Except the research shows that it is precisely being in a higher position which makes you immoral.
And when you read all those excerpts of bankers whining that their boots are getting insufficiently licked by the rest of society, well, it's tempting to believe this is indeed true.
Presumably, if being rich was no regarded as saying something about you, but rather an accident of Fortune (which it always is: well off is something you achieve through hard work and ingenuity; rich takes luck) society would be more moral.
There is a fundamental assumption difference between the two. Atlas Shrugged is based on the assumption that it's, to use common parlance "the 1%" who make the world go round.
Fight club assumes that it's the "99%".
Fight club is right on that point (obviously -- CEOs and lawyer and finance wizz-kids do not contribute to the economy commensurately to their salaries). However, there is no such organisation as "the 99%", and therefore, hoping that you can suddenly bring down civilisation because everyone will suddenly push in the same direction is a fantasy.
Progress still happens because ideas get diffused, take hold, and eventually become so dominant that the moral zeitgeist is altered. Within 25 years, only fringe loonies will be against gay marriage (we are close to that, maybe 15 years), and pot legalisation will have become self-evident. In Europe, the last religious generation will have died out, and in the US, atheists will be the majority. The current US debates on _contraception_ will be looked upon as the abhorrent obsession of the few.
But there still will be liberals and conservatives, and the debate will be as lively as now. The point is that you do no effect change by revolutions, if the social structures allow change that is. Change occurs because old people die out, young people grow up and facts remain. Doing whatever fits reality always wins in the long run.
But the ride is smoother is you keep talking about reality.
They changed the taskbar style and improved KHTML (those were the days... ). I mean, sure, changing to fluxbox because you did not need a desktop, sure. Because you wanted to try something else, why not.
Seriously? You code for xorg, and you cannot tell the difference between a DE and a WM? That explains a lot...
You still are a terrible human being for attacking people: as you apparently are qualified, you are not an ignorant jerk, but a troll. I am not sure this is better.
You are comparing fluxbox to a DE. If this had been about GNOME, I would have responded the same way.
Free software developers do what they do out of love. Because of that, it is sometimes somewhat incomplete, but also typically very well though out at the conceptual level -- at least for projects that survive. Idiots like you only serve to demotivate the devs. I don't like it when people get attacked from ignorance. I like it even less when people get attacked from ignorance as they are doing things for the good of everyone.
"better than windows" and "thank god for fluxbox". In the same paragraph.
Are you a troll or an idiot? a window manager is not the same thing as a desktop environment. The WM is a tiny, tiny part of that. And even as a standalone WM, kwin is really, really good.
Some of us think that using the CPU to calculate stuff that can be done by the GPU is dumb. Idiots would buy amazingly expensive gigs with GPUs with many texture units and then deactivate textures because they had the illusion it made their games run faster. Same thing here I guess: it does nothing, therefore, it must be going faster, right?
I don't want my software to waste cycles because you made stupid hardware choices and want to be accommodated.
There is no comparison between Greece and the US. That you compare them at all only shows you have not the faintest idea what you are writing about. The are not comparable in size, in monetary policy, macro-economically, micro-economically, in terms of state structure, in terms of political culture, etc.
Also, the money spent in Greece that actually went to researchers was a rare example of money _not_ squandered: had this money not been spent, Greece would now be even poorer. But it's all irrelevant: it is a negligible part of the budget of any government.
You are probably one of these morons who applaud when the R&D budget of a (soon-to-be bankrupt) tech company gets slashed, on the grounds that it'll help the bottom line this quarter -- never mind that it means no products for the next. You probably think that the best time to start a diet is when you are famished.
Growth balances budgets. Long-term commitment to research (notably fundamental research) yields long-term growth. In the long run, you completely depend on the research and education in your country.
geodesics in suitably chosen space-time curvatures are ellipses, parabola, straight lines or hyperbola. Just like Newton said. Except he did not know about curved space-time.
in the same way, once we knew about quantum mechanics, we could obtain the results of thermodynamics from looking at large collection of individual atoms.
There is no theory of architecture. There are civil engineering building codes, which, outside the US are mostly derived from Newtonian (and Hookean, and Timoshenkan) first principles. But believe me, it's all classical.
idle speculation on my part: I think we'll find that from an extension of quantum theory, you can get general relativity as a special case of something larger. What I'm saying is that I suspect that of QT and GR, GR will have to go. But I really don't know that.
TL;DR
Epistemology is not substitute for maths to understand what is science.
Read carefully. Medicine does work but is not science. Biology is a science, but only indirectly leads to medicine -- though it is slowly changing: eventually, medicine might become another engineering branch. Right now, it is an art.
Theories are not mostly correct. They are correct, within their domain of validity, for every single measure. Every last one of them.
Sometimes, they get superseded, then they become understood as a simplification of some larger theory (when one can be found). This is what happened to Newton's theory of gravitation, which got superseded by general relativity.
QCD and GR are both theories, in that they are perfectly correct for every measure, to the limit of our instruments. Same goes for evolution. Sometimes, even though we do not know the superseding theory, we can know that our knowledge is incomplete. In the case of quantum mechanics and relativity, we know this to be the case, because they cannot be extended to each other's realms of validity. Within their realms, however, every single observation ever made matches the theory.
You might be interested to know that thermodynamics is derived from quantum mechanics, and is understood as its limit for large enough numbers of particles.
All of this is completely orthogonal to the existence or non-existence of gods, for which there is no evidence, no theory, not even a reasonable hypothesis. If you are so sure it exists, why cannot you show me a single material proof of its existence? Why do you insist I should believe on the basis of nothing, and how would that make me a better person?
The thing you are missing is the notion of theory in science. If I make a million observations and get only 50 different answers AND I can formulate a theory about how I got those answers AND the theory is well supported by other observations (themselves for example evidence of the mechanisms postulated) then I'd say this is pretty compelling, because those 50 different observations are really one.
In climate science, you make observations, but also work within thermodynamics and fluid mechanics and geology and biology etc. You formulate models which are then either validated or not.
In the case of physics, for example the current search of the Higgs boson, they are getting many different "answers". But they work within a theory which describes all different manners of decay. So they can coalesce those "answers" into really only one.
Medicine does not work like that. They indeed do stuff and then get results and based on the fact that results seem consistent, decide that a given cure is working. This is not science, because there is no theory -- sometimes there is but in medicine, more often than not, there isn't. Statistics are, however, pretty powerful, and give a measure of confidence in the validity of the observations. Because there is no theory, it is usually impossible to make a prediction about the efficiency of a given cure before testing it.
There is no Theory behind God-as-a-physical-reality nor is there any evidence. Its existence is therefore unproven, unprovable, and ultimately irrelevant. It is absurd to base you behaviour on this postulate.
Where did you study philosophy of science, may I ask?
You might want to think a bit more deeply about what is evidence in science.
You might also want to consider that:
- you have no idea about how my life is lived
- you have no idea about what my motivations are for doing the things I do which you do not know
- you clearly are unable to distinguish god-as-a-concept from god-as-a-physical-reality from context (and god-as-a-concept is not a cause, the cause is humans, it is a post hoc justification)
- you do not understand medicine (which is not a science -- biology is)
- you do not understand climate science (which is wholly unlike medicine)
you other postings also labelled you as either a troll or a bigot. I give people the benefit of doubt, so I think you are a bigot. But there is always the hope that you are a troll.
Wait. What? You are claiming that Jesus was the messiah? That's silly. He might have been a fairly inspirational guy for his days, but that's probably it.
Thank you for illustrating the moral vacuum that is religious morals. You might want to reflect on your assertions that all that is Christian is good, and that all Muslims find the attack of the 11th of September 2001 good. Thus proving that a Christian finding 9/11 good is a Muslim.
As an exercise, find a ( Christian ) preacher who found 9/11 good. It is surprisingly easy.
Actually, something which is not observed by anyone -- where observed means "has effects in the material world" -- by definition cannot be worthwhile. It is as perfectly neutral to the balance of anything as nothing at all.
There are many billions of years between now and the heat death of the universe. In the (very) long term, I agree, there is no hope nor justification for doing anything. Except if you think that in the mean time, real joy and suffering can occur, and that the first ought to be maximised and the later minimised.
Maybe I enjoy seeing people happy, and that is enough for me to "do good"? The point is that meaning comes from within each of us. It is not bestowed upon us by a superior power.
I am not a hard man to convince. I just demand proof. Material or logical. If a double blind study showed that prayer had an effect on outcomes, I would consider that compelling -- there has been such studies, and they turned out negative.
If there is a deity, and they are so good at hiding themselves that they littered the universe with alternative (perfectly consistent and plausible) explanations to their existence, and yet demanded belief on pain of eternal damnation, I would consider it my duty, as a thinking human, to stand up to them. Because that makes them a cosmic-sized douchebag.
Your argument is that because humans are dumb and irrational, we need religion to coerce them into behaving? This is perhaps the saddest and most cynical belief in the need for religion there is. And it doesn't even work:
- religion can be used to make people do horrible things
- religion can be used to make good people do horrible things
- choosing a religious justification over a rational one is better because?
No, people ought to do things for the right reason, and strive towards finding out why things ought to be done. And when they do, tell others. I am pretty certain that the why of things is never "because god told me".
Ok, I should have distinguished between the various flavours of Buddhism. But the point remains: ending the cycle of rebirths is not a carrot-and-stick kind of motivation. Rather, it is a path of self-improvement leading to obliteration. Believing in rebirth is in essence different from believing in a god, though: one is the belief in a process, and the other is the belief in an agent.
No, a "Christian" is one who self-identifies as believing in Christ. They typically also claim to follow sets of (selected) teachings. But there is no test of behaviour other than belief in Christ to be Christian. Therefore, claiming a Christian which is also a violent arsehole is not a real Christian is committing the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
If anyone not following all precepts of their faith is not of their faith, let me tell you this: there are no believers.
There is no such thing as Christianity-the-religion. There are many sects that form a family, but they are as far apart theologically as, say, Judaism and Catholicism.
"Christians" and devout people of any faith do not get much love, because either they believe only those bits of their holy books which they personally deem moral, and therefore show themselves capable on the one hand of figuring out what is moral by themselves, and on the other hand compelled to justify it in the most ridiculous way, this is harmless but silly. Or they believe their holy books wholesale, and that makes them pretty horrible people.
And then, they claim (like you just did) that other people, without beliefs, are somehow incapable of being good, or moral, or at peace with themselves. This is insulting. Of course you will get mocked: you just insulted people for no reason at all.
As for life being more than science? yes. Every day comfort come from conversations, friendship and love of other humans. But for the mystical and the awe, science is so much more beautiful, profound and inspiring than any myth that no, I don't need any fairy tales to make my life more interesting.
This is the creation as science tells us it happened:
15 000 000 000 years ago, the universe started expanding and cooling down. Hydrogen formed, and lumps of hydrogen condensed to form stars. In the stars, all the elements up to iron were formed. This first generation of stars died, and some of them went nova, thus filling the universe with all the elements we see today. We are made of the stuff of dead stars, 10 000 000 000 years in the making.
From these elements and leftover hydrogen and helium, the sun and the solar system formed 5 000 000 000 years ago. Some 4 000 000 000 years ago, the first self-replicating life-form/bunch of molecules appeared. You are the result of an uninterrupted line going back four billion years ago of organisms, not one of which failed to reproduce.
In four billion years, the sun will die. And the organisms still there to see us will be as far from us as we are from the first self-replicating molecules.
How's that for awesome? And no supernatural needs to be invoked to explain it.
Slashdot Mirror
Except the research shows that it is precisely being in a higher position which makes you immoral.
And when you read all those excerpts of bankers whining that their boots are getting insufficiently licked by the rest of society, well, it's tempting to believe this is indeed true.
Presumably, if being rich was no regarded as saying something about you, but rather an accident of Fortune (which it always is: well off is something you achieve through hard work and ingenuity; rich takes luck) society would be more moral.
There is a fundamental assumption difference between the two. Atlas Shrugged is based on the assumption that it's, to use common parlance "the 1%" who make the world go round.
Fight club assumes that it's the "99%".
Fight club is right on that point (obviously -- CEOs and lawyer and finance wizz-kids do not contribute to the economy commensurately to their salaries). However, there is no such organisation as "the 99%", and therefore, hoping that you can suddenly bring down civilisation because everyone will suddenly push in the same direction is a fantasy.
Progress still happens because ideas get diffused, take hold, and eventually become so dominant that the moral zeitgeist is altered. Within 25 years, only fringe loonies will be against gay marriage (we are close to that, maybe 15 years), and pot legalisation will have become self-evident. In Europe, the last religious generation will have died out, and in the US, atheists will be the majority. The current US debates on _contraception_ will be looked upon as the abhorrent obsession of the few.
But there still will be liberals and conservatives, and the debate will be as lively as now. The point is that you do no effect change by revolutions, if the social structures allow change that is. Change occurs because old people die out, young people grow up and facts remain. Doing whatever fits reality always wins in the long run.
But the ride is smoother is you keep talking about reality.
3.5 ??! WTF ?
http://www.kde.org/announcements/visualguide-3.5.php
They changed the taskbar style and improved KHTML (those were the days... ). I mean, sure, changing to fluxbox because you did not need a desktop, sure. Because you wanted to try something else, why not.
But this is serious LSD-grade shit. Troll.
Seriously? You code for xorg, and you cannot tell the difference between a DE and a WM? That explains a lot...
You still are a terrible human being for attacking people: as you apparently are qualified, you are not an ignorant jerk, but a troll. I am not sure this is better.
You are comparing fluxbox to a DE. If this had been about GNOME, I would have responded the same way.
Free software developers do what they do out of love. Because of that, it is sometimes somewhat incomplete, but also typically very well though out at the conceptual level -- at least for projects that survive. Idiots like you only serve to demotivate the devs. I don't like it when people get attacked from ignorance. I like it even less when people get attacked from ignorance as they are doing things for the good of everyone.
Your comment makes you a terrible human.
"better than windows" and "thank god for fluxbox". In the same paragraph.
Are you a troll or an idiot? a window manager is not the same thing as a desktop environment. The WM is a tiny, tiny part of that. And even as a standalone WM, kwin is really, really good.
Some of us think that using the CPU to calculate stuff that can be done by the GPU is dumb. Idiots would buy amazingly expensive gigs with GPUs with many texture units and then deactivate textures because they had the illusion it made their games run faster. Same thing here I guess: it does nothing, therefore, it must be going faster, right?
I don't want my software to waste cycles because you made stupid hardware choices and want to be accommodated.
There is no comparison between Greece and the US. That you compare them at all only shows you have not the faintest idea what you are writing about. The are not comparable in size, in monetary policy, macro-economically, micro-economically, in terms of state structure, in terms of political culture, etc.
Also, the money spent in Greece that actually went to researchers was a rare example of money _not_ squandered: had this money not been spent, Greece would now be even poorer. But it's all irrelevant: it is a negligible part of the budget of any government.
You are probably one of these morons who applaud when the R&D budget of a (soon-to-be bankrupt) tech company gets slashed, on the grounds that it'll help the bottom line this quarter -- never mind that it means no products for the next. You probably think that the best time to start a diet is when you are famished.
Growth balances budgets. Long-term commitment to research (notably fundamental research) yields long-term growth. In the long run, you completely depend on the research and education in your country.
geodesics in suitably chosen space-time curvatures are ellipses, parabola, straight lines or hyperbola. Just like Newton said. Except he did not know about curved space-time.
in the same way, once we knew about quantum mechanics, we could obtain the results of thermodynamics from looking at large collection of individual atoms.
There is no theory of architecture. There are civil engineering building codes, which, outside the US are mostly derived from Newtonian (and Hookean, and Timoshenkan) first principles. But believe me, it's all classical.
idle speculation on my part: I think we'll find that from an extension of quantum theory, you can get general relativity as a special case of something larger. What I'm saying is that I suspect that of QT and GR, GR will have to go. But I really don't know that.
TL;DR
Epistemology is not substitute for maths to understand what is science.
Read carefully. Medicine does work but is not science. Biology is a science, but only indirectly leads to medicine -- though it is slowly changing: eventually, medicine might become another engineering branch. Right now, it is an art.
Theories are not mostly correct. They are correct, within their domain of validity, for every single measure. Every last one of them.
Sometimes, they get superseded, then they become understood as a simplification of some larger theory (when one can be found). This is what happened to Newton's theory of gravitation, which got superseded by general relativity.
QCD and GR are both theories, in that they are perfectly correct for every measure, to the limit of our instruments. Same goes for evolution. Sometimes, even though we do not know the superseding theory, we can know that our knowledge is incomplete. In the case of quantum mechanics and relativity, we know this to be the case, because they cannot be extended to each other's realms of validity. Within their realms, however, every single observation ever made matches the theory.
You might be interested to know that thermodynamics is derived from quantum mechanics, and is understood as its limit for large enough numbers of particles.
All of this is completely orthogonal to the existence or non-existence of gods, for which there is no evidence, no theory, not even a reasonable hypothesis. If you are so sure it exists, why cannot you show me a single material proof of its existence? Why do you insist I should believe on the basis of nothing, and how would that make me a better person?
The thing you are missing is the notion of theory in science. If I make a million observations and get only 50 different answers AND I can formulate a theory about how I got those answers AND the theory is well supported by other observations (themselves for example evidence of the mechanisms postulated) then I'd say this is pretty compelling, because those 50 different observations are really one.
In climate science, you make observations, but also work within thermodynamics and fluid mechanics and geology and biology etc. You formulate models which are then either validated or not.
In the case of physics, for example the current search of the Higgs boson, they are getting many different "answers". But they work within a theory which describes all different manners of decay. So they can coalesce those "answers" into really only one.
Medicine does not work like that. They indeed do stuff and then get results and based on the fact that results seem consistent, decide that a given cure is working. This is not science, because there is no theory -- sometimes there is but in medicine, more often than not, there isn't. Statistics are, however, pretty powerful, and give a measure of confidence in the validity of the observations. Because there is no theory, it is usually impossible to make a prediction about the efficiency of a given cure before testing it.
There is no Theory behind God-as-a-physical-reality nor is there any evidence. Its existence is therefore unproven, unprovable, and ultimately irrelevant. It is absurd to base you behaviour on this postulate.
Where did you study philosophy of science, may I ask?
You might want to think a bit more deeply about what is evidence in science.
You might also want to consider that:
- you have no idea about how my life is lived
- you have no idea about what my motivations are for doing the things I do which you do not know
- you clearly are unable to distinguish god-as-a-concept from god-as-a-physical-reality from context (and god-as-a-concept is not a cause, the cause is humans, it is a post hoc justification)
- you do not understand medicine (which is not a science -- biology is)
- you do not understand climate science (which is wholly unlike medicine)
you other postings also labelled you as either a troll or a bigot. I give people the benefit of doubt, so I think you are a bigot. But there is always the hope that you are a troll.
If there is a god, and it is as much of an arsehole as they make it to be, you won't be alone in trying to bury him. Count me in :)
Many mods are easily swayed by islamophobia... I mean, religions are bad in general, but OeLeWaPpErKe is really a Christian nut on a crusade.
He is right this time, but quite by accident.
They are not unique in that. You'll find that followers of all religions are similarly fragile in their beliefs.
Wait. What? You are claiming that Jesus was the messiah? That's silly. He might have been a fairly inspirational guy for his days, but that's probably it.
Thank you for illustrating the moral vacuum that is religious morals. You might want to reflect on your assertions that all that is Christian is good, and that all Muslims find the attack of the 11th of September 2001 good. Thus proving that a Christian finding 9/11 good is a Muslim.
As an exercise, find a ( Christian ) preacher who found 9/11 good. It is surprisingly easy.
You are an idiot.
Wait what? I don't believe in gods, which makes me an atheist. And that has nothing to do with my being an atheist? You make no sense.
Actually, something which is not observed by anyone -- where observed means "has effects in the material world" -- by definition cannot be worthwhile. It is as perfectly neutral to the balance of anything as nothing at all.
There are many billions of years between now and the heat death of the universe. In the (very) long term, I agree, there is no hope nor justification for doing anything. Except if you think that in the mean time, real joy and suffering can occur, and that the first ought to be maximised and the later minimised.
Maybe I enjoy seeing people happy, and that is enough for me to "do good"? The point is that meaning comes from within each of us. It is not bestowed upon us by a superior power.
I am not a hard man to convince. I just demand proof. Material or logical. If a double blind study showed that prayer had an effect on outcomes, I would consider that compelling -- there has been such studies, and they turned out negative.
If there is a deity, and they are so good at hiding themselves that they littered the universe with alternative (perfectly consistent and plausible) explanations to their existence, and yet demanded belief on pain of eternal damnation, I would consider it my duty, as a thinking human, to stand up to them. Because that makes them a cosmic-sized douchebag.
Your argument is that because humans are dumb and irrational, we need religion to coerce them into behaving? This is perhaps the saddest and most cynical belief in the need for religion there is. And it doesn't even work:
- religion can be used to make people do horrible things
- religion can be used to make good people do horrible things
- choosing a religious justification over a rational one is better because?
No, people ought to do things for the right reason, and strive towards finding out why things ought to be done. And when they do, tell others. I am pretty certain that the why of things is never "because god told me".
Ok, I should have distinguished between the various flavours of Buddhism. But the point remains: ending the cycle of rebirths is not a carrot-and-stick kind of motivation. Rather, it is a path of self-improvement leading to obliteration. Believing in rebirth is in essence different from believing in a god, though: one is the belief in a process, and the other is the belief in an agent.
No, a "Christian" is one who self-identifies as believing in Christ. They typically also claim to follow sets of (selected) teachings. But there is no test of behaviour other than belief in Christ to be Christian. Therefore, claiming a Christian which is also a violent arsehole is not a real Christian is committing the "no true Scotsman" fallacy.
If anyone not following all precepts of their faith is not of their faith, let me tell you this: there are no believers.
There is no such thing as Christianity-the-religion. There are many sects that form a family, but they are as far apart theologically as, say, Judaism and Catholicism.
"Christians" and devout people of any faith do not get much love, because either they believe only those bits of their holy books which they personally deem moral, and therefore show themselves capable on the one hand of figuring out what is moral by themselves, and on the other hand compelled to justify it in the most ridiculous way, this is harmless but silly. Or they believe their holy books wholesale, and that makes them pretty horrible people.
And then, they claim (like you just did) that other people, without beliefs, are somehow incapable of being good, or moral, or at peace with themselves. This is insulting. Of course you will get mocked: you just insulted people for no reason at all.
As for life being more than science? yes. Every day comfort come from conversations, friendship and love of other humans. But for the mystical and the awe, science is so much more beautiful, profound and inspiring than any myth that no, I don't need any fairy tales to make my life more interesting.
This is the creation as science tells us it happened:
15 000 000 000 years ago, the universe started expanding and cooling down. Hydrogen formed, and lumps of hydrogen condensed to form stars. In the stars, all the elements up to iron were formed. This first generation of stars died, and some of them went nova, thus filling the universe with all the elements we see today. We are made of the stuff of dead stars, 10 000 000 000 years in the making.
From these elements and leftover hydrogen and helium, the sun and the solar system formed 5 000 000 000 years ago. Some 4 000 000 000 years ago, the first self-replicating life-form/bunch of molecules appeared. You are the result of an uninterrupted line going back four billion years ago of organisms, not one of which failed to reproduce.
In four billion years, the sun will die. And the organisms still there to see us will be as far from us as we are from the first self-replicating molecules.
How's that for awesome? And no supernatural needs to be invoked to explain it.