubt I'm missing out on something really good and special by avoiding Burning Man, but on the other hand, I seem to live better the rest of the year than almost anybody I personally know who makes the effort of going. Certainly I spend the rest of the year with less dodging of creditors. As far as I can tell, you need a certain minimum commitment to commercialism and conformity to even be able to afford Burning Man, without taking a significant hit to your overall quality of life.
It was probably much better in Soviet Russia, where Burning Man would come to you.
Actually, this pluralism of styles, philosophies, and standards is exactly what postmodernism is. Modernism is quite different.
Burning Man is pretty much the archtypical postmodern event--so far as anything postmodern can be thought of as "archtypical", of course. One of the core concepts of postmodernism is the rejection of fixed archetypes.
When you say that Burning Man cannot be narrowly or exclusively defined, what you are really saying is that Burning Man is postmodern, by definition.
Please. "Kool-aid" is so 1978. These days, it's all about applesauce and vodka, baby.
For those moderators who are unduly impressed with this statement, please keep in mind that this is everybody's logic.
Observe: "Buddhism is right, and so is Christianity--except for the part where Christianity says that Bhuddhism is wrong, of course. On that point, Bhuddism is right, and everybody else is wrong."
Even the most tolerant and culturally relativistic religion still has to reject those religions that reject tolerance and cultural relativsm. Otherwise they make no sense at all.
What? The most wise and insightful religion is the one that asserts the truth of all religions that contradict it? Think about that for a moment. Saying that some things are right and others are wrong is the fundamental principle of getting anything done. It's not faulty logic, but clearheaded, sensible thinking. Christians may be wrong about everything else, but at least they're right about discriminating between what they believe and what they don't believe.
I guess it mainly depends on who's doing the talking... anything can be called a "cult", if you like. But here's one variant of the generally accepted indicators that a community is a cult. These signs can be applied to Christianity, too, and often rightly so. But when you compare the mainstream religions to the "cult" religions, the difference between the two is extreme. E.g., my parents are Christians--have been all their lives--but they've never exhibited any of the signs of a cult.
Well, maybe the "if you leave the church, you're wrong" sign, but that can be said about any standard: If you cross on a red light, you're wrong; that doesn't mean that traffic laws are a cult, though. Certainly I've never seen Christians, or Buddhists, or Neopagans punish their ex-members the way the Scientoligists or the Jehova's Witnesses do.
I don't know if the Raelians meet the more technical definition of a "cult", or if they're simply being discrimintated against because they're non-Christian. I suspect it's a little bit of both, though. Since they're refusing to publish their methodology, open their experimental process up to peer review, offer any sort of supporting evidence, or allow for independent corroboration of their claims, I'm content to let the media put them in the "cult" bucket pending clarification of the matter.
What am I doing? Rationalizing a parasitic belief, or simply expressing things I believe to be true? It seems clear to me that statements of this form are not automatically self-invalidating.
Also, it seems petty to whine about public expressions of personal belief in a thread about that very topic. Might as well ask why the pro-carrot people insist on pointing out the advantages of carrots every time a discussion of vegetables comes up. Why? Because it's topical.
Yes. The rest of us would be using our personal robots to take over, if not the world, then at least the neighborhood.
Heh. I've seen the quality of life of refurbished laser printers. If that's what Tomahawks have to look forward to, I'd prefer to go out in a blaze of glory myself.
System administration. There's only going to be more corporate WANs and servers as time goes on. Pretty soon, being a sysadmin will be like being an HVAC technician.
I imagine that software engineers would have an even easier time at system administration, where their powerful coding skills could allow them to automate their work to a much higher degree than the average MCSE.
Fair enough, but I'm still trying to figure out what any of this has to do with the coolness (or not) of techno music.
Surely modern guided missiles are essentially robots, though?
Take the Tomahawk missle, for example: preprogrammed, autonomous navigation... the only practical difference between it and the Roomba is the payload and mission.
Also, I imagine the Tomahawk is much smarter than the Roomba, and has a much better maintenance plan.
Could you elaborate on this point? As an evil overlord, I usually have no problem finding sla^H^H^Hrobots to vacuum my floors. I am, however, having difficulty finding an enterprise solution for automated smiting and rewarding.
What does that have to do with the (un)coolness of techno music?
On the other hand, your belief that nothing good can come out of Japan is charmingly naive.
And you would know "cool" how?
Special insight gained from posting arbitrary, witless flames?
If the dome is more space-efficient, but everybody refuses to make stuff with more space-efficient form factors, whose fault is that?
Also, what's to prevent someone from putting rectangular rooms (full of rectangular stuff) inside a dome, and using the "dead space" for storage closets, HVAC units, and all the other things that human buildings generally like to have? You get to keep your familiar rectangular user interface, and still make use of the increased space-efficiency to house all the behind-the-scenes stuff... more efficiently.
Aren't buckydomes more stable than rectangular structures, and cheaper to build than than the same volume of rectangular structures? If so, then the wins should be obvious: cheaper, more stable, and more space-efficient.
"Buckydomes are round, but desks are square" doesn't seem like much of a problem at all.
I wish. It's really just a good job of weaseling out of having to explain anything that doesn't make sense. But thanks for the thought.
Actually, speed is fine. It's the slowing down to below 55mph that kills people.
Thanks for the SAB link; it's very instructive. I guess I haven't done my due diligence on the issue. One thing did strike me as odd, though: the author seems to base his analysis on the King James translation, which isn't the only, or even the best translation available. Compare some of the passages in the SAB with the same passages in the New International Version (a good reference can be found online here).
This sort of thing has always raised a couple obvious questions for me. How true can the Bible be, if its meaning varies from translation to translation? How do we know which translators to trust, if any?
These are tough questions, and not ones that I can answer in any definitive way right now. However...
The edition of the NIV translation that's sitting on my bookshelf at home includes a lengthy preface that details the makeup of the translation team, the sources used, and the methods used to do the translation. Where multiple sources include the same passage, one is chosen as "canonical", and the others are referenced via footnotes. The reasons for choosing one source over another are explained. Where two sources do not agree, the canonical passage is in the main text, and the alternate passage is provided in full, in a footnote. I would like to see similar assurances of scholarly rigor from the author of the SAB. Please let me know if I've missed the webpage where that information is provided. I haven't had much time to explore the site yet.
But I'm not a biblical scholar, and I really don't know anything about textual criticism. So as far as the accuracy of the translation, and the validity of the original source texts goes, I have to rely almost entirely on the experts in the field.
So I will read more of the SAB, and cross-reference it with other translations, and consider its points. It's the least I can do, if I'm at all serious about finding the truth.
May I ask a favor in return? That you read the first chapter or two of Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. I couldn't find any online editions with a casual Google search, but it should be available in any bookstore. It is, I think, a good example of an intelligent, well-reasoned choice for Christianity. Its arguments are probably not bulletproof, but they make an interesting counterpoint to the SAB.
The rest of our conversation seems to be about trust: who can we trust, and why should we trust them? I think that the answer is the same for religious matters as it is for anything else. The difficulty is when two trustworthy people make contradicting statements. If we care about the topic at all, this means more work for us. In the end, we must examine the issue for ourselves, and personally decide which statement is true, and which is false.
Now that we've exchanged book titles, we can probably come back to the issue of trust later, after we've done some studying of our own :)
I've copied this post into my journal; would you mind posting your reply there, instead of here? It's probably a better place to continue this discussion.
No, you're right. I was getting little elitist, there. It's one of my many flaws, and one that many of my friends and family call me on all the time.
You'll probably see more of it in my latest response on the other thread, for which I apologize. Please forgive me. It's not my intention to pummel you into submission with my proclamations, even if it seems that way. I'll try to be less like that in the future.
The scientific community is very open about their experiments allowing anyone with the resources to try, any encourage it to make sure they didn't make any mistakes. They try to explain things to the public as logical as possible. So I trust this community.
The Christian community is very open about their source texts, allowing anyone with the resources to make their own translations and interpretations. Translations are done by multipartisan committees to prevent intentional or accidental errors. In my experience, they try to explain things as logically as possible. For these reasons, and my own experience of the community, I find them generally trustworthy--certainly as trustworthy as I find the Physics community, for example.
People, after reading the documentation on Christianity, felt it could work. They felt it was a worthy risk. There was no faith involved, just trust in themselves. They followed through and... well? They took the risk, made the leap... did they find the God their scriptures said was there, or not? The socialists conducted their experiment, and did not find the utopia they reasoned would be there. The Christians conducted their experiment. Was their reasoning correct, or flawed?
Religious institutions may be telling to you believe without question, but the thing they're telling you to believe is freely available for your own analysis. If you want to question it, you can. If you want to conduct the experiment yourself, you can. How thorough and accurate has your own analysis been?
With Quantum Physics, you have no choice but to trust the smarty-men with the expensive equipment. Unless you're one of them, you'll never be able to prove it for yourself. You'll just have to settle for other, less reliable methods of testing the truth of their claims.
Christian institutions may seem less reliable, but at least you don't need a million dollars and a Ph.D. to validate their claims. Ten dollars and basic literacy should be enough to get you started. You could conduct the experiment right now, if you wanted, and prove the thing for yourself, one way or the other.
Technically, I think the only way to be 100% sure about the outcome would be for you to count all the votes by hand yourself, without making any errors. Counting thousands of entities manually isn't inherently more accurate than counting them mechanically, whatever the Danish government may have told you.
I imagine that the vaunted superior accuracy of Danish ballot-counting is due more to their QA policies than to their manual counting. Perhaps also the Danes have a strong sense of civic duty, which makes them ideologically more committed to an accurate count than a personally pleasing one. Since machines don't have ideologies, they'd be inferior to Danes in this respect (all other things being equal, of course).
This statement might make sense if we'd already developed the Ultimate Search Technology(tm). The truth is that the current search technology is only a pale shadow of what future search technology will be.
Also, we haven't even developed the Ultimate Information Organization Technology(tm). So even the UST will have to constantly evolve to remain relevant to the constantly evolving information organization technology.
I imagine that the organizing and searching technologies will ultimately converge (any sufficiently advanced database will be indistinguishable from a perfect search engine). I also imagine that the first company to "leverage the synergy" of these two symbiotic technologies will become very poweful indeed. I imagine, finally, that most of Google's "feature creep" is actually the prototyping of more advanced information-organization and information-retrieval technologies. I don't think it's even a question of "more bells and whistles to keep ahead of the competion", so much as "developing the next-generation technology while our competitors are still trying to catch up with the current generation".
But these are all imaginings. Only Google really knows what it's doing. But considering how smart they've been so far, it doesn't seem reasonable to assume they're suddenly going to start being stupid, though.
I also understand what you're saying about NASA ROI vs. Private ROI.
But what if you asked, "would I get a better deal from that car dealership than from this one?" All you'd have to do is compare the two dealership's prices, and there's your answer.
On the other hand, what if you asked, "if there were another dealership--would it give me a better deal than this one?" You'll never know the answer to that question, because there is no other dealership to compare the first one to.
There were no private companies investing in space research on the scale of NASA, or the Soviet Space agency. There still aren't. Historically, the ROI from the private sector has been close to zero, since there were close to zero private-sector space programs. So the obvious answer is "NASA gives, and has always given, better ROI than the private sector".
I didn't say the medium had gotten more technologically primitive, if that's what you mean by "worse". I said it's gotten more "unpleasant". Don't believe me? Pop-up ads. Do we really want commercial interests to make outer space as annoying as cyberspace? Personally, I'd be willing to accept lower ROI and longer development cycles if it meant less orbital pop-up ads.
How is this different from the way anybody else deals with the unexplainable? There's no semantic difference between Billy Graham saying "God is mysterious" and Niels Bohr saying "Quantum Physics is mysterious". And being religious doesn't mean not searching for the best, most sensible explanation you can find. Religion isn't the only refuge of the intellectually lazy, so it's a little unfair to single it out for a failing common to everyone, regardless of faith or creed. Finally, "having faith" isn't always a sign of intellectual laziness. Sometimes, it's a sign of intellectual rigor.
Christianity has no real relevance to real world...
If you believe that, then you're taking a lot of "facts" about religion on quite a bit more faith than necessary.
So? Are you saying that only unpleasant statements are true, and that all comforting statements are false? That's not a very good criteria for determining truth. Anyway, the last time I checked, intellectually rigorous Christianity wasn't very comforting at all.
Socialism isn't a good analogy.
It isn't? It certainly seems to be analogous to Christianity:
Claims that "people were living a harsh existence"? Check.
"A book comes along and sounds logical", and people rebel against the status quo? Check.
The rebels "trusted their own ability to reason", and "knew [there] would be risk[s]"? Check.
"Their current way of life was awful..."? Redundant, but anyway. Check.
"...it's not like [they] had much to lose anyway"? Check.
"Others...just followed the masses in 'blind trust'"? Check.
I think my analogy works just fine.
If his reasoning doesn't entail what I say it does, than I'm wrong. If it does entail what I say it does, then it is flawed for the reasons I've given.
The best ways to demolish my own reasoning would be to either show that I'm wrong about what his reasoning entails, or show that my own reasoning has logical flaws.
All you've done is describe a common process for demonstrating logical flaws (statement --> absurd implication --> flaw), and then label it as a "straw man". Hardly a compelling counter-argument. Next time, be adventurous! Attack me with thinking instead of buzzwords!