Occums Razor cuts out c, marginalizes d, and splits a/b in half with a being the most simple explanation.
I am sick of people abusing Occam's Razor. It is by no means a scientific law, but rather a method of choosing which guess is the best guess. Even used as such, it's much more philosophical than scientific.
Read Wikipedia if you like.
Occam's razor is not an embargo against the positing of any kind of entity, or a recommendation of the simplest theory come what may[11] (Note that simplest theory is something like "only I exist" or "nothing exists"). Simpler theories are preferable other things being equal.
"Other things being equal." This is often applicable, but is a big stretch in this particular situation. Since we are making our guess about the existence or non-existence of God independent of any significant evidence (one side can say "autogenesis, things evolved, no God", the other can say "God made everything, everything is the way it is because God made it that way", both sides' explanations can fit the evidence equally well (regardless of whether or not one is actually a theory)), we must resort to philosophical arguments. This is where Occam's Razor is often abused as some sort of scientific law. It's not, it is purely philosophical and statistical. As said in wikipedia, it is only truly applicable "other things being equal." However, to say that all things are equal on both sides is ludicrous. There are massive philosophical ramifications for either guess, and any attempt to effectively weigh them all in a manner agreeable even with most people is surely doomed to failure.
My point here is that the existence or non-existence of creation is not a matter that can be settled scientifically, as much as we would all like. Attempts to use Occam's Razor in this way are the products of somebody who wants to fool themselves or others into thinking that creation is naturally excluded by some law.
It helps them to visualize numbers and visualize the processes of arithmetic.
Probably an education emphasizing the use of wetware a little more would lead to the creation of more visionaries in the 'Westen World'. Yes, I know, old stuff (Computer Power and Human Reason
by Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976).
CC.
Not so much. Take young Gauss. Instead of using crazy number crunching skills to add all the integers between 1 and 100, he visualized doubling and reversing the list, noticing that this equals 100(101), coming up with the formula n(n+1)/2 for finding integer sums.
So which has more vision? Crunching numbers, or finding an ingenius shortcut? Seriously, who would have thought of that? Certainly not somebody whose greatest skill was with the abacus. In fact, his daughter famously said that he could only count to 4, "after that came n." Gauss was the greatest mathematician in his era (and some consider him the greatest of all time), and he probably never used (or needed) an abacus. Point is, being a human calculator will give you no more added vision than, well, a calculator.
Disclaimer: This anecdote on young Gauss is mostly apocryphal, though it is widely believed to be true in the mathematical and historical community (although his daughter's quote comes from reliable sources). Opinions may vary.
I think he was pointing out how unprofessional this article is. I, for one, agree. Each of those pages has at most a few hundred words of text. It's a smallish article spaced out very unnecessarily.
If I turn off adblock and script block, it's even worse. Nothing on there needs to work, it's all ad junk and clutter. It may be interesting, but the quality of the site is not so good. I feel like slashdot should maintain a higher standard than this.
What is the point of this story, anyway? It seems to be about Contiki, but it ends with something on parking meters? How is clouding relevant?
What does "Internet Protocol Meets Physical Reality" mean? Wireless interfaces in everyday applications have been around for years. Forget headlines, this whole story seems to be pointless.
This could also apply to military disputes, not just domestic ones. Think about it. Any random city isn't likely to have significant access to immediate military protection. Most people in the US would be sitting ducks if even a small militarized force decided to attack. Now, if all those people had guns (even a hand gun), we'd at least give them a tough time (Every male Swiss, on the other hand, has military training and access to guns). With advanced warning, militias could even be formed, something that is impossible if nobody in the city has guns (excepting the police force, but they make up a minority of the overall people). If a gun free city were attacked, improvised office supplies would likely be the best weapons available, unless you count the guns in the hands of gangs and homicidal maniacs, but chances are they wouldn't stick their neck out, especially since doing so would get them in trouble anyway.
Please explain WTF does the murder of a provincial governor's critic has to do with Russian tanks in Eastern Europe? Your argument is sort of like saying that a lynching in some Deep South hellhole will lead to a US invasion of Canada.
Excuse us for talking about something that isn't already said in the article, but instead coming up with new points of discussion. Also, that's not what his argument is saying at all. I'd explain why it's not, but I've done enough feeding already.
Anti-Russian sentiment? I assume you're referring to the Georgian conflict.
There's a big difference between wanting to help Georgia and being anti-Russian. Take the Korean war for example. While we fought, in a way, against the Chinese, it was in defense of Korea. There was no massive anti-Chinese sentiment (for the most part, MacArthur advocated invasion). Nobody wanted a giant conflict with China; few wanted the Korean war at all.
This incident may make us feel negative about Russian government, but in much the same way (though perhaps more significantly) we sometimes feel about our own government, or Germany's (for example), or any other country's. Upset, but not revolutionary. Besides, still immersed in middle eastern conflict, I don't think the American public is in any danger of going crazy and demanding an invasion of and/or nuclear war with Russia.
As for your other point: *all* rings are starstuff -- gold, platinum, titanium, whatever -- so your last point there is complete hyperbole. Again, not excessively geeky.
There is the K-T Boundary with high concentrations of Iridium. Not, gold, silver titanium or whatever. Iridium.
Iridium is not common on Earth, so this layer likely came from a solar impact, unlike gold, which is a common element here on Earth.
Iridium would be a great star dust reminder, much more so than gold or platinum. Whether or not that justifies spending loads on a ring is debatable.
I wonder if this is a real office? It would take a lot of organization to pull something like this off, especially since it would probably require getting everybody to come in on the weekend (unless the regional manager is cool (and stupid) enough to let something like this slide).
When you discover something, typical procedure is to make a paper on it. Instead, MIT went ahead and worked on development before announcing the fundamental concept discovered. Maybe not "secret," but highly unusual.
But if funds are appropriated for materials criticising the theory of evolution, and knowing the common critiques and how plausible they sound to the uneducated despite being completely and utterly wrong (or even damned lies), I don't think science will be given fair treatment.
However, I don't really care.
As far as I'm concerned, any school system may teach whatever the hell they want to, and parents may or may not enrol their children in such schools.
If they are taught crap, they will remain uneducated. Or the quality of universities will drop to accomodate them.
Natural selection works in mysterious ways, and in the long run, this kind of crap will prove to be either irrelevant, or so detrimental to your schools that you will eventually be bought out by the Chinese and kept as cheap, uneducated labour force.
So yeah, go ahead, teach your kids crap. Teach them that critique without any foundation in reality is good. Teach them empty rhetoric. Hell, teach them religion, while you're at it.
People who care about education will put their kids in private schools. Or move away. Or both.
The rest will get approximately what they pay for.
And yes, I'm bitter about public schools (not in the British sense, mind you), and I intend to start a private school in my country. Someday.
I take it you weren't exactly a straight A student, then?
...or Californian government really is a slab of bologna.
In a few days, I won't be allowed to talk on my phone while driving. While I may not be allowed to avert my mouth and ears, I can still distract both hands and eyes (much less important) while texting.
I can even dial a number, hold the phone up by my ear, and talk to someone in the car (My New Hobby). If I want, I can text at the same time.
It is my opinion that we will all feel much safer knowing that those dangerous non-hands free cell phone talkers will now be focusing solely on the road.
Perhaps a class "How to deal with the willfully ignorant" that analyzes the various religions of the world and teaches the students to not bother with logic or rationality when dealing with an adult who believes in imaginary friends and life after death in the absence of any evidence.
I think people like you are the reason we need to teach "critical thinking."
You are basically saying we should tell children "Evolution is right and anyone who says otherwise is an absolute idiot and you shouldn't even try to reason with them. Moreover, you should never ever listen to them. They're just that stupid."
If evolution is spot on, then critical thinking should only foster the belief. Anyone who's fully thought through a subject and argued with it's critics will KNOW the truth, they won't just "believe."
I'm no scientist, but if you want to teach children like that, you're asking them to have faith. You're saying "don't worry, we're right. Just believe, if you don't you're stupid." In teaching anything else, a good teacher will say "X is true and this is why." They won't say "X is true and if you don't think so then you deserve to be put to sleep."
Again, I'm no scientist, but I do believe that we should teach on science, rather than faith and arrogance.
You're fighting against statistics if you say there's no difference, but I think there is indeed a much better explanation.
In auto balanced games, the give order goes red blue red blue red, correct?
That is, red is significantly more likely to have an extra player than blue.
I would actually be surprised if there was actually any significant correlation between browser use and IQ, given that most computer users use whatever someone else installed on their computers (IT, OEM or some friend). And if you think otherwise, you are probably confusing intelligent with computer savvy. I wouldn't be so doubtful. I'm sure there's a link between critical thinking and tendency to use Firefox over IE.
Assume you have a group of people of relatively moderate computer savviness. They all use IE, and you tell them all about Firefox. Some of them will say "Pssh... whatever" and conclude that IE is both adequate and familiar, making it easy to rationalize not considering a change. Others will note the benefits along with your shining recommendation and consider a switch.
If we conclude from this that the ones who blew it off think less critically (a debatable, but reasonable assumption), we will indeed see more critical thinking people using IE.
It isn't much of a leap then to say that Firefox users are in some way "smarter" than IE users.
If you can't say that, you can at least say that they're more likely to give a hoot about the test and try harder than the others.
Pre-bill political wrangling is a proven tactic. If you get a lot of people to complain about the concept, the bill will never come to fruition.
In fact, if you can get enough people to write in fearing some sort of massive problem, any bill that can be seen to have the slightest association with that fear, no matter how much the original fear was inflated, will never come to pass.
Telecom companies have always handed over such statistical data. It has been done under the patriot act for some time.
Many people assume that this is illegal, but it really isn't. The only privacy issue would be over listening to the actual calls. All such statistical data is public knowledge. This database would only take it a small step further.
Why is it that guitarists get so pissy about Guitar Hero when I never hear any space marines complaining about Metroid? You should not assume that anyone who complains about Guitar Hero actually plays the guitar.
The reason some people don't like Guitar Hero is because it looks nerdy and lame (it really does). Those people need to get over their sense of pride before they can enjoy Guitar Hero. It's a matter of general pride, not a matter of pride in any actual abilities.
There was a time when university campuses were bastions of free thought and conscience. Of course, the administrations were usually composed of the worst variety pedantic, bum-kissing bureaucrat the academic version of Social Darwinism could produce.
I'm not sure about free thought and conscience anymore, but the administration part seems to be just about the same.
I can count three stereotypes in this post. While these are all somewhat poetic and romantic, not all colleges are 70's LSD filled campuses with weekly protests and starvation strikes. Sorry.
Do you speak from experience? I've spoken to Bit torrent and limewire people from my university. The standard practice there is for the student to write an essay on why it is bad, after the dean has a nice talk with him. If there is a second offense, they would let the RIAA deal with it.
That's a much fairer warning than you can expect anywhere else in life. If students continue to share copyrighted materials after that, it's not because they're poor, but because they're utterly foolish.
Is it legal to record a TV show on a home VCR in Australia? Is it legal to save a.jpg to.gif or.png? Is it legal to move the sandwich you bought from the deli from a plastic bag to a brown paper bag?
If such a law is to be, they should at least be consistent. Right now it's a just a way of squeezing money out of people in a way that makes no sense. If there's no prior basis for this, such a law should by no means be permitted.
Slashdot Mirror
Occums Razor cuts out c, marginalizes d, and splits a/b in half with a being the most simple explanation.
I am sick of people abusing Occam's Razor. It is by no means a scientific law, but rather a method of choosing which guess is the best guess. Even used as such, it's much more philosophical than scientific.
Read Wikipedia if you like.
Occam's razor is not an embargo against the positing of any kind of entity, or a recommendation of the simplest theory come what may[11] (Note that simplest theory is something like "only I exist" or "nothing exists"). Simpler theories are preferable other things being equal.
"Other things being equal." This is often applicable, but is a big stretch in this particular situation. Since we are making our guess about the existence or non-existence of God independent of any significant evidence (one side can say "autogenesis, things evolved, no God", the other can say "God made everything, everything is the way it is because God made it that way", both sides' explanations can fit the evidence equally well (regardless of whether or not one is actually a theory)), we must resort to philosophical arguments. This is where Occam's Razor is often abused as some sort of scientific law. It's not, it is purely philosophical and statistical. As said in wikipedia, it is only truly applicable "other things being equal." However, to say that all things are equal on both sides is ludicrous. There are massive philosophical ramifications for either guess, and any attempt to effectively weigh them all in a manner agreeable even with most people is surely doomed to failure.
My point here is that the existence or non-existence of creation is not a matter that can be settled scientifically, as much as we would all like. Attempts to use Occam's Razor in this way are the products of somebody who wants to fool themselves or others into thinking that creation is naturally excluded by some law.
It helps them to visualize numbers and visualize the processes of arithmetic. Probably an education emphasizing the use of wetware a little more would lead to the creation of more visionaries in the 'Westen World'. Yes, I know, old stuff (Computer Power and Human Reason by Joseph Weizenbaum, 1976). CC.
Not so much. Take young Gauss. Instead of using crazy number crunching skills to add all the integers between 1 and 100, he visualized doubling and reversing the list, noticing that this equals 100(101), coming up with the formula n(n+1)/2 for finding integer sums.
So which has more vision? Crunching numbers, or finding an ingenius shortcut? Seriously, who would have thought of that? Certainly not somebody whose greatest skill was with the abacus. In fact, his daughter famously said that he could only count to 4, "after that came n." Gauss was the greatest mathematician in his era (and some consider him the greatest of all time), and he probably never used (or needed) an abacus. Point is, being a human calculator will give you no more added vision than, well, a calculator.
Disclaimer: This anecdote on young Gauss is mostly apocryphal, though it is widely believed to be true in the mathematical and historical community (although his daughter's quote comes from reliable sources). Opinions may vary.
I think he was pointing out how unprofessional this article is. I, for one, agree. Each of those pages has at most a few hundred words of text. It's a smallish article spaced out very unnecessarily.
If I turn off adblock and script block, it's even worse. Nothing on there needs to work, it's all ad junk and clutter. It may be interesting, but the quality of the site is not so good. I feel like slashdot should maintain a higher standard than this.
What is the point of this story, anyway? It seems to be about Contiki, but it ends with something on parking meters? How is clouding relevant?
What does "Internet Protocol Meets Physical Reality" mean? Wireless interfaces in everyday applications have been around for years. Forget headlines, this whole story seems to be pointless.
Insightful, not funny? I think this is slashdot (the community) indirectly declaring their political views.
This could also apply to military disputes, not just domestic ones. Think about it. Any random city isn't likely to have significant access to immediate military protection. Most people in the US would be sitting ducks if even a small militarized force decided to attack. Now, if all those people had guns (even a hand gun), we'd at least give them a tough time (Every male Swiss, on the other hand, has military training and access to guns). With advanced warning, militias could even be formed, something that is impossible if nobody in the city has guns (excepting the police force, but they make up a minority of the overall people). If a gun free city were attacked, improvised office supplies would likely be the best weapons available, unless you count the guns in the hands of gangs and homicidal maniacs, but chances are they wouldn't stick their neck out, especially since doing so would get them in trouble anyway.
Please explain WTF does the murder of a provincial governor's critic has to do with Russian tanks in Eastern Europe? Your argument is sort of like saying that a lynching in some Deep South hellhole will lead to a US invasion of Canada.
Excuse us for talking about something that isn't already said in the article, but instead coming up with new points of discussion. Also, that's not what his argument is saying at all. I'd explain why it's not, but I've done enough feeding already.
Anti-Russian sentiment? I assume you're referring to the Georgian conflict.
There's a big difference between wanting to help Georgia and being anti-Russian. Take the Korean war for example. While we fought, in a way, against the Chinese, it was in defense of Korea. There was no massive anti-Chinese sentiment (for the most part, MacArthur advocated invasion). Nobody wanted a giant conflict with China; few wanted the Korean war at all.
This incident may make us feel negative about Russian government, but in much the same way (though perhaps more significantly) we sometimes feel about our own government, or Germany's (for example), or any other country's. Upset, but not revolutionary. Besides, still immersed in middle eastern conflict, I don't think the American public is in any danger of going crazy and demanding an invasion of and/or nuclear war with Russia.
Well, these guys might do.
(Score:-1, Bad Pun)
As for your other point: *all* rings are starstuff -- gold, platinum, titanium, whatever -- so your last point there is complete hyperbole. Again, not excessively geeky.
There is the K-T Boundary with high concentrations of Iridium. Not, gold, silver titanium or whatever. Iridium.
Iridium is not common on Earth, so this layer likely came from a solar impact, unlike gold, which is a common element here on Earth.
Iridium would be a great star dust reminder, much more so than gold or platinum. Whether or not that justifies spending loads on a ring is debatable.
I wonder if this is a real office? It would take a lot of organization to pull something like this off, especially since it would probably require getting everybody to come in on the weekend (unless the regional manager is cool (and stupid) enough to let something like this slide).
When you discover something, typical procedure is to make a paper on it. Instead, MIT went ahead and worked on development before announcing the fundamental concept discovered. Maybe not "secret," but highly unusual.
Yeah, lovely.
But if funds are appropriated for materials criticising the theory of evolution, and knowing the common critiques and how plausible they sound to the uneducated despite being completely and utterly wrong (or even damned lies), I don't think science will be given fair treatment.
However, I don't really care. As far as I'm concerned, any school system may teach whatever the hell they want to, and parents may or may not enrol their children in such schools. If they are taught crap, they will remain uneducated. Or the quality of universities will drop to accomodate them. Natural selection works in mysterious ways, and in the long run, this kind of crap will prove to be either irrelevant, or so detrimental to your schools that you will eventually be bought out by the Chinese and kept as cheap, uneducated labour force.
So yeah, go ahead, teach your kids crap. Teach them that critique without any foundation in reality is good. Teach them empty rhetoric. Hell, teach them religion, while you're at it. People who care about education will put their kids in private schools. Or move away. Or both. The rest will get approximately what they pay for.
And yes, I'm bitter about public schools (not in the British sense, mind you), and I intend to start a private school in my country. Someday.
I take it you weren't exactly a straight A student, then?
In a few days, I won't be allowed to talk on my phone while driving. While I may not be allowed to avert my mouth and ears, I can still distract both hands and eyes (much less important) while texting.
I can even dial a number, hold the phone up by my ear, and talk to someone in the car (My New Hobby). If I want, I can text at the same time.
It is my opinion that we will all feel much safer knowing that those dangerous non-hands free cell phone talkers will now be focusing solely on the road.
Perhaps a class "How to deal with the willfully ignorant" that analyzes the various religions of the world and teaches the students to not bother with logic or rationality when dealing with an adult who believes in imaginary friends and life after death in the absence of any evidence.
I think people like you are the reason we need to teach "critical thinking."
You are basically saying we should tell children "Evolution is right and anyone who says otherwise is an absolute idiot and you shouldn't even try to reason with them. Moreover, you should never ever listen to them. They're just that stupid."
If evolution is spot on, then critical thinking should only foster the belief. Anyone who's fully thought through a subject and argued with it's critics will KNOW the truth, they won't just "believe."
I'm no scientist, but if you want to teach children like that, you're asking them to have faith. You're saying "don't worry, we're right. Just believe, if you don't you're stupid." In teaching anything else, a good teacher will say "X is true and this is why." They won't say "X is true and if you don't think so then you deserve to be put to sleep."
Again, I'm no scientist, but I do believe that we should teach on science, rather than faith and arrogance.
Exactly what role P2P plays in the five percent is an entirely different matter.
In auto balanced games, the give order goes red blue red blue red, correct? That is, red is significantly more likely to have an extra player than blue.
Assume you have a group of people of relatively moderate computer savviness. They all use IE, and you tell them all about Firefox. Some of them will say "Pssh... whatever" and conclude that IE is both adequate and familiar, making it easy to rationalize not considering a change. Others will note the benefits along with your shining recommendation and consider a switch.
If we conclude from this that the ones who blew it off think less critically (a debatable, but reasonable assumption), we will indeed see more critical thinking people using IE.
It isn't much of a leap then to say that Firefox users are in some way "smarter" than IE users.
If you can't say that, you can at least say that they're more likely to give a hoot about the test and try harder than the others.
In fact, if you can get enough people to write in fearing some sort of massive problem, any bill that can be seen to have the slightest association with that fear, no matter how much the original fear was inflated, will never come to pass.
Many people assume that this is illegal, but it really isn't. The only privacy issue would be over listening to the actual calls. All such statistical data is public knowledge. This database would only take it a small step further.
The reason some people don't like Guitar Hero is because it looks nerdy and lame (it really does). Those people need to get over their sense of pride before they can enjoy Guitar Hero. It's a matter of general pride, not a matter of pride in any actual abilities.
There was a time when university campuses were bastions of free thought and conscience. Of course, the administrations were usually composed of the worst variety pedantic, bum-kissing bureaucrat the academic version of Social Darwinism could produce.
I'm not sure about free thought and conscience anymore, but the administration part seems to be just about the same.
I can count three stereotypes in this post. While these are all somewhat poetic and romantic, not all colleges are 70's LSD filled campuses with weekly protests and starvation strikes. Sorry.Captain Obvious.
Do you speak from experience? I've spoken to Bit torrent and limewire people from my university. The standard practice there is for the student to write an essay on why it is bad, after the dean has a nice talk with him. If there is a second offense, they would let the RIAA deal with it. That's a much fairer warning than you can expect anywhere else in life. If students continue to share copyrighted materials after that, it's not because they're poor, but because they're utterly foolish.
Is it legal to record a TV show on a home VCR in Australia? Is it legal to save a .jpg to .gif or .png? Is it legal to move the sandwich you bought from the deli from a plastic bag to a brown paper bag?
If such a law is to be, they should at least be consistent. Right now it's a just a way of squeezing money out of people in a way that makes no sense. If there's no prior basis for this, such a law should by no means be permitted.